5 Ways to Multiply Sales Leads A property lead is like a bar of soap in the shower. If you’re not careful, it’ll slip through your fingers. If you could convert even half the people that visit your website each month, you’d have more than enough leads to sell all your properties. If you outsource or delegate your online marketing, you need to set targets and measure performance to ensure you are not losing leads to your competitors. The problem is choosing the right measures from the hundreds of metrics that are available. Targets change behaviour and if you choose the wrong ones, you risk allocating time and resources into unproductive areas that don’t come up with the goods. Consistency over accuracy Given the choice, it’s better to be consistent rather than 100% accurate. Not everyone will remember or tell you exactly what they did once they pick up the phone. It can also be hard work keeping track of email leads from a number of different sources. If you’re consistent, at least you can make improvements and measure their effect. If you can afford it, it is worth taking a holistic approach and investing in a lead tracking and CRM system, like the ones provided by Property Software Solutions and Probis. Here, for simplicity, we just look at measuring leads from your website and ignore other channels. You won’t be 100% accurate, but if you are consistent, these measures can help you make significant improvements to lead generation. Analytics software In order to increase sales leads, you need to have the right kit to measure performance. I recommend Google Analytics for those happy to give their data to Google, as it’s free and very easy to use, or ClickTracks for those that don’t, or who want something more sophisticated.
1. Email lead conversion rate This is the most important measure of how leaky or wasteful your website is. It is often easier to increase this rate than it is to enhance your natural search positions. Find out what it averages each month and target your marketing or web team on improving it. It’s the number of leads your website generates divided by the number of people visiting (“visits”) each month. Your analytics programme will calculate it for you when you set up your “thank you for enquiring” page as a goal.
2. Property detail conversion rate How many people actually get to view the details of properties on your site? If you can get people to view properties, you’re in with a fighting chance of getting them to make an enquiry. The Property Detail Conversion rate measures the percentage of people (visits) that end up viewing a property. Again, your analytics program will calculate this for you if you enter the common part of the URL of each detail page into your goals (e.g. www.mysite.com/property/detail). 3. Property page to lead conversion rate This combines 1 and 2 above. What percentage of people (visits) who reach your property detail page actually go on to make an enquiry? Ways to improve this rate include:
Better photographs of properties Videos and virtual tours More inspiring copy Have a piece of presence software that pops up with a human (usually female) face and asks “can I help you?”
If you have set up your goals from 1 and 2, your can press “funnel visualisation” on Google Analytics to see a picture similar to the one below:
4. Traffic net of paid search visits Measures 1 to 3 look at efficiency. They reduce the leaks in your site and improve the percentage of people you convert to lead. The other obvious way to raise lead numbers is to increase traffic. As paid search budgets can fluctuate and traffic improvements are transitory, it’s worth stripping out paid search traffic from your figures. If you want to permanently improve the number of leads you generate and reduce your cost per lead, measure traffic net of paid search and target people against it. 5. Cost per lead from paid search Paid search is usually the most expensive element in your online marketing mix. It is important to know your cost per lead so you can work on reducing it, or at least reducing the pace of inflation. Also, if it’s costing you more than £10 per lead, should you allocate the budget to pay-per-performance property portals instead? It depends on whether you think you can improve your paid search cost per lead and whether these leads convert better, but without this information you
can’t make a proper decision. I find it easier to measure this using Google Adwords rather than Google Analytics. You’ll need to add code to your goal pages to do this. Comparables Measuring and targeting people on improving the five measures above will help you significantly improve the number of leads you generate over time. The main problem is knowing how your measurements compare to industry standards. The Search Marketing Guide provides some benchmarks but nothing that is real estate specific. You can compare your traffic to your competitors’ using Alexa. It’s the best free tool but is biased towards technical sites. It’s best described as consistently inaccurate. If you can afford it, the best benchmarking tool is Hitwise. Jason Leven, Web Development Manager for Knight Frank, says they “use it to benchmark their own performance against that of the property category as a whole and against key competitors, like Savills”. You can’t benchmark conversion rates but you can compare traffic figures and view where your competitors are generating traffic. Bespoke reports start at $695. Access to the software will set you back over $25,000 a year.