This article was originally published on the Home Value Leads blog.
It can get overwhelming balancing listings, presentations, showings and marketing for your real estate business without getting bogged down in metrics. But metrics are one of the most important ways that you, as a real estate agent, can determine where your marketing dollars have been best spent - and what to avoid. Here are a few ways that you can easily measure your marketing efforts to make sure you are on the right track.
Website Metrics through Google Analytics
If you don't already have Google Analytics embedded into your website or have a way of tracking unique visitors, location of visitors and clicks to your site, then now's a good time to start. To make it even easier, in Google Analytics, you can actually have certain reports emailed to you. Simply go to your account, go to a report you'd like emailed to you and click "Email" below the report's title. You can then check off the most important data from each report you'd like to see. For Audience Overview, for example, these can include:
- Bounced sessions - how likely were people to click through to other pages on your site
- Organic traffic
- Paid traffic
- Referral traffic - great to see which other sites your visitors came from
You'll have to look at each of the different reporting elements on the right to figure out which ones will be the most meaningful for you. Acquisition, or how you obtained your web visitors, is another great report to have emailed to you or someone on your team.
Sales Metrics through Your CRM
We know, you just want people to list or purchase. But your CRM can give you some valuable insight into where to concentrate or improve your efforts. Even better if your CRM is tied to your email marketing. To break down your CRM data, take a look at where your best performance is in regards to landing listings, for example. How often did you reach out to your top ones? In what time frame? What kinds of outreach did you do? What did you send them? Once you have a good picture of how your actions turned leads into clients, you'll feel more confident to replicate the process for future leads. When it comes to your CRM, your data is only as good as what you put in it. So be sure that you consistently add any information and have, perhaps, a coding system in place to tag every correspondence as well as take good notes. Encourage your whole team to do the same. In a future post, we'll discuss the importance of systems and working procedures to help make this easier.
Email Marketing Metrics
If you have a separate email marketing system, you should be able to measure activity there, too. If you are not already hooked up to an email marketing software that has metrics built in, definitely find one that works for you. Without a sound metric system in place, you could be missing out on valuable information from the many emails you send each year. Some areas to look at regularly for your email marketing: open rates, click-through rates on links and the day of the week and time of day that you send them out. You will start to see patterns of what kinds of content and timing work well for your campaigns. Again, replicate these or, for areas of opportunity, test a few different ways to improve your campaigns. Improving campaigns may be as simple as changing the time of day, the day of the week you send out your email or how often you send them.
A Final Note
With every system of metrics, it's important to have a good period of time during which you are measuring actions. You probably won't learn much from one email campaign but six months' worth can tell you a lot. In addition, setting up a regular time monthly or quarterly to review your marketing metrics can help you see what's been working and keep you on the ball for the future.
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