Five ways to measure your marketing campaign’s success

How to track the performance of your online marketing activities

Whether you are advertising a new property listing or raising awareness of your business brand, every real estate online marketing campaign has different goals and desired outcomes.

Is your online property marketing campaign delivering the best possible results? How you measure success will depend on whether the campaign is via your website, a third-party site or social media, but is it possible to test the outcome of most digital marketing activity.

Online property marketing – indicators of success

Increase in traffic

In basic terms, one of the main goals of an online property marketing campaign is to drive more traffic to a website, and by using an analytics package such as Google Analytics you can track the number of unique visitors who come to your site over a given period. Spikes in numbers can often accurately be attributed to certain campaigns or blog posts, proving that you’ve achieved something with your work and also indicating what techniques work best for your target audience. If your campaign is via social media, using a bit.ly will also provide rich data on who clicked on your link and from where.

Time spent on your site

Traffic figures alone don’t always mean much. If visitors just come to read one property-related blog post and leave, never to return, your business is no better off than before. Ideally, you want them to spend lots of time on your site, which indicates that they are engaging with the content, and visiting lots of different pages including the real estate listings, which demonstrates that they think you have something worth sharing and that they are interested in potentially doing business with you.

Bounce rate

On the other hand, you’re likely to have some visitors who find your site through search engines or referral links and who won’t like what they see. These people will quickly hit the back button on their browser, and this will increase your bounce rates. If you can reduce this figure it shows that you’re providing valuable content, targeting your online property marketing efforts in the right areas and engaging with the right audiences.

Subscriptions and sign-ups

So you have people visiting your real estate site and spending a bit of time there, but do you know who they are, and are they committing to you? By recording information such as the number of newsletter or RSS sign-ups, downloads of property details and online brochures, or followers on social media you can show that people really appreciate your content and want more from you. These are the people that you can target through additional marketing, and with the right content you can help to guide them down the sales funnel.

Cost per lead

The success of all businesses depends on their figures, and if you’re spending thousands of dollars and only getting a few potential clients to visit your site then you’re doing something wrong. By keeping a record of how each online property marketing campaign has performed you can start to benchmark your projects. As you become more experienced in marketing you should be able to increase the number of leads you get from each campaign while cost-effectively managing your activities.

If you’re having difficulty measuring the success of your online marketing campaign, contact Campaigntrack for help improving the return on investment.

About Melanie Hoole
I'm a marketing and product management expert specialising in real estate marketing and software development.

This post originally appeared on the Campaigntrack blog and was authored by Oliver Gaywood.