Over the past decade I have investigated various methods of measuring online traffic for the various web sites I've managed, and no single measurement seems to bear up to scrutiny. In fact, most do a pretty good job of contradicting each other.

This problem was highlighted last week with the publication of Internet Advertising Bureau’s report (1) showing that online ad spending in Australia had topped the $2bn mark (doubling over the past 4 years). Another recent report (2) predicted internet advertising will almost double again over the next 4 years to leapfrog newspapers and TV to become the number one advertising media.

The $2bn breaks down roughly to half in search/directories (so, mainly Google Adwords), a quarter in online classifieds (mainly real estate, cars and jobs) with the rest spent on general online display ads (skyscraper banners and the like).

With the growing dominance of internet advertising in Australia and throughout the world, it would seem important that we have a precise idea of the number of eyeballs visiting web sites (and which pages), something the internet was supposed to deliver far more accurately than traditional media ever could. All businesses, even the smallest real estate agency office, should know how many people are coming to its online shop window.

Every time a web visitor clicks onto a web site, their visit should be recorded in the log files on the server (unless there's some serious caching going on). Software (such as 'Smarter Stats') can be installed to interpret these and draw some pretty charts in real time, and send you daily/weekly reports by email so you can keep an eye on things.

Alternatively (and maybe as a double check) you can install Google Analytics code into your web site code, and let Google measure the traffic, as many people do. And/or for those with high traffic sites wanting third party advertising dollars, Nielsen tags are supposed to do the same thing. As long as the page with the code loads when the visitor trawls through the site, this should give you more or less the same result as log file reader software and tally with Google Analytics. Except it doesn’t – nothing like.

Even eliminating 'nonhuman' traffic (Google spiders crawling round the web indexing web sites) I get varying results (sometimes by a factor of 2 or 3) for unique visitors, page views and the like when I use these different measuring sticks. Why is this? I’ve asked many onliner marketers and ebusiness people and no one seems to know.

Why can’t we measure internet traffic accurately and with confidence?

End Notes

1. IAB Australia's Online Advertising Expenditure Report, compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers
2. “Internet Advertising set to Dominate”, Lara Sinclair, The Australian, 2nd August 2010

Photo - Gizmodo (Google StreetView guys)

The Property Council of Australia and the Residential Development Council believe the Building Better Regional Cities funding announced today paves the way for improved infrastructure needed to support a ‘Sustainable Australia’.

The funding, announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, will invest $200 million to help build up to 15,000 more affordable homes in regional cities over three years and will relieve pressure on our major capital cities, so that Australia can grow sustainably.

Caryn Kakas, Executive Director of the Residential Development Council, strongly supports the announcement, which is modelled on the successful Housing Affordability Fund (HAF) which ties funding dollars to performance outcomes.

The HAF funding has demonstrated that the provision of forward-linking infrastructure has the ability to remove costs that would otherwise keep the development from occurring. These projects have the added advantage of also bringing much-needed housing supply to the marketplace.

“Housing affordability is not an issue that is restricted to capital cities. There is no doubt that regional areas have been unable to develop to their potential due to the lack of affordable housing, delivery of linking infrastructure and employment opportunities,” Ms Kakas said.

Peter Verwer, chief executive of the Property Council of Australia, indicated that it was imperative that cities be the focus of the election and welcomed the first major policy announcement which was has been directed to delivering infrastructure to cities.

“We need long-term strategic planning that secures the strong economic growth that will fund sustainable communities that are greener, more vibrant and liveable,” Mr Verwer said.

He called on both parties to provide comprehensive cities policies that join up metropolitan and regional programs during campaign.

“That means moving to better urban planning frameworks, and introducing a national urban planning policy that allows our cities to successfully deliver housing and key infrastructure for our growing population.”

“All parties should be focused on stemming the tide of inefficiencies overtaking our cities, through increased investment in long-term planning and renewed commitment to the delivery of infrastructure.”

Having just sold a real estate online business, almost eleven years to the day after it was founded, I thought I’d share some thoughts before they were lost to the sands of time…

Start Up
Starting a business is relatively easy, as it involves buying things. Buying a company name, a domain name, some IT and marketing skills, office space…  it’s the running of it that is tough. And if you were starting up in a whole new industry (online real estate ads) in 1999, then it was tougher still. But sometimes people like to give the new guys a go, and for that I salute Western Australia, not somewhere I grew up in, but the place I’ve called home for 13 years now, and a State where new ventures (be they junior miners, baby bios or anything really) are welcomed and often where (due to its remoteness) new products can be quietly launched. The first dotcom boom helped: if you had an MBA, a dotcom idea and a pulse people threw money at you. Perhaps your nerve is the only thing holding you back. The support of a wonderfully supportive spouse or partner helps a great deal, as does the sage advice of a few business people & MBA professors you look up to.

Getting Out There
As many of us know by now, major new IT projects can take three times as long (and cost three times as much) as you think they will. IT has a certain logic to it, that you will learn along the way, but with no experience in IT, real estate or business, we are testament that you can certainly give it a go, and if we can do it, let me tell you, you certainly can. But choosing your business model (advertising, e-tailing or subscriptions were the three in existence when we began) is going to be critical, as is gaining a foothold and moving towards that all important tipping point where enough visitors are coming to your site to view enough content. Without that, you will not enjoy the ride much.

We picked off the top end suburbs, mainly because we hailed from there and thought the internet use would be highest in those areas and many would have fastish web access from their work computers in the city. (Remember, this was in the days of dial up. No one had heard of broadband.) We figured that the real estate agents that plied these areas probably had the success and advertising money to pay for such a new service and might get it sooner than those out in the boon docks. So it proved.

We were also lucky that realestate.com.au and domain.com.au were not around at the time – in fact they weren’t to place salespeople on the ground in WA until we were well established. There were local competitors trying to beat us, and property.com.au were probably the major force at the time, so it was our cool technology (“interactive mapping”) and our parochial nature (“we’re just around the corner!”) that we pushed as our unique selling points. The local Institute site reiwa.com (for some strange historical reason) had not made much impact in the western suburbs, so really the area was there for the taking. It was a land grab.

Most of business really is about remaining close to your customers, and so we spent a lot of time talking and listening to them. We did not have bucket loads of cash to spend on marketing (we’d have just wasted it if we had) and so we had to be a little street wise about how to build traffic, get good SEO results, get our name out and evolve our business model through the years. We moved into web design, print, seminars and such (none of this bore any mention in our original business plan) and so the words of Amir Bhide came true: “just get out there, because opportunities only present themselves by you being out there”. [Bhide’s 1993 ‘Bootstrap Finance’ Harvard Business Review article had become our Bible.]

What Worked?
Like many businesses, we have tried lots of things, thrown away what didn’t work and kept what did. So what worked?

1. The perpetual shift of eyeballs and advertising dollars from print to online was the major ‘wind beneath our wings’, but this on its own would not have been enough (although it was a necessary factor)
2. True attention to total customer service was critical – easy to say, but only evidenced in a million little things done day in day out over a decade. Real estate clients can annoy you, can be unfair, can be wrong… yes, so what? Without them, you are nothing. Most of the time, they happily use your services, pay their bills on time and keep coming back for more. Trust follows. Invaluable.
3. Hiring and Retaining the best people – we’ve always had good people, sometimes certain people did not fit (so they had to go). People are not only your best asset, in a real sense, they are your only differentiating asset.
4. Being Realistic. There will be tough times, sometimes you just have to admit defeat, sometimes you have to push through the barrier and win. This involves judgement and gut feel, but also a healthy dose of reality and reflection (Jim Collins’ ‘Stockdale Paradox’, from ‘Good to Great’ 2001)
5. You can R+D yourself into Bankruptcy. True, the web site is important, and its fun having lots of cool stuff on the portal, but there has to be a balance between making money (sales) and developing a nice site (R+D). I had lots of battles on this one over the years. Sales is hard work, but it is the most important too. Pick up the phone, make that call. Everyday. The reward for making some sales is some time in R+D.

No doubt readers of this will have other comments on ‘what works’.

Exit
Maybe the most difficult decision is to know when to exit, and how to manage that whole process. We had all sorts come across the threshold in 11 years promising this and that. Most just wanted to take a peek under the bonnet. It’s all very emotionally draining. In the end, it was a cup of coffee, an idea that had merit and then a few more meetings to thrash out the numbers. It was all done inside 6 weeks. If you’d told me 4 months ago I’d be where I am today, I’d have not believed you. Yet now it’s happened, it seems the most natural conclusion in the world. In a few months, I hope to blog about ‘merging portals’, but for now, I have work to do doing just that…

In good news for the building industry housing finance commitments rose in May. The rise breaks a run of seven consecutive falls caused by the ending of the Government’s First Home Owner ‘Boost’ and rate rises, according to peak building and construction organisation Master Builders Australia.

Peter Jones, Master Builders’ Chief Economist, said: “The faltering housing recovery still needs to overcome a hangover from the First Home Owner ‘boost’ scheme, the lingering effects of the credit squeeze and higher interest rates.”

He said: “Critical for the housing market will be a period of stable interest rates in order to engender confidence and encourage upgraders, investors and first home buyers alike.”

“Loans for the building or purchase of new dwellings are beginning to flatten out after the correction seen during the past four or five months, and remain well up on the low point in late 2008.”

“Although there is a solid pipeline of new building work yet to be done, Australia needs a major phase of residential building to go anywhere near to meeting the housing needs of the population.”

“The investment-driven side of the new housing market is still struggling to overcome the credit crunch, although finance for construction of dwellings for rent or resale by investors is beginning to show some improvement.”

“Despite some promising signs, the housing upswing remains tenuous and Master Builders urges the Reserve Bank to keep interest rates on hold for an extended period to ensure that recovery in the interest rate-sensitive residential building sector can regain momentum.”

• Total number of dwellings financed for owner occupiers, seasonally adjusted, rose by 1.9 per cent in May, to be down 24.4 per cent on May last year. 
• Number of loans for ‘new’ dwellings (construction/purchase of new dwellings combined) fell by 0.2 per cent in May to be down by 13.8 per cent on the same month last year: - the number of loans for the construction of dwellings fell by 2.2 per cent in May, to be down 15.3 per cent on the same month last year; - the number of loans for the purchase of new dwellings rose by 4.7 per cent in May, to be down 10.3 per cent on the same time last year. 
• The number of loans for the purchase of established dwellings rose by 2.3 in May, to be down 26.1 per cent on the same time last year. 
• The value of lending to finance the purchase of investment housing rose by 2.5 per cent in May, to be up 17.3 per cent on a year ago - the value of lending to finance construction of dwellings for rent or resale rose by 28.1 per cent, to be up 5.6 per cent on a year ago.

Do you have a Facebook page? Has it been a while since it was last updated? If so you're not on your own.

Facebook Pages work best when they're well maintained and updated regularly. It's a surefire recipe to keep your fans coming back.

Here are 8 quick and easy ways to give your Facebook page an overhaul.

1. Change your profile pic. The simplest way to change your page is by uploading a new profile picture. Make sure it looks professional. 
2. Update your basic and detailed info. If your bio and details are a little light on, update them with more information. Remember to include a brief blurb about your company and all your relevant contact details. 
3. Create a Facebook landing page. A Facebook landing page will really help you to stand out. They’re customisable so you can incorporate logos and design elements for brand cohesion. Check out the Aussie Home Welcome page (if you’d like more information about creating a Facebook landing page, get in touch). 
4. Start a discussion. Want to create some fan interaction? Post a few questions or comments to the discussion board feature. Encourage people to ask you questions.  
5. Create a resource hub. An excellent way to add value to your page is by creating a resource hub. Upload relevant documents, links, videos and other documents that your visitors will find interesting. 
6. Add your blog’s RSS feed. There are a whole range of Facebook apps that let you integrate the RSS feed from your blog (this one is pretty good). Displaying your most recent blog posts is an eye catching and informative addition. 
7. Integrate your Twitter feed. Installing this app will automatically pull your tweets from your Twitter account and display them on your Facebook page. What sort of information do you include on your Facebook fan page?
8. Share a link. One of the best ways to keep your fans engaged is sharing interesting tips. There's plenty of resources available so get cracking. 

Image credit: www.real-techguy.com

At around 9.20am on Friday 2nd July, almost 11 years to the day since the company was first incorporated, aussiehome.com Pty Ltd was sold to REIWA.

In a good-natured signing ceremony, along with my cofounder Nick Streuli, who I’d met while we both completed our MBAs at UWA in the late 90s, I signed the final papers that saw REIWA take over.

Nick and I went off for a coffee afterwards to reminisce. What an 11 years it had been…

In March 1999, Lisa and I attended a ‘Night with Barry Humphries’ at the Regal Theatre. During the show, we were both dragged up on stage to eat a meal with Dame Edna, which had just been ordered from the Subi Hotel. A night neither of us could forget - it was also the same night Nick rang me with his idea for a 'local property web site'. 6 months later, I resigned my secure Head of Department job at Hale School. I remember the date – 9/9/99 - as Dame Edna might have said, “spooky!” Portentous maybe.

1999 was the Year of the Dotcoms. If you had an MBA, a dotcom idea and a pulse, people were interested (6 months later, they ran for the hills). While most e-businesses came crashing down to earth shortly after the Easter 2000 'Tech Wreck', aussiehome.com survived due to its loyal following of visitors and real estate agents and some calm advice from some key shareholders. As the continual shift from print to online took hold in the 2000s, so aussiehome.com developed web site design and hosting services, print publications and online databases, enewsletters and CRMs. We moved into seminars and training, social media and mobile/iphone applications.

There have been many bumps and dinks along the way, some close calls and some great moments. Only 7 months old, we won the Asia-Pacific IT Award for WA for Best Innovation in E-Commerce (beating much larger companies such as AdultShop.com and others). 2 years later they won the Best E-Business in WA and also the People's Choice Award for the most popular web site. In 2004, the company won its first national Award,  as a BRW ‘Best Start-Up' Business, and in both 2007 and 2008 a 'Smart Company Top 40' Award (the only company in WA to do so). I also won a Business News '40under40' Award and our wonderful IT & Systems Manager Amit Sethi won a 'Early Career' Award for Computer Science graduates.

We love to innovate – Nick always insisted that we ‘push the envelope’. We were the first company anywhere to put houses on interactive maps on the internet; the first company in Perth to offer virtual tours to the real estate industry; the first (and still only) site to have a professionally produced real estate TV show (many aussiehome.com clients have featured in it) and still the only site to have 'heat maps' and the ability to 'plot your home open route on a map'. [Goodness, I'm beginning to sound like Kevin Rudd listing all his achievements - sorry about that.]

We all share a lot of pride in our accomplishments. But most of all, we've had fun, and I want to thank all our staff (past and present) and of course our shareholders (who gave us a go back in 1999) and especially our clients who could have easily gone with someone else, but plumped for us and stuck with us. And of course Nick who came up with the idea and convinced me to do it in the first place.

I'm so glad all the aussiehome.com staff are coming with me. I get to run REIWA.com. We get to bring all our services (although most of the staff will still be based in our Nedlands office, and the aussiehome.com web site will continue, at least for a while).

Coming home on Friday night I told my 2 kids that I had just sold the business. My 6 year old boy piped up with “Does that mean you have no work Dad?”

“Oh no," I replied "I have lots of work to do.”

We all do. We are all working with REIWA.com now. We can’t wait. In fact, we’ve already begun.

Meanwhile – thanks for all your support. I have met loads of people over the years who have told me how they have loved using the aussiehome.com site.

I even met Dame Edna - thanks your majesty - you were there at the beginning. As you once said: "“Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.”

Now let's all go have some fun on REIWA.com ...

A lot of agents use email marketing. A few use it with stunning success. Their success always starts with an effective email strategy.

Here then are the eight must-haves if you want a highly effective email marketing campaign. They'll get you moving on the path to more sales.

1. Not on your list? Don’t send it. If a person isn’t on your list and you don’t have a pre-existing business relationship with them, don’t send them your campaign. It's called spamming. Not only is it against the law, it’s just plain bad business.  
2. Plan what you want to say. Any information that you send out to clients needs to have a purpose. Keep this in mind so you can stay on message. Self-serving waffle backfires does more harm than good. 
3. Include a plain text version. Some people may not be able to see HTML email so be sure to include a plain text version of your campaign.  Most good email marketing software includes this function as standard. 
4. Make it punchy. Short, sharp and to the point works on the internet. Don’t litter your email message with long, flowery sentences. People won’t read them.  
5. Check your spelling. Always spellcheck and proofread before hitting the send button. Something as simple as a spelling mistake can ruin the effectiveness of an email.  
6. Call to action. Include a clear call to action in the first two sentences of your email. Let the reader know who you are and what you want them to do.  
7. Keep punctuation out of the subject line. Punctuation trips up spam filters. Avoid using all capitals, exclamation points and question marks.  Especially stay clear of the dreaded !!!. It's a sure-fire way of being marked as spam.
8. Make the unsubscribe button easy to find. Provide a clear and easy way for people to be removed from your list. A link or a button works well. 

The trick with email campaigns is finding a routine and strategy that works for your business. Following the tips above will help you on your way, the rest is up to you.

Facebook can be a great tool for agents - if it’s used well. Just steer clear of these traps and you'll be well on your way to social media success.

1. Going for the hard sell. Very few things are as annoying as an agent who only posts links to listings or who brags constantly about recent sales. Be helpful and interact with other users. Add value to the community.
2. Over-sharing. Before you post anything on Facebook stop and ask yourself if you’d be comfortable sharing it with a client in real life. Besides privacy and safety issues, anything you say is going to viewable (and remembered) for a long time.  
3. Being a stalker. It’s great to want to know about your Facebook friends but knowing too much can put you in stalker territory. One example of stalker behaviour is using information gleaned from status updates in real life conversations. Unless you know the person well it can come off a little creepy. 
4. Not listening. It’s great to be enthusiastic about Facebook. It’s not so great to be the person that clutters up your friends’ newsfeeds. Your contacts will hide your feed if you start posting too much, so find a happy medium.  
5. Over-friending and zero interaction. Some Facebook users place a lot of emphasis on the number of friends they have. A high friend count is pointless if there’s no interaction. Comment on photos, status updates or become a fan of their business. Show them you care.  
6. Engaging with trolls. The internet is full of trolls and trolls love to argue and cause havoc. They’re everywhere, including Facebook, and they may comment negatively on your updates or criticise you in some way. Never enter into an online slanging match with a troll. It will only harm your business.  
7. Being hit and miss. Awkward silences harm your campaign. The best social media campaigns are well thought out strategies that have a clear plan of attack. Plan what you’re going to post, when you’re going to post and stick to it. 

Have you committed any of these Facebook sins? Are there any we've missed? What's the worst of them? 

Photo credit::Banalities on Flickr

I write this as (hopefully) a more humble and aware individual than I was yesterday, having joined 98 other WA CEOs at the WACA last night in the first CEO Sleepout for the homeless, as organised by the Vinnies.

Where to start? Well I can report that the concrete floor underneath the Lillee-Marsh stand is cold at 3 in the morning (when I think I finally got off to a fitful sleep, such as it was), and I know that when I queue up for my pie and chips there in the future I will always gaze down at that corner where I slept last night (see picture left), and the experience will continue to prompt me to think about Australia's homeless people (105,000 a night, 14,000 in WA - a travesty for a wealthy country one might argue).

The pure experience of sleeping out with just a sleeping bag, piece of cardboard and pillow meant this was always going to mean more than just tipping money in for a good cause. You also lived it (at least for one night), and felt blessed that for the other 364 nights of the year you had a warm bed to sleep in. What we did was way easier than what the homeless face every night, for real, but it still made its mark.

Seeing others join you, sleeping in stairwells, down along the railings, under the chairs, and in 2 cases, actually braving the grass pitch itself (see pictures on right) added tremendously to the event. A camaraderie developed through the night, and warm smiles greeted you wherever you went as we all shared the experience. There was a diary room where you could say your thoughts to camera, a book to sign, pictures of homeless to gaze at. And being at the WACA - it was all so surreal.

At kickoff time (7pm last night), Vinnies organised a thought provoking 2 hours of presentations from homeless people who shared their stories, videos, government MPs donating $15,000, and the CEO of Burswood who raised the most ($34,000), all beautifully MC'd by Adrian Barich, who told his favourite Jako jokes. Twiggy Forrest of course stole the night with his appearance and a breathtaking $113,000 cheque from FMG and assorted groups and companies, which took the WA raising to over $420,000. $2.5 million raised nationally (so WA punched above its weight).

As dawn broke the soup kitchen, the roll, the coffee and the shared chatter were in force along with sore heads and bodies ambling around sharing rumours of rats and feral cats (didn't see any myself).

I'll not forget last night. It's startling that one in four homeless are under the age of 18, and most are females. It's a myth that the homelessness are mainly drunken old men on park benches. And hearing their stories, so lucidly put, you can see how the veneer of a seemingly 'normal' life and homelessness is quite thin, and how easy anyone could slip through and find themselves in what must be one of the worst situations to be in.

Altogether, it was poignant and meaningful. It raised our understanding of the issues for us all, and others. We must thank and acknowledge everyone involved in what was WA's first CEO Sleepout, all those that gave - there is still time to give more, and the CEO Sleepout web site is wonderfully well organised and easy to use.

YOU CAN SUPPORT THE CAUSE HERE - thank you. To see more follow the Twitter stream #ceosleepout or read my experiences at Twitter.com/chazgunningham.

The key to great marketing is understanding your audience. To do just that Facebook recently launched a new Page Insights dashboard.

Although the new dashboard is not yet available on all Australian Pages it's set to provide administrators with a bunch of new ways to understand what's happening on their Page.

With the new dashboard Page administrators will be able to view the number of Likes, Shares and Re-shares right down to the level of individual posts. This provides insights into what stories hold the most audience appeal to which audience segments.

The new Insights dashboard provides detailed demographic data giving Page owners a clear look at which parts of their audience are interacting with Page content.

Facebook also allows domain administrators access to anonymised demographics of people who shared content from their website on Facebook. This requires content to be optimised for sharing and the addition of a small piece of code, provided by Facebook, to their website.

What have type of content do you find works best on your Page? What audience segment is the most active?

Photo credit::Alex Himel on Facebook