9 Crucial KPIs Every Real Estate Marketer Should Track
We've all heard it before:
My post reached 10,000 Facebook users!
This billboard is seen by 50,000 commuters every day!
Our Google ad is #1 in the search results!
What do all of these statements have in common? They say little about how successful your marketing efforts actually are.
Don't get us wrong. Reach, impressions, and rankings, in combination with other data, can be crucial indicators of building brand awareness and building your real estate client base. But on their own, they are not reliable enough to tell you anything about the success of your marketing efforts.
And yet, countless real estate marketers continue to rely on them. Be it for lack of knowledge or time, they equate so-called vanity metrics with successful marketing.
Don't be that realtor.
Instead, rise above your competition by relying on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that actually indicate whether your marketing efforts are moving the needle on the success of your business.
Emphasizing Data in Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy
In a previous post, we've emphasized the importance of using data to improve your marketing efforts. By taking a data-focused approach, you can find the strategies and tactics that attract and retain the most possible clients.
That data, of course, has to be intentional. Rather than simply collecting as much data as possible, you need to find, analyze, and act on the metrics that matter most. To help you accomplish that goal, here are 9 real estate marketing KPIs to maximize the success of your efforts over time.
1) Web Visits
Let's start with the basics. On their own, web visits (just like the above-mentioned vanity metrics) don't mean much. If you don't get your audience to do anything beyond visiting your home page, you won't grow your business.
But at the same time, web visits can be a crucial first indicator of the success of your tactics. Ultimately, each of your efforts should aim toward getting potential clients to a point where they can browse listings and get in touch with you.
Your website is likely the central spot at which they can do all of that. Tracking your visitors helps you better understand and standardize your individual marketing channels.
2) Search Traffic
At this point, no digital marketing effort is complete without an emphasis on search engine optimization. Put simply, you want home buyers and sellers to see your listings and website pop up in search results anytime they look for topics or services related to your expertise.
By measuring your search traffic, you can determine just how successful your SEO efforts actually are. In addition to finding out which keywords perform best and deserve more optimization, you can also track visitors from specific keywords all the way to conversion, allowing you to make prioritization judgments and decisions with an eye toward maximum impact.
3) Traffic Sources
Beyond search, it also makes sense to understand exactly how your visitors land on your page, and what devices they're using to get there. Breaking down your web visits by sources is a start; especially if you use URLs tagged with UTM codes, you will always keep track of how your individual tactics are performing.
In addition, pay special attention to the other information services like Google Analytics spit out. For example, you can easily track which devices and browsers most of your audience uses to access your website. Armed with that information, you can more easily develop your online presence specifically with your audience in mind.
4) Lead Conversions
Lead generation is becoming increasingly important, particularly in real estate marketing. If you can get your audience's contact information, you can send regular relevant and credible information their way. Once they're ready for an agent, they'll be significantly more likely to remember you.
That trend, in turn, makes your lead conversions a crucial KPI. And you can dig deep: through Google Analytics, for example, you can set up conversion goals that help you better track and make marketing decisions based on not just general lead conversions, but lead conversions by individual traffic sources.
5) Exit Pages
Chances are you know about bounce rate, which describes the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only a single page. But do you know about exit pages?
Sooner or later, your visitors will leave your website to go elsewhere. Analyzing your exit pages helps you understand when that happens, and whether visitors have performed the actions you want them to perform.
For example, you might prefer your visitors to visit your home page, read a blog post, and download a piece of gated content. If the confirmation page for your sign up form is the most popular exit page, your strategy is working. But if it's the blog post, you may need to refine your CTA or value proposition.
6) Landing Page Conversion Rates
In addition to page-wide lead conversions, it helps to track which of your individual landing pages are most successful in generating leads. Especially if you've optimized your real estate landing pages for conversion, you probably want to know which efforts are actually working, to duplicate these efforts on other pages.
By measuring your landing page conversion rates, you can do just that. Benchmark your individual landing pages against each other as well as industry averages, then revamp your lower performers to mimic their higher performing counterparts.
7) Cost Per Lead
A marketing tactic that generates a significant amount of leads per month may not be worth it if it blows your budget in the process. By calculating the cost of an average lead, and breaking that calculation down by channel and source, you gain a better understanding of the efforts with the best return on your marketing investment.
This cost-per-lead calculator is a great place to get started. Ultimately, you need to know how much you spend on each marketing initiative, and how many leads that initiative generates. If you have a broad understanding of how much your leads are worth, you can now quickly analyze whether a marketing campaign has a net positive or negative effect on your revenue.
8) Client Lifetime Value (CLV)
How much revenue can you expect from an average real estate client over the course of their relationship with you? The calculations to arrive at this KPI can be complex, but have the potential to be immensely valuable.
Adwerx has built a free CLV calculator that can get you started. In combination with the above cost per lead, your understanding of the worth of an average client can help you make more informed decisions on which marketing efforts provide the best possible ROI.
9) Referral Percentage
Every real estate marketer wants to attract clients that are likely to refer their friends and family. In fact, word of mouth marketing is among the most important sources of business growth in this area.
That's why a KPI that helps you get a better understanding of this number is vital. Calculating the likelihood a new client will eventually refer someone else helps you focus on members of your target audience with the biggest potential long-term impact on your real estate business.
Using Focused KPIs to Improve Your Marketing Efforts Over Time
Ultimately, these 9 KPIs help you build the foundation of your marketing strategy. By tracking the success of your individual channels to this depth, you can determine exactly which channels (and messages) work, and which don't.
The result is a marketing strategy that is constantly evolving and improving based on the outcomes of your tactics.
The most successful efforts are built into repeatable, automated tasks that will result in the same outcomes with less effort. The less successful efforts, on the other hand, are either dropped or adjusted to optimize your marketing resources.
The key in all of these efforts is to build a framework that results in actionable data. Once you focus on KPIs like the above, you can use that data to better understand not just the success of your marketing tactics, but also your audience's behavior and preferences.
Armed with these insights, you can build and adjust a strategy that ensures each of your resources is spent with a singular goal in mind: to attract and retain home buyers and sellers as potential clients, and grow your business.
