The advent of PropTech, or property technology, has pushed real estate firms and service providers to embrace the digital landscape. Where agents once primarily advertised lawn signs, firms increasingly understand the value of digital marketing and take steps to scale their efforts across online channels.
However, it isn’t just enough to adopt online marketing tactics as a means of staying competitive. As a real estate marketer, you must continually monitor and analyze key performance indicators to understand the impact of your efforts and find opportunities for optimization.
Still, in a sea of trackable metrics, you may be asking yourself which ones you should prioritize. You don’t want to over-focus on vanity metrics (metrics that, in the grand scheme of things, are not integral to success) and risk ignoring data that will lead to actionable insights. We’ve put together a list of top marketing KPIs that matter to real estate companies and why they’re essential to track.
Organic search traffic
As a marketer, you want to make sure that you’re maximizing your chances of being seen by potential customers. An essential aspect of online visibility is the SEO health of your site — that is, how well-positioned your website is to show up in organic (i.e., non-ad) Google results. For example, if your business rents or leases out office space, like SquareFoot, in Washington D.C., you want to make sure you are getting in front of people who are typing “office space for lease in DC” or “coworking spaces in Washington” (among other similar queries).
If your website comprises individual listings, SEO-optimizing those pages will increase their chance of surfaced to people searching for those addresses. As you roll out initiatives to improve your SEO, make sure you are tracking organic traffic coming to your site via search engines so you can get a sense of the effectiveness of your efforts.
Traffic by channel
Organic search is, without a doubt, a precious channel for real estate marketers. It would be best if you also were looking at how much traffic comes in through each of your marketing channels to see what tactics are working well for you, what’s not working, and where there is an opportunity to increase your traffic numbers.
For example, if you are running brand awareness campaigns but your direct traffic numbers (i.e., the number of people typing your website domain directly into their address bars) are not increasing, you may want to look into tweaking those campaigns to better drive people to your site.
If you are getting a lot of traffic from social media platforms relative to how much time you invest in those platforms, you may want to scale your efforts there. Breaking down traffic by channel will give you visibility into what channels matter to your business and allow you to prioritize your marketing tactics in a data-driven way.
Conversion rates
Traffic is just one part of the equation, but you won’t get very far if you over-focus on traffic without analyzing your traffic-to-conversion rates. You want to make sure that your campaigns and your traffic are getting you leads.
As an example, you may decide to allocate a large budget to developing a content series to drive people to give you their contact information. After poking around in your analytics platform, you may see that your content pieces are getting a considerable amount of traffic.
However, stopping your analysis there will be detrimental to your business’s bottom line. If people are dropping off after reading your piece and not navigating to your main conversion pages or forms, your return on the investment will be minimal. Identifying which campaigns are converting will be instrumental in moving clients down the funnel.
Email open rates and CTR
Email is a primary channel leveraged by real estate agents and marketers alike. It’s a highly effective medium for disseminating new listings on the market. However, you must make sure that your emails are doing what you want them to do — i.e., piquing interest in what you have to offer.
Two main email KPIs that you should be tracking are open rates and clickthrough rates. Open rates will indicate whether people are interested in reading your emails. If your open rates are low, consider testing different subject lines and sender names — but also evaluate the health of your email list. It may be that bad contact data or recipients to whom your services are not relevant.
Clickthrough rates will indicate how relevant and/or appealing your email content is to those who are opening your emails. Sometimes referred to as “click-to-open rates,” this metric takes into account the number of people who are clicking in your emails relative to the number of people who have opened them.
Knowing how your email content performs will help you iterate on what you’re delivering and how you are presenting it. For example, you may want to test the email layouts, lengths, and content to see whether it impacts the number of people clicking through to the links you include in your emails.
Cost per lead
Ensure you’re not overpaying for leads by tracking this crucial KPI, which is primarily used in online advertising platforms.
Understanding the cost per lead (i.e., the total cost of your campaign divided by the number of leads that campaign generates) for each of your marketing campaigns will give you insight into the cost-effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Consistently tracking CPLs and working to lower dollars spent while maintaining lead volume will allow you to get the most bang for your buck.
While there is a vast universe of trackable metrics that will give you some insight into how well your marketing campaigns are performing and where there are areas of opportunity to scale your efforts, these five metric categories will be instrumental in augmenting the success of your marketing, and ultimately, your business. Stay ahead of the curve by diligently monitoring these KPIs.
