Property Management Website Metrics: Behavior

The last blog in this series covered the A in the ABCs of marketing metrics. To recap, "A" metrics are acquisition metrics, the data behind how you are attracting users to your property management website.

After you figure out what is drawing traffic, the next step is to figure out how users are interacting with your website. This ensures that it is working for you to create conversions. You might have the greatest lead magnet of all time—but it doesn't matter if users can't find it. For this reason, we measure behavior metrics.

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Bounces and Exits

What is a "bounce?"

• A bounce is when a user lands on a page and leaves without moving on to any more pages on your property management website.
• The bounce rate is the percentage of visits to a page that ends up bouncing or leaving without clicking through into your site.

An exit is when someone visits multiple pages from a site and then leaves; an exit rate is the percentage of traffic that left the site from that particular page. Bounce rates and exit rates tell us a lot about your site!

Reasons a User Bounces

• Misleading content in the meta description (they didn't find what they were told was on the page).
• Slow load times: The higher the page load time, the higher the bounce rate.
• The user can't find a way to the information they are looking for, such as navigation to a pricing page.
• The page was difficult to use.

The common theme in these reasons for bouncing is that a user isn't finding something useful, be it content or experience. Pages with a higher bounce rate than your average should be examined for these issues.

Why Care About Exits?

Exits let you know the end result of a multi-page visit.

• What is your goal for a user while they are on your site?
• Are they taking that action before exiting?
• Is something driving them off of that page, or are they completing their journey?

The three most visited pages on a property management website are the home page, pricing page, and listings page. If you have a lot of exits on your pricing page with less than ideal conversion, it might make sense to put a last-chance offer on your pricing page to capture the lead before they exit.

Pages Per Session and Session Duration

Pages per session and session duration are straight-forward averages that let us know how many pages a user visits on average and how long they spend going through those pages.

• High pages and low duration means the user is looking for something quickly and can't find it.
• Lower pages and higher duration probably means that users are spending time reading and taking in your content.
• These numbers can be useful if you are trying to lower your bounce rate and increase the user value of your website.

Pages per session should increase as the bounce rate declines: work on growing the time spent on your site by creating useful user paths through your website to direct traffic flow.

As with all averages, it's useful to look for extremes that might be skewing your results. For this reason, we recommend that averages should always be examined because they are easily flawed.

Clicks and Scrolling

Geekly Media uses heatmapping technology to gather a visual representation of where users are clicking on a property management website as well as scroll behavior.

Scroll behavior lets us know how far down a page a user will scroll. If your goal is lead capture, but you put your form on the bottom of a page a user isn't likely to scroll on, you're going to see poor returns.

Heatmapping can also let us see the user path from a visit, so we can see the order of pages the user is clicking through, where they stop and take in content, as well as what they ignore and hurry past. This helps us to optimize the information we offer and place lead capture opportunities where they'll be maximized.

Looking at the Data

There are a lot of ways to sort behavior metrics in HubSpot, so you can use this to your advantage to look for trends. 

Aggregate Data

There are two views I usually share with my clients when reporting: whole-site data and segmented-page-type data.

Whole-site data is great for determining whether or not your marketing efforts are working in general. Most people look at their data this way or on a page-by-page basis, which is very helpful for high-value pages such as your pricing page.

Segmented data is great for looking at trends per content type. As a whole, how are blog posts performing in comparison to:

• The rest of your site?
• Landing pages?
• Main site pages excluding landing pages and blogs?

More importantly, why does this matter?

If you're launching a new marketing effort that relies on blogging to acquire traffic—and then a landing page to convert it—you'll want to see your blog and landing page traffic grow. If you're working on getting your home page to the top of the SERPs, you'll want to see the overall effectiveness of your primary pages excluding blogs and landing pages. 

Single-Page Data

Single-page numbers are also great, especially for digging in to see what users are looking for on your site. I like to look at individual blog post numbers, generally sorting through the top performers for a time period.

If in the last 60 days, your users are visiting and spending time on rent collection topic blog posts, this is a good hint to create more content about collecting rent to help your users find what they are looking for on your site. 

Single-page metrics can also help you slowly improve your site by looking for the trouble-makers. You don't necessarily need to scratch a whole site and start over to reach your goals if your site is seriously underperforming! Start by enhancing the problem pages or removing them to increase overall site numbers and value to your users. Sometimes, removing underperforming content is better than updating it.

Stay tuned for the third blog in our four-blog series that will cover conversion! We'll follow up with SEO after that for a complete guide to property management website metrics.

However, you don't have to wait for our next blog to get started on applying what you're learning now. Reach out to our team to learn more!