Monitor and improve these 5 metrics to get more leads

Figuring out and monitoring your key performance indicators (KPI’s) on your real estate website is one of the most valuable thing you can do. Once you figure out the metrics you want to improve and make those improvements, they’re yours forever.

Goal Conversion Rates

Google Analytics allows you to track goals such as what % of my visitors sign up for my newsletter?

Without a doubt this is your one most important metric. Some simple tweaks to increase conversion rates:

• Add social proof to your page – Show people that other people like you.
• Implement a live chat service such as Zopim. We’ve seen great results with this on real estate landing pages.
• Use great content to deliver ‘free’ value to your prospects
• Make your signups easy – The longer your form, the less it will convert.
• Have a clear call to action. Visitors should be able to identify what you do and why it’s important to them right away.
• Show off any real estate rewards you have received. Show the visitor that you’re a great real estate agent.
• Have awesome testimonials. Not just in text, if you can get your old clients to give you a video referral, that’s as good as it gets. Immediate way to build trust and get someone interested right away.
• Remove as many distractions as possible

When improving this, you should be naturally improving all the key performance indicators below as well. If people are converting it’s because your site is delivering value and doing many things right. If it’s not you’re doing something / a lot of things wrong which you need to improve upon that we go over below.

Heres a great simple tutorial on setting up goals: here

Average Page Views / Time Spent On Site

How many pages on average your visitors spends on your website / blog and how much time.

This is a core metric because the more page views you get from an average visitors is a chance for you to deliver more value. The more value you can give a visitor, the higher the chance is that they will join your newsletter or contact you for services.

• Reason Linking. If visitors are on your blog reading a piece of content, give them another piece of content that directly relates to what they’re reading. Your visitors are more likely to read it at that point in time.  You can do this by using a related content plugin for wordpress or using anchor text links.
• Write good content with great headlines. Want people to click more? The simple way is to provide something click worthy. Go through all your titles and rate yourself, would you want to view more articles on your website based on titles alone?
• Tweak your current design – This is an overall method to be used to improve any metric. Best used when A/B testing with a platform such as Optimizely.

 

Bounce Rate

“The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page”

Try to aim for a bounce rate below 50% – There are no exact statistics for the real estate industry bounce rate but, there are some general ones we can base off of.

• Landing page bounce rate average – 70-90%
• Lead Generation -50% average – Not specific to the real estate industry.
• Content pages – 40-60%
• Blogs – 70-90%

*Sidenote – As much as you might hate popups, they work. What % of your customers are currently signing up for your services? Try a popup with a free offer and tweak the copywriting on it before giving up. I’ve seen popups convert at up to 15% alone. 

To improve your bounce rate try some of these tactics:

• Don’t have an automatic video start playing – Seen this and it makes a lot of people angry and leave right away
• According to a study released by Akamai in Sept. 2009 – 40% of  your site visitors will leave if your website takes more than three seconds to load. 
• Make your load time faster with tools such as W3 Cache – Also reduce image sizes if you’re not using wordpress and remove any plugins that are not absolutely necessary. Use Google Page Insights to test your speed.
• Do have a great design. One of the most important factors in bounce rate.
• Figure out your main referrals to that page and understand why they’re coming to that page. Make sure their goals are met easily.
• Clear navigation / pathway
• Make sure any external links open a new window
• Attract the right visitors. Low quality traffic will KILL your bounce rate.
• Have an easy to understand layout / design
• Don’t let your ads / offers/ lead generation efforts distract from the core reason the audience is visiting.

Keep trying new things to lower your bounce rate and monitor your analytics. Any gains you make from your efforts will continue to work for you months after you make them.

Referrals

What sites are sending traffic to you? Simple, but important. 

This is an easy, but very important metric to watch for a simple reason that I learned a year ago and has changed my life ever since.

Double down on what’s working.

It’s easy to keep testing new methods to try and get more traffic in search for that silver bullet. Well there is no silver bullet, what works is doubling down on what’s already working. Make a list of all your top referring sources and start doing more of that. If it’s blog commenting, sharing on Facebook, tweeting, whatever, monitor your referral analytics and do more of whatever is working.

Keywords (Google Webmasters Tool)

Free tool provided by Google, separate from Google Analytics that will give you more in-depth data on what keywords are currently working for: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

The key metrics behind this also go back to the previous point. You’re going to want to identify what keywords are currently driving you the most traffic and go back to those posts to figure out how you can make them even better using the principals above.

These are your money makers so you’re going to want to reduce bounce rage, increase average page views and get the absolute most out of these keywords possible.

On top of all that you’re also going to want to build these keywords up. If you’re already ranking for them, start figuring out how you could potentially start building backlinks for them to help you get even more traffic from them. Before you do that make sure that the pages are performing at an optimal level and you’re getting the most juice out of them as possible.

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