It’s like male geeks don’t know how to deal with real live women, so they just asume it’s a user interface problem.  Not their fault. They’ll just wait for the next version to come out – something more “user friendly.”

Microserfs, Douglas Coupland

Ethan says Type-A personalities have a whole subset of diseases that they, and only they, share, and the transmission vector for these diseases is the DOOR CLOSE button on elevators that only get pushed by impatient, Type-A people.  Ethan pushes these buttons with his elbow, now.  I’m starting to worry  about all of us.

Microserfs, Douglas Coupland

I don’t know why my hands rip so much. But they do, and badly. Experimenting with new methods of hand maintenance, but it’s a slow process of trial and error.

So my first question is always the same: What’s your goal?

You get mostly the same answers – to get more registrations or blog subscribers or have them fill out a contact form.  Something along those lines.

And you can certainly maximize those things.  If your goal is as many IDX registrations as possible, we can cram everyone down that funnel.  We can make our goal to increase the number of registrations per 1000 visitors, or some such easily identified figure from our analytics.  I mean, hey.  Only a small portion of the visitors to your site are there to search properties.  Some want information, or the value of their home, or community data, or are checking out photos of a home their friend is purchasing.  But we can cram ‘em all down that registration road. 

But I’m guessing that’s not what you really want.  Or ought to want.  Because what I hope you want is to deliver such a delightful experience for that visitor that they happily register, or email you, or download your market report with glee. 

So to approach your analytics with an attitude of whats-in-it-for-me gets you to the wrong conclusions, especially in a service based industry like real estate.

Because it isn’t about what our website does for our company.  It’s about what our website does for our customers.

When I look at a section of my site, first I want to think about who is using it, and what they want to accomplish.  And then I make those things easy to find and do.  And then I can identify and monitor metrics that measure those things.

We can discuss bounce rates and page views and whatnot, but that’s such a small part of the bigger picture.  Without the context of what those things mean in terms of our consumers’ needs and wants and goals, we’re operating in a vacuum.  We optimize for our consumers. And happy consumers take care of us.

There’s a whole treasure of answers, just sitting there waiting – you just have to have the analysis cycles in place to take advantage of it. 

Do you know what people are searching for most often in your particular vertical?  Have you figured out which keyword battles are worth fighting?  Do you have a strategy in place to fight those battles – and a system in place to keep you informed and accountable to your progress?

Can you tell me, right now, without researching your analytics for an hour – which source of traffic to your site converts most often to business?  Or which keywords convert best?  What’s your most highly trafficked page, and does it support your business goals?

Are you talking to your customers using the kinds of words they prefer?

Have you checked, recently?

And if you have, what did you do about it, and is it working?  Do you know?

I’m a little exacting, and precise.

I blame it on my background.

I’ve got an engineering degree where I was taught to define and measure systems.  To improve performance, reduce risk, to evaluate alternatives and measure results.  I spent a quarter century in a ballet studio, perfecting the nuances of both small and large movements, where every tiny detail counts, from the specific lift of a pinky to balancing your entire body weight perfectly centered on a single toe.

It made me an awesome software tester.  Quality assurance and me are like peas and carrots.  It’s part of who I am now.  I can’t visit your site without automatically thinking about ways to break it.  I can’t look at your form without wondering how much testing you’ve done to improve conversions. 

And I get a little frustrated when things don’t work.  Especially stuff that I consider pretty basic. 

I get even more frustrated when I see you trying to fix those things without any regard to testing, or to quality.  Just code the fix, cram it in, and move on.  And when I run into the exact same problem after you’ve told me it’s been fixed?  Lather, rinse, repeat, I guess.

Testing has always been the red-headed step child.  No one likes it, no one wants to do it.  No one wants to implement testing systems at the same time they start development.  So by the time anyone starts testing and running any kind of quality control, it’s already too late.  Your testers will find problems you should have fixed years ago.  And while your dev staff wants to move on to the next fun new feature, those pesky testers keep shouting about the same old stuff that still doesn’t work.

If your development staff is running your testing?  If they’re checking the same code they just wrote?  You’re screwed.  Not only does your developer hate testing, but they’re not objective anyway.

I used to test the software that runs traffic lights.  I did that for 5 years, banging away on the same thing, running through the same battery of tests over and over and over again.  And then I’d do it all over again on multiple operating systems.  For each iteration of the software.  Because if the developer missed something, and I didn’t catch it, there was potential for huge danger.  Putting an entire city of street lights into flashing red, simultaneously.  Not making the light at a railroad crossing change fast enough when there’s an oncoming train.  Some major safety issues.

Now, maybe it isn’t life or death if your little widget doesn’t go blinky-blinky at the right time when I enter a properly formatted phone number.  But if you haven’t implemented independent, iterative, consistent testing for whatever it is you’re doing?

Then you’re creating a sub-par product.  Simple as that.

How do I, as a business, prepare for and capitalize on these mobile visitors?

First, I wanted to see if I even had any mobile traffic.  And then I asked other real estate agents about their mobile traffic, just to compare.  I had 9 responses in this oh so scientific study.  Here’s what I found.

On average, mobile traffic accounts for 3.46% of a real estate agent’s site visitors.  Answers ranged from 0.55% to 5.98%.

For most, that mobile traffic arrives via a search engine – most answers were 50% to 80% search engine traffic.  And you know what those users were searching for?

The same random stuff they search for on their laptops.  Lots of long tail type keywords mixed with those nice juicy real estate type of phrases.  And while only one person I asked had an individual property address in their top 10 overall site keywords, nearly everyone had an address (or subdivision search) in their top 10 mobile keywords.

There were, however, 2 people that had half or more of their mobile traffic from direct visitors – people who came to the site directly by either typing in the URL, navigating to the site via some kind of saved bookmark, or possibly those who clicked on a link within a document or email.  It’d be interesting to look at those two further, to look at the behavior of those direct visitors, confirm they already have a loyal mobile user following.  Perhaps not coincidentally, those two have the least traffic by far of all the agents I asked, they target the smallest areas, and tend to cover more community type events rather than the larger ‘real estate in your area’ kind of stories.  Food for thought, anyway.

So my mobile traffic pretty much falls within the averages mentioned.  Nearly a quarter of my mobile visitors are direct traffic – Google sends the most mobile traffic, followed by direct visitors, and a distant 3rd are my RSS email subscribers clicking through from those emails on their phone.

The vast majority of my mobile users are iPhoners and Androiders.  No surprise there, as those have the best browsers on mobile devices, IMHO.  People on iPads and iPods account for twice as many visitors as those on Blackberries. 

I didn’t have a single property address in my top 10 mobile keywords, but my mobile keywords and my regular site visitor keywords were pretty much the same.  But bear in mind, these are my blog visitors.  My property search (and quite honestly, the site where I target the juicier real estate type keywords) and my indexable IDX bit live on a different domains and different analytics profiles.  So that makes sense for me.

Other than making sure my site loads quickly for mobile visitors, is clean and easy to navigate on mobile devices – what should I do?

My gut tends to think that mobile users will turn to apps to search for property and get neighborhood information, and not to individual agent sites via browser search results.  And Lord knows I don’t have the resources to compete with the larger real estate app vendors out there.

So what can I do as an individual agent?  Make sure my site is easily readable and navigable via mobile devices, certainly.  But what are my chances to capture eyeballs that lead more directly to sales if I’m competing with really slick national mobile apps, and what’s the best way to do so?

What do you think?  Comments are open, below!

(oh, and we’ll look at how to find these numbers in your analytics in the next post.)