Really strong overview & 101 Seth! Even just knowing the basics (enough to be dangerous, I guess) is still so valuable. GA is free, real estate folks love that model!!! Seriously, though, there's so much data available to a site owner that not measuring ROI on marketing activity is just unacceptable in this day and age, in my opinion. You (and Placester) are really doing a great job of publishing strong data and educational pieces!

Rivers, appreciate you reading it and spreading the word. We're trying to dive deep and help get folks onto the playing field where they can start to see some results. I would love to collaborate on a piece at some point, maybe on lead capture which you guys are so good at.

Love this article, Seth, really thorough. Analytics has done wonders for us to be able to really understand what our web users are doing.

Blogging has a been a huge help for generating inbound traffic and long-tail search engine rankings. Using analytics, we can see which kinds of topics create casual browsers, and which ones create motivated buyers.

Nice work!

Sam, thanks for taking a look. Are you using any other tools besides GA? What's your favorite?

I'm trying out SEOMoz Pro with Open Site Explorer. It's pretty amazing, but most users will be fine with GA's free tools.

We use SEOMoz as well. really like it, but it doesn't do everything I want. I'm curious, how are you validating the quality of the visitors/leads generating by your content? It's always this last piece that most people neglect.

Validating quality of leads is still a work in progress--It's not as scientific as I'd like right now, sort of a manual process. We'll look at a spike in traffic from, say, an article about houseboats. Then we'll analyze if overall bounce rates changed, and especially bounce rates on the landing pages linked to within the blog post (houseboat traffic is notorious lookers, not buyers).

I've experimented with funnels and goal visualization which would be a great way to track leads from landing page to signup but, frankly, I don't have enough time to really get good at this stuff. I need to generate content and sell homes.

Sam, completely understand th quandry, sounds like you are doing most of the important stuff. It's super tough these days wearing so many hats, Two things you might want to play with. 1) the annotation tool in GA, log your major content marketing activities so you can look back and attribute your efforts to the appropriate results. 2) Using the campaign URL builder for each post and channel really helps us understand what getting the most traction and where. https://support.google.com/... - Best, SP

Thank you, really appreciate the advice. I'll take a look at those tools...hopefully when I get a break sometime in the next month.

Time is always an issue. Ping me directly if you want me to walk you through how I use those tools. Best, Seth