Web Site Performance and Conversion: Get Out the Measuring Stick

Our Guest Post today comes from Jennifer Kennedy, Technology and Operations Specialist at Property Counselors Management Group in Fort Myers, Fl. Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and getting the conversation going. This is Jennifer’s second Guest Blog with us, her first post, Does Increased Web Traffic Draw Increased Sales had lots of comments!

Get Out the Measuring Stick

A few years back industry leaders were conveying the importance for properties to have a website and online presence.  This is when our team at PCMG decided to move forward with each property having its own website for current and future residents.   After the initial launch, we saw a significant increase in traffic.

However, it is far too easy to create the websites and then just set them on the shelf.   Are the photos currently on your site from the fun and exciting resident function you had last week or last year?   We have come to realize that it is critical to keep updating content and evaluating website performance.   We just completed revamping our entire company website, which is quite an undertaking that requires resources constantly allocated to website content and improvement.

Now that the websites are launched and the content updated, it is time to get out the measuring stick.  The primary purpose for a property website is to generate traffic and secure leases.  In order to properly evaluate these goals, standard metrics need to be in place.  We currently measure our website conversions for unique visitors that lead to an online guest card or a phone call to the property.    As a portfolio, websites are converting 5% of new visitors to an online guest cards and 4% converting to a phone call resulting in a 9% total conversion.

The most important part of measuring is that our efforts are producing new leases.   Portfolio results consistently show that any property that converts 10% of its new visitors has seen a boost in occupancy with most averaging a 3% increase.

There is nothing I would like to see more from our industry than coming to a consensus on how to measure website performance with benchmarks that we can gauge our results against. What measuring stick are you using to evaluate your property website performance?

Digital Marketing; Want More Business-Start Blogging

So, How much data do you need to start blogging?

I am a big fan of what the folks over at Hub Spot are doing, and they continue to provide actual results as to what is working for their clients. According to a study of 2,300 HubSpot customers revealed that businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those who don’t.

According to the folks at Hub Spot,

We compared leads last month with leads two months ago for 6 consecutive months, and the result shows that blogging businesses, whether or not they use the HubSpot platform, experience a 165% lead growth, a much larger increase than that of non-blogging businesses, which experience a 73% lead growth.

So, How long are going to wait to start a blog for your business? No time for that, let us here at Digital Sherpa help, we do blogging you, in a big way, and we can help you move the Google Needle! This stuff works, and IS how we grew our own small business, It will work for you too.

Commercial Real Estate Professional Leverages Social Media Tools

Posted by: Adam Japko, ajapko@nci.com

It has been a busy season for us at DigitalSherpa releasing industry focused social media service programs helping both local and national businesses harness the social web as part of their marketing programs.  As we were preparing for last week’s release of CRE (Commercial Real Estate) Sherpa, we discovered John Reeder, a local commercial real estate professional associated with Sperry Van Ness in Southern California. 

John has a really fine commercial real estate blog.  You can check it out here.  It is an impressive centerpiece for his overall social media campaign on several fronts:

1) There are not that many commercial real estate blogs to begin with.  This is one of the reasons that we introduced CRE Sherpa to help the industry leverage the available tools that can drive their personal and business brands like John is.  John is breaking new ground and is an early adopter in the CRE space.

2)John has integrated other social identities, like Twitter, and has also leveraged some good tools on his blog such as Disqus Comments.  

3)His posts are regular and frequent, a key to a good social platform and engaged following.  In addition, he is providing a “News Dump” that he powers that includes CRE content from around the web.

Most interesting of all to me, as a hungry learner on how and why businesses begin leveraging powerful returns from social media participation, was John’s starting point thinking found on his “Who Am I” page:

Why am I blogging?  Good question.  I don’t know for sure, but here is what I suspect:

30% because I am a shameless self promoter, but corporate websites are a poor venue for random thoughts about the market.  I see the power that having an online professional persona has had for my blogger heroes (Barry Ritholtz, Fred Wilson and Brad Feld) and it seems like leveraging an online presence is a no brainer for a CRE professional.

40% because I always end up creating a bunch of charts and graphs, and I figured I may as well post them on the internet so that 6 visitors a month can look at them.

15% because I wish there was a really good commercial real estate blog.  I’m skeptical as to whether this site will be the really good blog I am hoping for, but it never hurts to try.  Investment real estate gets very little good coverage in the mainstream press (as in journalists do not understand investment real estate, not that it gets bad press), so the internet seems like a natural place to be able to read thoughtful commentary on the market.  But I guess I don’t really see it online either.

25% because I believe that we are nearing the next sea change that will affect the way that we conduct business.  Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook are only starting to influence the way we conduct business.  I see this trend accelerating as the tools become more useful.  So I want to have my boat in the water when this sea change happens.

This is a common and prevalent perspective that new businesses or personal bloggers embrace when they begin deploying social media tools.  They have something to say, figure there is an opportunity to be heard, and there is little to lose besides some time trying it.  As you can see, John figured only about 6 visitors a month would show up and see his charts; and I am sure he was only half kidding when he wrote this as he was probably preparing to launch his blog.

It is not clear to me how long John has been at it.  I can’t find an archive on the blog.  But, his results have been impressive.  First, traffic to the Real Property Alpha blog is substantial.  According to Compete reporting, the site has been averaging 2500 t 4500 unique visitors for several months.

In addition, John has been active on Twitter and has about 480 followers and is on more than 20 lists of real estate related twitters.

The traffic results and engagement that John is driving around his content marketing effort is impressive, but not out of the ordinary for local businesses that approach the social web systematically.  The amount of web benefits that most social media participants see far outstrips the returns they previously experienced with more traditional tactics for driving traffic to their web sites.

I have not met John Reeder in person yet, but I have an impression of him as a smart CRE professional and somebody that I would turn to if I was looking for advice in Southern Cal CRE.  That’s the power that John has unleashed.  And it is doubly impressive that he has accomplished this in a marketplace that is under leveraging the power of the social web to date.

Does increased web traffic result to increased sales?

Our Guest Post today comes from Jennifer Kennedy, Technology and Operations Specialist at Property Counselors Management Group in Fort Myers, Fl. Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and getting the conversation going surrounding web traffic and apartment communities!

Here is Jennifer’s post;

Measuring Web  Traffic

This topic came up on the January 5^th blog talk radio Apartment Marketing Gone Digital. I was inspired by the comment made in relation to traditional property tours.  As an industry we have a standard expectation that if a certain number of prospects walk through the door we expect our teams to close and lease a certain amount of apartments, thereby know how much traffic we need to generate to reach our occupancy goals.  However, how do we measure our website traffic? How much traffic do I need to generate to my property website to secure a lease?

Apartment operators and owners need to answer these questions for their business, and the way to measure website leads will vary from company to company depending on the marketing of their websites and the way the sites themselves are organized.  For PCMG the property websites are both for prospects and residents.   Based on the dual roles for our sites, when it comes to generating leads we look solely to new visits to our site that resulted in an online guest card.  We found that as a company 5% of new visitors completed a guest card.  We had one site as low as 1% and one as high as 10%, but the majority hovered around 5%.   Five percent sounds low until you put it in the perspective that our average number of new visitors to our website is 237.

This information generated a new set of questions.  How can I make 10% the standard?  What did my site that hit 10% do differently?  Was the traffic generated from different sources than my other properties?   Answer these questions and you now know what sources deserve the most resources allocated to them.  There are so many mediums that can be utilized to push traffic to your site it is paramount to determine where your time and money should be spent.

I urge you to start measuring today!  Complete an analysis that is appropriate for the purpose of your site.   As an industry we have to start measuring the effectiveness of our sites in order to progress and continue to take online leasing to the next level.  If we don’t have a measure for our online efforts, we will never know the extent of their success.

The ROI of Social Media Marketing

DigitalSherpa is a service of Network Communications, Inc. and the company’s Chairman & CEO, Dan McCarthy, has been an early adopter of social media as an internet marketing strategy. In his blog, ViralHousingFix, Dan has shared many of his observations about the application of social media to marketing and has articulated some foundation principles.  To better understand DigitalSherpa’s approach to social media marketing and to gain additional perspective, you may want to read Dan’s following posts:

ROI of social media marketing: 3 case studies

Winning at search (small and medium sized businesses)

Explosive growth of social media: A visual experience

Demographics of online social behavior

Video: Fact-based, compelling — social media growth