Good Morning Apartment Friends!
I wanted to get back to a conversation that began to develop around web site conversion ratios for marketing apartments, Does Increased Web Traffic Result in Increased Rentals, and how that relates to Renting More Apartments. One thing that is pretty clear, there doesn't seem to be an agreed upon set of metrics, but I sense the issue is broader than that.
I spend a fair amount of time with Internet marketing folks, unrelated to the apartment business, that specialize in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) That group has a completely different paradigm of what a web site is used for and how they should operate.
It seems that most folks conducting apartment marketing don't really put much emphasis on web site traffic, and more specific, the direct correlation between increased web site traffic and physical traffic / guest cards. Is it just an electronic brochure?
Your Web Site IS Your Electronic Leasing Center
A lot of apartment marketing folks and property management folks put a lot of effort into their presentation. Be it corporate ensembles, brochures, groomed tour routes, and even cookies out on the counter.
But what if your leasing center was actually the 2nd or 3rd interaction with your prospect, not the 1st? Because it likely is, irrespective of if you believe it. Prospects shopping and buying habits have and continue to change. And IF you would focus more on your digital presentations, and expanding your digital footprint, you would also see a direct correlation to increased web traffic and increased physical traffic / guest cards.
How to Measure Web Site Conversion for Apartment Marketing
While this will likely be a series in of itself, we are going to start posting some basic, rudimentary web stats, and attempt to create some benchmarks metrics and ratios. Here is our starting list. We welcome constructive feedback on how you are measuring web site conversion for your apartment marketing campaign.
- Total Web Traffic per month
- Total Guest Cards per month
- Delineate and separate Walk In Traffic and Phone Traffic from Total Guest Cards, which should roughly equal web traffic verses physical traffic metric and conversion factors.
While we recognize this is a broad brush approach, it will start to establish some basic benchmarks for measuring and increasing web site conversion.
We welcome your comments, and how you may be measuring web traffic,
