As a modern real estate agent with a modern real estate marketing strategy, having a website is a critical part of seeing success; but just having a website alone isn’t enough.
To see success, you need to make sure your marketing strategy is working to help your website get in front of the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons.
While there are a lot of different strategies to get that to happen, one of the most effective ones is to build a website acquisition strategy with a strong, properly distributed, marketing mix.
When it comes to evaluating your website marketing strategy, there are 2 main metrics that you should be looking at to measure your overall success: your acquisition metrics and your engagement metrics.
Your acquisition metrics is how you get traffic to your website (your marketing strategy), and your engagement metrics is what that traffic did once they were on your website (your conversion strategy).
Your marketing mix falls into your acquisition strategy; and it makes up all of the different, measurable channels and traffic sources that drive people to your website.
★ Google Analytics 4 makes reviewing these metrics pretty straightforward, even if you don’t know much about using the Google Analytics platform. To see it, just open Google Analytics, click “Reports”, and then click “Acquisition > Overview” and “Engagement > Overview”, to see the reports for each.
If you want to learn a bit more about Google Analytics 4, have a look at this post called: Measuring the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy in Google Analytics 4.
To see success, your acquisition strategy must have a good marketing mix attached to it, meaning, you should have the right amount of traffic coming from the right traffic sources.
Regardless of how many sessions or page views your website has, or how much overall traffic your website gets, having the right marketing mix in your traffic sources is key as it will result in more high-quality traffic that’s more likely to convert.
★ Want to learn more about building a real estate marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- How to Launch a Successful Real Estate Marketing Campaign
- Building a Real Estate Marketing Stickiness Strategy
- Understanding Your Lifecycle Marketing Strategy
- Improving Your Marketing Strategy Based on Behavior
While there are a few different types of acquisition traffic sources, here’s what you should be looking for (as well as how much of each traffic source you should aim for to build a good marketing mix).
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the highest and most valuable traffic source you can get, always. Why?
Because overall, it’s the most likely to trust you and the most likely to convert (provided you have a well-planned overall digital strategy in place with it). But it’s also the most difficult type of traffic to get, and depending on what market you’re in, it could take you years of effort to build out a solid SEO strategy that primarily brings in organic traffic (although it’s worth the time and effort).
This metric should be at 50-75% of your traffic sources.
★ Want to learn more about building an SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- How to Start Building a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
- Why Building Trust is a Key Part of a Successful SEO Strategy
- Download Our SEO Strategy Building Guide for Real Estate Agents
2. Referral Traffic:
Referral traffic is essentially a click on any link or button on any domain that’s not your own (and that’s not part of the other traffic sources).
Referral traffic is particularly valuable, as part of your link-building strategy, if it comes from high-ranking, authoritative websites as it’s one of the ranking factors that search engines use to determine the authoritativeness of your website.
This metric should be at 20-30% of your traffic sources.
★ Want to learn more about referral traffic and link building? Have a look at these posts:
- Why You Need an External Link Building Strategy
- How Being Authoritative Can Bring You More Quality Website Traffic
3. Direct Traffic:
Direct Traffic is traffic that arrived at your website directly, in most cases, by typing your URL into a browser and accessing it directly. One other thing to note here is that often Google Analytics 4 also puts traffic that arrived via your email marketing in this traffic source (but not always), so you should keep that in mind while reviewing the metrics for this traffic source.
This metric should be at 10-20% of your traffic sources.
4. Organic Social Traffic:
Organic social traffic is traffic that came to your website from a link on a social media platform. One thing to note here is that while Google Analytics 4 calls this organic social, all of your traffic that came from a social media platform will be in this traffic source, whether it’s organic or paid because Google Analytics 4 doesn’t know the difference between the 2 (it just knows it arrived from a social platform).
This metric should be at 6-10% of your total traffic sources.
★ Want to learn more about social media? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- How to Make Outsourcing Social Media Work For Agents
- Why You Should Have an Internal Social Media Destination Page
- Download Our Social Media Template Bundle for Real Estate Agents
5. Paid Traffic:
Paid traffic is just that, traffic that you paid to get to your website. While this can be many different types of advertising, in this case, it’s primarily Google Ads (or paid campaigns from another search engine provider). While it’s not absolutely necessary to run paid search campaigns to get good results online, it can certainly work well as part of a disturbed marketing mix.
This metric should be at 5-8% of your traffic sources.
★Want to learn more about paid search? Have a look at this post called: Using Paid Search to Get More Conversions and Transactions.
Why Your Traffic Acquisition Breakdown Could Look Different
One thing is for sure: getting 50-75% of your overall traffic to come from organic traffic sources is achieved by putting consistent effort into your overall digital strategy; you should consider your organic search to be the foundational traffic.
If your overall digital strategy is successful, you should see consistent organic traffic despite dips in the market and despite how many listings you have at any given time. The other acquisition channels (referral traffic, organic social traffic, and direct traffic) are often a result of specific marketing activities you are doing.
For example, if you don’t post on social media, you won’t get social traffic, which means these numbers can sometimes fluctuate. Let’s say that one month you boosted several social media posts, but this month you didn’t boost any. That means your month-over-month traffic from that source would see a dip, which isn’t a bad thing; it just means you spent less time and fewer resources trying to drive that specific type of traffic to your site.
Additionally, you should be able to measure the success of your specific marketing activities based on traffic acquisition. If you send a weekly newsletter that takes forever to produce, but you’re only seeing 5% of your overall traffic come from direct sources, it might be time to rethink how you spend your time and resources on that specific initiative.
Properly Distributed Traffic is Better Traffic
While there are many different strategies for getting conversions on your website, not all are based on quality over quantity. If your goal is to get high-quality, highly-engaged traffic that’s most likely to convert, having a good, properly distributed marketing mix is a key part of making that happen.
Want to improve your overall lead generation plan? Download our Lead Management Workbook. It’s a self-guided, interactive workbook where you answer questions about your current lead generation plan, outline what’s working and what isn’t working, and put together a plan to improve it. And, it’s free to download.
