If I were to ask you about your conversion rates, what could you tell me? Do you know how many online leads came in your door? What percentage of your sales was jump-started by your Online Sales Counselor? What pages of your site have the most unique visitors (and I don’t mean “unusual”, but the number of total visitors, not actual visits)? How many people are accessing your mobile site?
We have so many tools to help us measure the success of individual sales and marketing efforts, but far too many are being ignored. You study those sales figures, but how do you know what contributes to success (or failure) if you’re not analyzing the steps that lead you there? If you want to sell more homes, you need to monitor your metrics with extreme vigilance.
Start with your leads.
Where do prospects come from? It can be hard to measure because people receive so many marketing messages in a day that they might not realize what actually prompted them to contact you. Maybe they saw a sign somewhere and then looked at your website. Or a friend mentioned your name in passing—but is that a referral?
You can, however, measure the leads coming through your website, walking through your door, and calling on the phone. How many Realtors contact you each week? What’s the conversion rate with Realtors? How does that compare with the conversion rate for online leads? Does any particular referral source stand out? If so, not only do you need to keep cultivating that one (because competitors can sneak in any time and impinge on that loyalty), but also look at where you can develop other referral sources.
Study your website traffic.
You can see where people are clicking through on your site, where they linger, and where they exit. How many views are your videos getting? Which models get the most views? Which seem to be ignored? And what does all of this information tell you?
These are all important metrics for understanding the effectiveness of your site, as well as knowing where you need to place more emphasis. If, for example, your blog isn’t getting enough traffic but your videos are being seen, maybe you should look at the content you’re posting on your blog. Are you linking your videos to your blogs? Your site optimization should include pathways for the user to click through from one page to another. Embed links to take them from one place to another. For example, if you mention a community in a blog, embed a link to that page. If you have a blog on a specific topic—e.g., financing—be sure you link it to and from other pages that mention “financing”. In this way, you fill them up with useful information and they stay on your site, and come back again.
You invest in your sales and marketing. If you want to maximize the return on investment, monitor your metrics. Don’t let another week pass by without spending an hour or two looking at what happened in the past week, month, and quarter. You’ll discover it is time well spent.
