Managing your real estate website typically involves two major aspects: increasing traffic to your website and converting that traffic into leads. The first area of increasing traffic might include topics such as search engine optimization, participating in online communities, social media and more. The area of real estate lead conversion is what we will discuss in this article, and the topics include optimizing your website for lead conversion, IDX integration for lead conversion and, finally, how to effectively track real estate lead conversion using Google Analytics. We’ll even include tips on how to track conversion across multiple subdomains which can be a common challenge for IDX integrated websites (see the end of this article).
Optimizing Your Website For Lead Conversion
Most websites use a variety of lead conversion techniques. These might include email subscription opt-in forms, IDX lead conversion and even simple contact forms strategically placed throughout your site. We encourage using all of the above.
Email marketing systems can make managing an email list simple and effective. Providers like Mailchimp allow free accounts (up to a certain threshold) and make it super simple to setup an autoresponder which drips regular content to your email list effectively automating the process of staying in front of potential clients via email.
How do you increase email signups? The best way to get email subscribers is to produce top notch, high quality content that leaves a user wanting more. Adding a simple call-to-action at the bottom of a blog post or report allows users to sign up after reading a great article on your website.
To give your email list signup rate a boost, you might consider a tool like OptinMonster which uses popup technology to ask the user to signup for a list. OptinMonster even uses exit intent technology to only display the popup when the user is about to leave your page. This can be an effective way to grab the attention of a departing user while minimizing the impact to the overall user experience of your website. Note: 29doors offers the premium version OptinMonster free of charge to all hosting clients (a $300 value).
For advanced users, discussing optimization will eventually lead to the topic of A/B Testing. A/B testing means testing two variations of the lead conversion process to obtain hard data in determining the more effective option. You might A/B test the call to action verbiage on your page, the location of a contact form, the graphic used on your site, etc. You can literally A/B test thousands of elements on your website. Note, OptinMonster mentioned above has A/B testing built in for comparing two versions of a pop-up form. For sophisticated A/B testing in general on your website, you might consider a tool such as Optimizely.
Using IDX For Lead Conversion
IDX integration serves two primary purposes for real estate websites. First, it offers a quality feature for users interested in searching and browsing live real estate listings. Second, it is a very effective lead conversion tool.
The effective way to increase lead conversion via your IDX integration is by making it very easy for a web visitor to find himself browsing listings. Initiating an MLS search should be an easy and intuitive jump from any page on the site. Using pages of content such as community pages can be a great method of pushing users into relevant listings (and ultimately into lead registration). Moreover, when you write a blog post on an event or a news item taking place in a specific part of your city, consider adding a link to browse homes for that area, thus pushing a reader of a blog article into the IDX section of the website.
Most IDX providers such as IDX Broker (a commonly recommended provider by 29doors) allow the website owner to tweak the lead registration rules of the website. What this means is that you can modify the settings to either request or require a user to register and provide his contact information at a certain point of using your website – specifically, using the IDX portion of your website. For example, you might require a user to register after viewing five properties in a given MLS search. The thought process behind such a setup is that you want to “whet the appetite” of the user with a few properties, then encourage or force him or her to register before proceeding further.
How To Track Real Estate Lead Conversion On Your Website
Tracking your lead conversion stats is extremely important. If you’re failing to track conversion stats, you will have no idea what is effective and what isn’t effective at generating leads on your website. By knowing if something is effective or not, you can then make informed decisions on tweaks and changes to your website.
The following tips and strategies assume you are using Google Analytics for tracking statistics and analytics on your website.
Setting Up Goals
In Google Analytics, you can track conversions by setting up goals. Goals in Google Analytics have a few different types like events and duration, but the main one most will use is simply the destination goal. An example of a destination goal is if a user visits a specific URL or page on your site. For instance, you might setup a goal for when users visit your contact page.
Using a Thank You Page
The above example of setting up a destination goal on the contact page is in reality a poor strategy. After all, a percentage of the visitors that view the contact page won’t fill out your contact form, so using simply the contact page visit itself would not be an accurate method to track that goal or conversion. A better way to track it would be to set the goal on the URL of a thank you page that the user is forwarded to after filling out the contact form. A thank you page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a page that is displayed to the user that typically says something such as “Thank you for contacting us.”
Most quality contact form systems allow you to setup a thank you page and use it for goal tracking. Gravity Forms (the gold standard of WordPress forms) makes this super easy. Note: 29doors offers Gravity Forms free of charge to all hosting clients.
It is also worth noting that most IDX providers allow you to use a thank you page in conjunction with lead registration.
Using The Data
After you have setup goals and have let Google Analytics accumulate data on the behavior of your visitors, you can visit the Google Analytics dashboard and view some fascinating data. When opening up the goals section of your analytics, you might want to pay attention to the following:
Goal Overview Page in Google Analytics (Completion Locations are hidden)
On the Goal Overview page, you can see which goals are converting the most amount of users. If you have contact forms, IDX lead registration forms, and email subscription forms, the overview page will tell you the volume of conversions for each goal you have defined.
On the Goal Overview page, you can also change the view to look at the Source / Medium data. This will tell you where the visitors that are converting into leads are coming from. This might include Organic Search, referrals from various websites, social media and more. Remember, this is simply the source data for all conversions. We’ll get into drilling down into source data for a specific goal shortly.
The Goal Flow page will show you a nice visual graphic of different pieces of information. For example, you can view which pages a user is viewing before they hit the destination URL defined by your goal.
Drilling Down Into More Detailed Data
Google Analytics lets you drill down and learn more about the behavior surrounding each goal defined in your Analytics. Let’s say you have a goal of filling out a particular contact form on your website. What if you want to know how many users that come from organic search are completing that specific goal? Let’s go further than that… What if you want to know which keywords in Google are sending users that convert and fill out that contact form? Drilling down will allow you to answer these questions.
If I jump into the Acquisition > Channels page on my Google Analytics dashboard, we can start to drill down into this data.
The Acquisition > Channels dashboard
As you can see in the above screenshot, this page will show us the various channels sending visitors to our website. Moreover, the right hand columns on the table of data will show us the conversion rates for a specific goal for each channel. The dashboard is currently showing information on Goal 1: Contact Us which is one of the goals defined in my Google Analytics. Notice above the last three columns, there is a drop down menu which allows you to change the goal and view the conversion data for a different goal.
Let’s go deeper using the previous questions we asked. What if we want to see which organic search keywords are converting? By clicking on “Organic Search” in the table in the above screenshot, you can drill down into keywords. See below:
Keywords and Conversion Data (specific keywords are hidden)
Similarly you can view the conversion data in the last three columns, but instead of overall acquisition channels, now we’re looking at keywords. You might notice something strange about the keyword list. Over 90% of your keyword visits will likely be in the (not provided) bucket. This is due to a recent change for Google where they are blocking the source keyword for most of the web traffic. As such, this page might tell you some information, but it’s not super helpful. A slight way around this is to view the Landing Page data rather than the Keyword itself. If you notice on the above screen shot, just below the line graph at the top, you will see “Primary Dimension” with Keyword currently selected.
If we click on Landing Page, we’ll get the similar data above, but instead of a list of keywords it will be a list of landing pages on your site. This shows you which pages on your site are generating organic search traffic. Typically by looking at the page itself (and perhaps by doing some example searches in Google), you can determine the keyword or group of keywords driving traffic to these pages. This will also, of course, show you which landing pages are leading to conversions of organic search visitors.
Learning More On Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool that you can spend years learning. We just scratched the surface in this article on its capabilities. There are a myriad of resources and tutorials for using Google Analytics on the web. A simple search on Google will lead you to further reading if interested.
Tracking Goals & Conversions Across Multiple Subdomains
Before we wrap up, we’re going to provide a solution to a common problem facing real estate websites: tracking goal conversions across multiple subdomains. Why is this relevant specifically to real estate lead conversion? Simple. Because many IDX providers utilize separate subdomains for IDX integrated websites. IDX Broker is an example of a provider using the separate subdomain. We discuss this topic more here.
How It Works
You have a website at www.mywebsite.com. A user visits your website by finding a blog post on Google that leads them to your site. After clicking around on your site, the user ends up browsing some live real estate listings. If the site is setup using IDX Broker, the user will end up on a URL that looks something like idx.mywebsite.com/listing/.
Most of the time the user is not even aware of the change in the subdomain (from www to idx), and frankly, this is by design. The IDX portion of the site is designed to blend in to the entire website.
After browsing some listings, the user registers and converts to a lead. Mission accomplished.
The Problem
The problem with this setup comes in the analytics data. If you setup a goal to track these IDX conversions as we describe above, you will not be able to drill down into the data as we demonstrated above for the IDX goal conversions. The reason for this is because the user traveled to a separate subdomain.
There are actually a few different ways that this analytics setup can fail for IDX conversions across subdomains.
Is the Google Analytics tracking code present on the IDX pages? Depending on the setup, it’s possible that the webmaster failed to include the Google Analytics code on the IDX generated pages. If this is the case, Google Analytics might view the change in subdomain as an exit from your site. IDX Broker will typically use a wrapper generating by the main site, and thus, preventing this from happening, but it’s still something to check.
Google Analytics views the two subdomains as two separate websites. The Analytics tool may be tracking the page views across both subdomains, but it might be viewing them as separate websites. This will ultimately result in all of your conversions essentially showing up as a referral from your main site to the IDX subdomain site and thus eliminating the possibility to view any actual source data on IDX lead conversions.
The Solution
To make sure Analytics is tracking goals and conversions across the two subdomains correctly, we need to do two things.
First, we must add some Referral Exclusions to the web property in your Google Analytics profile. To do so, navigate to the Admin section in Google Analytics. Under the Property, open up the Tracking Info settings. There will be an option titled Referral Exclusion List. Assuming your website is www.mywebsite.com and your IDX subdomain is idx.mywebsite.com, add the following new rules to your referral exclusion list:
www.mywebsite.com
mywebsite.com
idx.mywebsite.com
Once you save those changes, now we will make a slight change to the actual tracking code that we’re embedding into the website. In the snippet of tracking code, find the line that looks like:
Change the line to look like this:
This code change will tell Google Analytics to use the same cookie across both subdomains. In non-technical language, it’s going to make Google Analytics view your dual subdomain website as one single website when it comes to tracking user behavior. You’re done!
Once you’ve made those changes, sit back and give it a few days. You should now be able to see all the data you need on the IDX conversions.