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a la mode
news & marketing tips — posted
June 2, 2005
How to analyze
your XSite traffic
You've chosen your themes, uploaded pictures and added content pages,
calculators and videos. But how do you know who's visiting your XSite?
That's where your XSite's Statistics come into play, which you can
view by going to the My Office section of your XSite and clicking on "XSite
Statistics." It's here you can find out how many visitors came to your
site, where they're coming from, what keywords they entered that
brought them there, what pages they viewed, and much more.
Although all of this information is available at your fingertips, some
of you may be confused by terms such as "visitors," "page views" and
"entry pages" and what they tell you about your XSite visitors. So
let's clarify things a bit.
Who's there?
A visitor to your XSite is just that — someone who comes to any page
on your XSite. When referring to the number of visitors your XSite has
generated, you're referring to the total number of people who access a
website over a certain period of time. A single person is counted as
one visitor each time he/she visits your site. So, if a person visits
your site three times during a specified time, it counts as three
visitors.
A unique visitor, on the other hand, is someone with a unique IP
address (A number used to identify a computer connected to the
Internet) entering your site for the first time during a specified
period. Unique visitors are counted only once no matter how many times
they visit your XSite.
You can check your unique visitors on your Statistics page by
scrolling down to the "First Time Visitors" section. You can also
see how
many times a visitor returns to you site in the "Returning Visitors"
section. This is a good thing to check regularly since people that
visit your site again and again are most likely to become new clients!
What do they want?
While it's important to know how many people are visiting your site,
you also want to know what tools and content they find most useful.
That's why many XSite owners monitor the "Page Views" section of their
Statistics, which tracks the number of times each page on your site
has been visited.
Many mortgage brokers fine tune their most popular pages with the goal
of turning those visitors into leads. For example, if you find that
the content page "When to Refinance" has the most views of any
page on your site, you'll want to make sure there's a lead generation
form on that page. And if there's a page on your site that you'd
like more people to view, you can rearrange your
homepage to make that link to the page more visible.
How'd they find you?
The entry pages in your Statistics indicate where visitors entered
your site. Due to search engines used and links on other websites,
you'll likely see that not all of your visitors arrive at your home
page first. If you find that many visitors are arriving on one page
but you'd like to have them visit other pages, you may want to modify
that popular landing page to include links to the page you'd really
like them to visit.
The "Referring URLs" section shows you other websites that are sending
visitors to your XSite, such as Yahoo! Or Google. And, if you've
created linking partners with other Mortgage XSite owners or other
websites, this is a good way to find out which of those sites are
bringing you the most traffic.
"Common Search Terms" will tell you what keywords and phrases people
use on major search engines to find your XSite. The section also
tracks the number of times the keyword or phrase was used over a
specific period of time. Because you can see exactly what keywords
visitors typed in to get to your site, you can better target your
marketing campaigns as well as any pay-per-click services you use.
Now what?
Analyzing your XSite's statistics regularly allows you to better target
your website and marketing efforts so you can achieve better ROI and,
of course, turn more leads into clients!
Combat spam and put your clients at ease with just a
few clicks
Most people are
annoyed by spam in their e-mail boxes. But did you know that those
pesky messages actually affect your business's overall productivity?
The cost of spam in
2005 is projected to be about $17 billion in the United States,
according to Ferris Research, a messaging market-research firm. This
figure reflects the productivity loss from businesses without spam
filters, the cost to purchase and administer anti-spam systems, and
time wasted dealing with spam that gets through and with legitimate
messages that have been misidentified as spam. That's a lot of money
—
especially if you're a one-man mortgage company who spends the morning
weeding spam out of your inbox.
Fortunately, your
Mortgage XSite comes with CertMail, a web-based e-mail account protected by an industrial strength,
server-side virus and spam filter, which detects the most common forms
of unwanted e-mail and handles it for you without cluttering up your
inbox. You decide how that mail is treated and can also configure
your own lists of "Safe" and "Blocked" senders, giving you the
ultimate say on what messages get through.
And what's worse
than spam in your inbox? Spam in your clients' inboxes that
cause your important e-mails to get lost among advertisements for
generic drugs and online dating websites. That's why we created SureReceipts for your
CertMail, which allows you to get a true receipt
on e-mails you send.
Unlike read
receipts built into programs like Microsoft Outlook, SureReceipts
doesn't depend on the recipient using Outlook or confirming they want
to send your receipt. Plus, the delivery mechanism built into SureReceipts overcomes common file-size limitations with attachments,
so you can send any size files you want.
For you, using
SureReceipts is just like sending a regular e-mail through CertMail. You just need to
mark the "Deliver using SureReceipts"
option when composing your message. However, the
recipient sees something a little different when your message comes
in. Instead of seeing your attachments, they'll get a notification
that a message is waiting for them and a hyperlink to click. Once
they click the link, they are taken to a message pickup area on our
CertMail server. And you are sent a
"receipt" back in e-mail. Then,
the page they see has your message on it, plus individual links for
each of the attachments. And when they click the attachments, you're
also sent notification.
Buying a home can
be stressful for your clients, especially if it is their first
mortgage. SureReceipts lets your clients know that you have made sure
that every aspect of their transaction is secure as possible. For
more information on using CertMail and SureReceipts, go to the
CertMail section of the My Office area of your XSite and click on the
Help icon for the user manual.
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