GAAR's  consumer website NewMexicoHomeSearch.com (or NMHS, for short) made its debut in early April of 2016.

Since then, GAAR has been monitoring the site's activity to guage how users are using it to help better chart the course for future developments. Here are a couple of analytics highlights from 2016:

Sessions

Since its launch, the site has had around 20,000 sessions per month on the website, which is some great exposure for our REALTOR'S® listings. There was a slight dip around the holidays, which is fairly normal for real estate websites. We hope to see these numbers continue go up in 2017 as the site gains more exposure through advertising, word of mouth and additions of MLS partners like Taos County and Roswell.

Bounce Rate

For those not obsessed with tools like Google Analytics, a site's bounce rate is  the percentage of single-page visits to your website. This is a number we actually want to to be low, as that means that users aren't going to just one page and then leaving. In the chart below, you can see the NMHS has had below a 32% bounce rate since day one. This is great news, as it means that once users get to the site they are clicking in to other areas. According to a MOZ presentation at Inman Connect NY, the target bounce rate for most real estate websites is between 30 - 40%, meaning that NMHS is right on target.

Avg. Pages Per Session and Avg. Session Duration

According to MOZ, if your real estate website can get between 3 and 5 pages viewed per user session, that's not bad. 9 and 11 pages viewed per session is considered excellent. Where does NMHS stand on page views? For 2016 we saw an average of 14.31 pages view per session. This means users are digging in and spending a lot of time (an average of 9 minutes and 45 seconds, to be exact) on the website.

We will continue to review and intrepret the data that comes from Google Analytics , Listtrac and other means to make continuous updates and recommendations to the newly formed NMHS PAG.