7 Ways to Measure Your Real Estate Marketing Strategies

Make no bones about it, if you are a lone real estate agent, you need a marketing strategy in order to generate inbound leads and turn those leads into customers. But have you looked at how you measure up lately?

Through data insights you can determine exactly how well your real estate marketing strategy is performing. This gives you the flexibility to change course on the ones that are not working well and throw additional energy behind those that are, or at the very least maintain them.

7 Money-Saving Ideas to Measure Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a foundational tool you should use to get metrics on your website. It’s free and easy to set up, and should be considered a necessary step for every website.

It gives you insight into the viewer experience, so you can tailor your marketing strategy to suit their needs. Analyze your site, getting a clear view of which content pieces or pages are the top-performing and how users are engaging with them. Are they sharing them with others? Are they staying on your site for a long period of time? Are they clicking through and gathering additional info? Are they comparing homes?

Google Analytics tells you all of this, but this tool does so much more:

• Look at audience demographics, including gender, age, and interests
• Track engagement via behavior reports
• Use acquisition reports to examine traffic and social reports to view shared content and referrals
• Assess SEO
• Construct conversion goals
• Track campaign efforts
• Get real-time reporting
• Measure multiple platform and device performance

2. Webtrends

Under one dashboard, Webtrends creates a log file that tracks all activity on your site, giving you a complete picture of how your customers interact with your brand across multiple digital channels--your website, social media platforms, mobile app, etc.

You can then use this data to:

• Calculate and customize metrics
• Get both a standard and customized analytics report
• Know what time and day visitors are on your site
• Get insight to which pages they are viewing and how they are using the content
• Know the URL of the site that referred the viewer to your site

3. Social Media Analytics

Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are all great avenues to market your real estate business. You can build client relationships, generate inbound leads, and turn prospects into customers.

Luckily, these social media networks have their own built-in analytics that allow you to sift through customer data and collect things such as demographics, retention, and conversion rates. You’ll also get information on the metrics we mentioned in the previous segment, including:

• Click rates
• Post engagement
• Impressions and how that stacks up to engagement
• Reach
• Funnels
• Visits
• Engagement (e.g. shares, likes, and comments)

4. Add UTM Parameters When Linking to Site Content

UTM parameters are tags you add to the end of a URL. When someone clicks the link, the tags are carried over to Google Analytics for tracking. You can attribute that visit to the exact source the visitor came from, as opposed to only knowing it was a “referral.” With this info, you can figure out:

• How many people came to your site from that particular source
• The average amount of time visitors from that source spent viewing your content
• Bounce rate of those specific visitors
• Whether it led to a conversion—if you have conversion tracking set up

Customizing your UTM parameters will give you more detailed insight so that you have a full scope of how people from external sources are behaving on your site, and ultimately if they’re turning into conversions. This shows you if a channel is a good source of traffic, or if it’s actually sending you unengaged visitors. You can then adjust your spend and efforts accordingly.  

5. Client Feedback

When you onboard a client, or when a prospect contacts you to gather additional information or set up a meeting, ask how they found you. Document this data along with any other information you can get out of leads. You’ll be able to know which of your marketing strategies led them to you, be it your website, social media, a friend, a listing in a paper or magazine, etc. You can also learn which pieces of content led them to make the decision to contact you, or better yet you can learn what almost kept them from calling you.

All of this information is extremely valuable in shaping your marketing strategy and messaging moving forward.

6. Spreadsheets

If you use one or a combination of the above tools, you might find it hard to keep track of the ever-changing data, especially if you are collecting from multiple channels. You can get a long-term view of how your marketing strategies are performing on those avenues by placing the information you gather into a marketing spreadsheet. Here are some helpful ones that are ready-to-go.

At Facet, we’ve taken this approach a few steps further and store important data and analytics in a data warehouse—allowing us to access and manipulate the data to surface important insights that ultimately drive our strategic decisions.

7. CRM Software

Know your numbers. It is vital to keep track of how much it costs to convert leads into sales, as this tells you which marketing efforts are a valuable investment and which are not. You can calculate your cost per lead by taking the amount you spend on a campaign and dividing it by the number of leads it generates.

Pipedrive is one web-based sales CRM and pipeline management solution that allows you to streamline and track every action involved in converting a lead into a prospect and a prospect into a customer.