A real estate agent, that I coach, and I were communicating via Blackberry Messenger. One of the benefits of coaching with me is my coaching clients have 24/7 access to me, not just scheduled call times. My coaching client, like many of my clients is working on a new real estate website. He asked me,
“Do you have an idea how many daily google visitors should equal some kind of appointment or registration?”
That is a interesting question.
And before I share with you the answer I gave him, I want to introduce you to Garron Sellikens. I have met Garron a couple times now and have been impressed with his thought process, implementation and study of the results that a real estate agent website gets on lead generation and lead conversion.
Garron recently did this video blog on lead generation and lead conversion as a preview for what he is doing as a presentation at BUZZRE in Orange County next week. In the video he is trying to help real estate agents pinpoint the exact time that an appointment is set and a prospect becomes a client.
He has this flow chart of the whole process that I took a screenshot of it and posted it here.
I left a comment on Garrons post that is basically in relation to the conversation with my coaching client,
So really in the online/website lead conversion process there are two times that lead conversion can happen.
I look at the first step as when they register or give their contact info…lead conversion from a visit to someone now in your database. And then the second lead conversion step – setting the appointment.
The interesting thing is agents have a hard time pinpointing this, because sometimes lead generation, lead conversion can happen in an instant. It will look like a collapsed process.
FIRST - You need them to register for your IDX search or fill out a contact form or something similar to that type of process so you have information that you can enter into your client relationship manager or database system.
SECOND – Now that you can engage and connect with them, the process can be a two way street and proceed to a face to face appoinment. I believe that lead conversion starts with conversation. It’s kind of hard to start a conversation if you don’t have anyone to talk to.
Bringing us back to the answer I gave my coaching client.
I told him I wouldn’t be concerned with how many visits equal an appointment. Just trying to figure out how many visits to your website equals an appointment doesn’t seem like a focused enough metric.
if you want to see a really smart guy talk about analytics, instead of reading my ideas, check out the video of Gahlord Dewald talking about Google Analytics.
The three metrics I shared with my client instead of us trying to guess how many visits equals an appointment:
I wanted us to start focusing on the time each visitor is spending on the website. I’m a big believer that people spend time before they spend money. And that money follows time. So knowing the amount of time a prospect is spending on your website gives you a good metric of what COULD be in your pipeline.
I say COULD be, because it is still about conversion and you might not be in conversation with them yet.
Another thing I told him to track was the number of REPEAT VISITS to his real estate website. Having 100 unique visits a day is great, but if you have 100 unique visits everyday and no one is coming back….ah…how are you ever going to get into conversation with them?
Bounce rate is the measurement of someone landing on your website and not not clicking around on your website or taking any action before clicking the back button or clicking off your site. Knowing what your bounce rate is a good metric to tell you if a visitor to your website is easily and quickly finding what they are looking for. Again, if you have 100 unique visits, but have a 87% Bounce Rate, it was really like only have 13 actual visits to your real estate website.
I’m a big believer that lead generation is actually easy, its the lead conversion that trips real estate agents up. People showing up to your website is the lead generation process.
But, what are you doing to convert these leads to appointments and make them clients?
Instead of trying to figure out how to get more visits or generate more leads, why not take a look at how to convert what you are already getting? This goes for your offline lead generation also.
