Google Analytics and Website Grader: Check Your Website and Marketing - for free!

Adding Google Analytics to your website takes minutes and provides an invaluable check on your advertising spending. 2700 North Ocean is a luxury real estate project that came to Gibson Roscoe with an objective to sell vacation homes during South Florida’s short (January to April) season. The project’s website was built in Flash. In December, before we relaunched the site, it only had 12 visitors per day.



Gibson Roscoe rewrote and designed the site in CSS and launched a newspaper and TV ad campaign to generate phone calls and visits to the property. Many buyers will want to visit a website for details before negotiating on a specific residence. Its important we make the web site easy to find and navigate. Using Google Analytics we see that spikes in web traffic and page views coincide with the Friday newspaper ads we ran and so these ads were continued for four additional insertions.

The television ads keep the web traffic up during other days of the week and we added to the media buy. Buyers are shopping for 2 minutes or more on the site, which begins to pay-off. Each week about $5 million dollars in units were sold, and by April, $34 million in sales have been achieved.

Can the web site be improved?
Yes. By looking at Website Grader, another cost free way to improve your website marketing, we learn the site’s strengths and weaknesses and “tweak” it continually. Our new 2700 North Ocean Website is graded 81 points out of 100.



It gets good grades for having current content - a blog. It gets good grades for having a Facebook Fan Page Link, but can be improved with links to Twitter. Client and agency now know we must go to work, promoting content.

The Basics of “Pay Per Click”

Everyone now knows that “google word searches” are a primary way customers find products and services.

So how do you have your web site appear in the top listings? Buy a “Pay Per Click” plan. Where? on Google where 80% of all searches are initiated.

In this example, Jupiter Medical Center wants patients seeking information on bariatric surgery to visit their site.

A monthly budget is set, you provide Google a list of “Key Words” and a target price per word. In this case the words/phrases chosen were Bariatric Surgery, Bariatric Surgeons, Gastric Bypass Surgery, Lap Band Surgery, Weight Loss Surgery and the “auction rate” for the words fluctuated around $5.00.

Other advertisers paying to be the top search words in the chosen market area are competing with you for the top positions. The plan can be focused to as narrow as a county. Jupiter was only interested in searches are initiated within Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties (Florida).

Each time an individual “clicked through” the listing to get to the web site, Google charged the “auction price” until the daily budget was exhausted. (The monthly budget was divided by 30 to provide a daily budget).

At the end of each month, a report is generated a report that shows which keywords create the most click-throughs, and shows how the budget was spent. The budget can then be adjusted upward or downward.