Property Management Website Metrics: Acquisition

Having a website with thousands of visitors a month is everyone's dream, right? More traffic means more leads—but not always. Traffic isn't always qualified (which is just another term for being your target market).

• What are the kind of numbers that you can actually be confident in?
• What goals should you set for your campaigns?
• How do you know whether your marketing is working?

This blog series is going to cover the ABCs of:

• Property management website metrics you should be tracking.
• How often to look at the numbers (there is such a thing as too often).
• What actions you should be taking to stay competitive based on the numbers. 

The ABCs of Property Management Website Metrics

What are the ABCs of metrics? Acquisition, Behavior, Conversion, and SEO! This acronym makes it a bit easier to remember the groupings of the most important metrics for you to track when it comes to the results you're seeing—or not seeing—from your property management website.

• Acquisition: This metric measures traffic and the sources of traffic to your site. 
• Behavior: This metric lets you know whether your website is engaging, and in general, what does and does not work on your site.
• Conversion: This metric tracks whether or not your website is 'doing' anything. All the traffic in the world doesn't matter if you aren't getting qualified property management leads!
• SEO: This facet of your metrics shows you how easy it is for users to find your property management website—even when they don't know you exist.

In this blog, we are going to cover acquisition metrics. We'll focus primarily on Google, the number one search engine, as well as HubSpot metrics you can look at, coupled with other reporting opportunities. In our following blogs, we'll cover behavior, conversion, and SEO—because you need all four for a sound strategy.

Acquisition

You can't get property management leads without traffic, and you have to acquire that traffic to get the most value out of your property management website. One of the things we look at for our clients is where the numbers are suffering. If behavior and conversion numbers are great, then an easy marketing strategy is to increase acquisition. Increasing traffic is usually a safe place to start when it comes to marketing—but remember, you want that traffic to be qualified. 

Sessions

Sessions, as measured by Google, are visits to a website during a time frame, either expiring after 30 minutes or midnight—whichever is sooner. If you have campaigns set up in Google Analytics, a user who leaves and then reengages with a different campaign will count as a new session.

HubSpot has a different set of criteria: HubSpot counts sessions based on time as Google does (new after 30 minutes of inactivity) as well as the source a user visits your site from. This means if a user visits your site from Google and leaves and then visits again from a link on your Facebook page five minutes later, that counts as two sessions.

What You Should Look For

• Look for increasing sessions: if you are capturing new traffic—as well as giving current clients a reason to return—your sessions should grow.
• In property management, expect to see growth in sessions during the spring and summer months when tenants are looking to move—owners will be looking for management services during this time as well.
• A drop in sessions around the holidays is normal and to be expected.

Pageviews

Pageviews show you what pages either have super engaging content or terribly loading issues that force a lot of refreshes. Testing your site from multiple devices and locations can give you an insight into whether your content is killing it or your web design is killing your numbers. Pageviews should be higher than sessions if your property management website is engaging, and keep users clicking through multiple pages. Each time a user lands on a page, it counts as a pageview. This metric should never replace sessions.

What You Should Look For

• You should expect to see high pageviews on your homepage, pricing page, and listings pages.
• After that, look at page views through groups of content.
• High page views on your blog pages mean your blogging strategy is working.
• High page views in landing pages should correlate with increased conversions; otherwise, you need to reevaluate your landing page content.

Users

The users metric tracks distinct individuals who visit your property management website, either new or returning. The sum of these visits will equal your sessions. Google tracks this metric while HubSpot does not, as user tracking is based on cookies, which users can easily clear.

Grouped with this metric is % New Sessions. % New Sessions describes what percentage of sessions are coming from new users versus users who have been to your website before. It is important to have a good amount of new sessions; otherwise, your existing clients are probably creating your traffic instead of new users. At the same time, you don't want to see too many new sessions compared to returning: if you don't have enough returning traffic, your users are probably not finding what they're looking for and are lost forever.

What You Should Look For

• Steady growth in users: you'll want your owners and tenants to take advantage of your resources.
• This leads to recurring traffic while growing your userbase to bring in new traffic—and new potential clients.

Entrances

Entrances sound like what they are: a user enters your website from somewhere. However, an entrance is only counted once per session by Google. This means that a person can visit a bunch of times per session, but only count as one entrance. Why is this important? You want to know where your users are entering your site from. If you posted a link to Facebook or a blog post was ranking on Google, entrances give you an idea of how people find your property management website.

HubSpot ranks this similarly as Google, where an entrance shows the first page in a session.

What You Should Look For

• Entrances give us a good idea of what content draws users in.
• If you only have a handful of pages drawing entrances, your SEO probably isn't that great.
• Get as many pages ranking for as many relevant keywords as possible, and grow the pages users are entering your site from.
• If you see a lot of entrances on blogs based around maintenance, you can assume that maintenance is a topic troubling your local owners.

Channels

Channels are sources but lumped together to form a group. For example, organic search encompasses more than Google; it also includes Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. Social counts as traffic from social media sites, not just Facebook. In general, these channels will drive traffic to your website:

• Organic: A user found your site from a search engine.
• Direct traffic: A user typed in your URL, such as www.rentbridgegroup.com.
• Referral traffic: Referral traffic is traffic that is linked to your site from something other than a social media page.
• Social traffic: Aptly named, this traffic comes from a social media site.

What You Should Look For

What do your marketing strategy and SWOT analysis call for? If you need more organic traffic or tenant leads through social, you'll want to see growth in those areas. Many times the metrics you need to be watching are signaled in your strategic plan.

Acquisition Concluded

How a user gets to your site is valuable information. If most of your traffic comes from social media, for example, then paid ads through social channels would be a sound strategy. If most of your traffic comes from organic search, you should be prioritizing Google Ads. 

Most of these metrics are logic-based: generally, growth is good, and backsliding is bad. However, be sure to not only look at the change in numbers but the context surrounding it. I am often asked to teach these metrics to my team, and I struggle because there is an intuitive element to this. Data is fantastic, and anyone who has sat in on a monthly report overview meeting with me knows how excited I am to explain these metrics to our marketing clients. 

What you generally don't see in a marketing report is the digging and research behind the explanation; the amount of time spent looking at numerous pages of metrics to see how all of these numbers play together in an intricately interconnected web. Yes, you can change one thing to see if it increases conversions on a page—but how does it affect traffic as a whole through the organism of your property management website? That is what we seek to teach in this blog series.

If you want to get started making meaningful changes to these metrics, the best place to begin is by downloading The Property Manager's Guide to SEO in 2020. We explain all of the elements of SEO that a new user should know and give you a 30-day plan for SEO success for your property management website!