Using Google Analytics To Build a Multifamily Marketing Budget
Multifamily Marketing SEO Tips
Multifamily marketing is not a one-size-fits-all game. You must leverage the data when designing your marketing budget in order to create a more informed and efficient figure that will meet your upcoming objectives. In addition to taking a more data-driven approach on the front end, you’ll see a greater ROI on the back end if you consider traffic, cost per lead, click-throughs, etc. With the increasing amount of available data, especially up-to-date data, marketing decisions can be made with certainty.
Google Analytics is an interactive website performance tool that offers insightful data analytics. With Google Analytics, you will be able to decipher the strengthens and weaknesses of your website.
Using Google Analytics Data to Evaluate Performance
What exactly are you looking for? You should start by identifying what channels or content are underperforming for your community. This will allow you to identify areas that are lacking in conversions, and to identify potential investment opportunities. An investment opportunity such as outsourcing social media management to a social media expert, like us at Show My Property.
For a data-driven marketing strategy to be truly effective, it must, above all else, be put into action! A marketing strategy that yields actionable results requires planning. As soon as you begin to leverage the numbers, you’ll see results right away.
If your community’s website has been successfully connected to Google Analytics you will be able to follow the next tips.
Website Visits
The year is over and you are looking forward to executing better occupancy levels for next year. From all the marketing efforts put in last year take a look at the entire year and how many website visitors you had. There are three types of audience groups you want to look at how many monthly visitors there were, how many were new users, and how many are returning users.
Monthly Users
There is no exact number to benchmark against other competing communities, but you can see the trend month by month. What was the lowest month? What was your peak? Click this link to view a demo of Google Analytics with a monthly user acquisition overview report. For this website, November had the highest number of users and the lowest month was January of this year. From this analysis, you can see that there was a boost in users but there was a sudden drop in users. It is safe to assume that although there was a positive spike most users did not return.
Overall, you can see a general overview of the number of visitors from month to month and be able to identify trends. This can help you develop a marketing strategy with goals to beat last year’s performance.
User Acquisition Terms
Where did all these people come from? Know that you know what was the highest and lowest amount of website traffic for your website, check the places where they came from. Click this link to see a demo of a user acquisition report on Google Analytics. The following channels are the most important for communities
Direct traffic – Direct access to your website occurs when someone types in your website’s URL or bookmarks your site.
Organic Search – is traffic sent from search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) to your website. Organic means that a search engine includes your website in search results “organically” (or because it matches a user’s search)
Paid – In contrast to organic search, paid search is exactly what it sounds like – you pay search engines’ ad networks like Google AdWords or Bing Ads to send traffic to your site.
Referral – Any website that links to or refers traffic to your website is considered a referral.
Social – traffic generated through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn.
Email – visits through links in emails (for example, Gmail or Yahoo Mail).
How To Analyze User Acquisition Behaviors
What is the most worthy statistic? You want to sort your most popular channel forms the highest number of new users. This tells you that certain channels were successful in generating the most amount of new users to your website. For example, you sent money on email lists and email campaigns year and you can see it generated the most amount of new users. This is a positive correlation but there’s more than meets the eye!
Now, this is to check how effectively the overall users from this channel were engaged with your website. The engagement rate column tells you the percentage of engaged sessions (Engaged sessions divided by Sessions). Thus, the higher percentage of the channel confirms these channels have a positive engagement rate.
Analytical Standpoint
So what does it mean for having a low amount of new users and an engagement rate for social media? It is a safe bet you can invest in quality social media production to boost your referrals from social media. As a rule of thumb, organic channels should be the highest producing number of new users for a website but having a healthy social media referral with high engagement levels will boost your site’s overall lead conversions.
The Worst Scenario
Let’s say you have a negative percentage across the board for all channels in the user acquisition report. There are two things that could be impacting your site’s performance.
One is that your marketing efforts haven’t nailed the target audience you should be looking for. A marketing agency such as Show My Property will be able to pinpoint the exact target audience your community needs to connect with. Or two, your website’s performance is lacking in retaining quality user engagement. A revamp of your website such as website speed, layout, or graphics will help to keep users engaged. Read more about SEO topics to make positive changes to your website.
The Solution
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