Do you know your numbers?
Some home builder marketers may shy away from measuring data and analytics but they’re essential to understanding how your marketing strategy is performing and for decision-making. However, data can be your best friend – if you know what to look at. Here are some key marketing metrics you should be regularly reviewing.
Website metrics
The typical home search begins online. Regularly reviewing your website metrics can reveal trends and potential issues for further investigation. Here are the most common website metrics you should be tracking:
Website traffic: You’re probably already familiar with total website traffic. Knowing your total website traffic makes it easier to spot when traffic is falling below seasonal trends. In addition to your total website traffic, you should also know your best-performing website sources to understand which sources are performing well and should focus more on.
- Organic Search: traffic that came through a search engine, e.g. Google, Yahoo, or Bing
- Direct: traffic from users who directly typed your website URL in
- Referral: traffic that came from another website
- Social: traffic that came from a link on social media
- Paid Traffic: any traffic that came from a paid advertising campaign, like search ads or display ads.
- Listing Networks: traffic that came from a listing network, e.g. Zillow or New Home Source
Average session duration: this is the average amount of time a user spends on your website before exiting or after 30 minutes of inactivity. This is a good gauge of how engaging your website is – the longer the average session duration, the more engaged visitors are. Shorter average session durations may be a sign that your website is confusing or difficult to navigate.
Bounce rate: bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit after viewing only one page. You want to avoid a high bounce rate on non-marketing landing page content as it indicates that visitors are not viewing key informational pages on your website. This is especially true for paid sources as a high bounce rate for that traffic could indicate that your ads are not getting in front of the right audience or that the content of your ads and the associated landing page don’t match or aren’t compelling to site visitors.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate shows the ratio of website visitors that turn into leads or sales. The conversion rate provides context to your website traffic – if you have a lot of traffic but little to no leads, you’re missing opportunities. Additionally, you should also know how many of those leads turn into buyers.
Leads
It sounds obvious but it’s important to know how many leads you’re generating. You should know how many leads you need in order to reach a certain level of sales (this is where your lead-to-sale conversion rate comes in handy).
It’s also essential to know where your leads are coming from, especially if you’re investing in paid advertising campaigns. Analyzing your leads per source can reveal which traffic sources are worth investing more in and which ones may need more help improving.
Building on leads per source, knowing how much each lead costs will give you the information needed to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular source.
Marketing is a game of numbers and knowing how your home builder website is performing will guide your digital marketing strategy.
Need help improving your digital marketing strategies? We can work with you to create an effective digital marketing strategy so you can drive the highest quality traffic and bring in the highest quality leads. With over 25 years of experience working exclusively with home builders, we know what works. Give us a call and see what we can do for you.