3 Metrics to Optimize Your Property Development Website
What to Track on Your Website to Improve New Development Sales
In the current competitive market, the project marketers and development organizations that stand out are the ones that close deals. And to do that, your new development marketing needs to excel at both traditional and digital marketing.
By now it’s common practice to have a website for your property development project. A good real estate website has a strong online presence, which creates a solid foundation that allows you to build campaigns to capture the attention of the home buyer market.
It’s good to know which pages people are visiting. But to truly optimize your digital project marketing, it’s vital to understand where visitors are coming from, how they interact with your content, and how effective your forms are.
To best understand whether your property development website and marketing is working as it should, focus on these three metrics.
To Measure Development Website Effectiveness
Metric development project marketers should measure: Conversion Rate
Definition: the amount of conversions (completing a particular action, typically filling out a form) completed per amount of total users
When you have a website, it can be tempting to measure its success on the number of visitors you’re getting. As any seasoned digital marketer will tell you, this is a trap of vanity.
While it’s great to know your website gets several thousand hits a day, it’s more useful to know how many of those people are showing real interest in the development by completing the registration form.
A property development website is like a show home. It’s the place where prospects can get a good idea of what they might be buying into. But it differs because not everyone who comes to the website is a qualified prospect. Someone who made the effort to go to your presentation center is showing significantly more commitment than a visitor to your website!
Because of this, it’s vital that you distill the visits metrics to see only the numbers of people who completed the registration form.
If you’re using Google Analytics to track website analytics (hint: you definitely should be), you actually have a goal tracking dashboard where you can see who has come to your website and completed a certain action. Just remember to set up your goal completion triggers for each form. Use a tutorial such as this one from MonsterInsights.
This is a great resource to use for your walk-in registrations at the presentation center as well, because it allows you to input that data and then break down and compare online and offline marketing campaigns. And then if you want to find the actual conversion rate, simply divide the total number of completed forms (your goal) by the number of visitors to your website.
To Improve Registration Form Completions on Project Websites
Metric development project marketers should measure: Marketing source percentage
Definition: the campaign that referred users to the particular webpage or action
When marketing your new development project, a registration form fill-out is a sign of success. But, in addition to understanding how many people are entering your prospect database, real estate marketers need to know where these prospects are coming from. Which marketing sources are the most successful?
To do that, it’s good practice to use different forms on each different marketing campaign.
This allows you to boost the number of forms filed out overall because you can then tailor different forms to different audiences. The questions that you ask at different points in a prospect’s journey has a big impact on the types of information they’re willing to share. By using different forms, you can optimize for best-performing forms and even individual questions, whether that’s on your project development website or through online ads.
For example, you might have a registration form on the homepage of your project website, as well as embedded on the last page of your project development photo gallery. Which is more popular? It might be the homepage form, because it’s on the front page of the website. But it might also be the one in the gallery, because visitors have just finished looking through photos of the condos and want to see them in person.
With Spark, you can run reports on source breakdown over a period of time.
When setting up the different forms on Spark or your external form creator, just make sure to use different source names for each one. A straightforward naming convention (like Home Page Form for the home page, Facebook Form for Facebook) will make it easy to add the correct form to the correct pages, as well as help keep reporting simple later on.
With different forms and clearly identified names, you can easily understand at a glance which ones are performing the best. Then it’s a matter of leveraging that to improve registration form completions overall on your project development website!
To Understand How Visitors Interact on the Development Website
Metric development project marketers should measure: Unique pageviews
Definition: the number of views on a webpage from unique visitors (vs. returning ones)
For your website registration campaigns to succeed, it’s important to understand more about the behavior of visitors on the website itself. Where are people spending most of their time? How many people are coming back to the website more than once?
Use Google Analytics to get a better picture of how long visitors are spending on your website, and where. On Analytics, check under Behavior > Site Content to get several different views of your webpages. These dashboards give you statistics such as Pageviews, Unique Pageviews, Average Time on Page, and so forth, broken down by subsection or even by individual pages.
The difference between the number of pageviews you’re getting on a webpage, vs the number of unique pageviews, gives you an idea of how many people are returning visitors. A larger number of unique visitors is good if you’re getting a decent amount of conversions. Otherwise, ask yourself why people are coming to your development website and leaving without filling out the registration form!
By using the unique pageview metric in conjunction with registration form statistics on Spark, you can create a clearer picture of what people are experiencing on your website.
Low conversion numbers vs. a large percentage of unique pageview might suggest that people arriving on your site aren’t interested in the content. Try changing up the copy and images on the website, or even targeting your campaigns differently. Watch your metrics as you make these changes, and use the variation that yields the best results.
Improve Property Development Websites with Smarter Data
Getting performance on your property development website up to par isn’t always about getting more visitors. Instead of overloading yourself and your team with too much data, get smart about the types of data you use.
To start, simplify your marketing processes. Make the most out of your tools and follow best practices, like using different forms for different campaigns, or using intuitive naming conventions to differentiate sources. This goes a long way in ultimately helping you to understand and optimize marketing campaigns for your new development project.
At Spark, we’re creating the most robust, end-to-end sales and marketing software available, specifically built to serve the new development real estate industry.
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