Google Analytics + External Site Statistics Tracking in one application?

Question

My company is a broker in the real estate industry. As such, we send a lot of our listings to sites like Trulia.com and Zillow.com, among others. These sites direct leads to our realtors, and provide us with reports every month detailing the activity our listings have had on their site-- links back to our website, emails generated, etc.

Our Marketing and Advertising departments want to take that information and enter it into a system to keep track of everything in one place, for the purpose of producing comparison reports.

I cannot find any externally available product that provides this functionality. I would sincerely like to avoid writing this tool myself. Does anyone know of a tool that could do this?

In short, an ideal system would:

• Import Google Analytics data via API
• Import real estate listing site data via CSV upload / manual entry
• Provide comparison reports based on data

Does anyone know of anything pre-made that can do this?

Answer 1

So you cannot track visitors on Zillow or Trulia using your own google analytics code. The only way that is possible is if they allow you to add your tracking code to listings. The reason is, that if you were to create a posting on those sites and include javascript the javascript portion would be wiped out.

If Trulia / Zillow and others can give you LIVE statistics, then you can use Google Analytics Serverside (both the open source php version or perhaps the mobile version) to then add this data to google analytics.

One option would be to just store everything in your own Analytics DB (SQL) or Metrics service. You can use a service like Kiss Metrics or Mixpanel. Mix / Kiss are a lot more flexible in the way they store data than google analytics. The advantage of storing data yourself or within these services is that you control the reporting.

So you can build an app (script) that takes trulia reports and updates Kiss / Mixpanel / Mysql or whatever you use to store the data. You can build another one for zillow. And build another one for your own site or if you stay wiht analytics one that imports that data in for you. Last you can use that data and share those reports with your clients.

What is going to end up sucking is that the data is not instant. I doubt you will ever get all the real estate portals to have a unified reporting api. Its not in the interest of zillow to compare itself with realtor.com or condo.com. Their ad teams will go nutts if its exposed how in effective one portal might be compared to the rest.

Answer 2

You could use Google Analytics for storing your CSV data (via Data Import in the Management API) and a tracking pixel service to feed visits on external sites to your Google Analytics account. In this case you could create all of your reports directly in Analytics (updated in near real time).

Answer 3

It looks like Zapiers can connects Zillow and Trulia data to their CRM for real estate agents, Follow Up Boss. Zapier also can import google analytics data. I've never used it, so I don't know how well the different inputs play together.