It is a known fact that in order to attract residents to your property, marketing is key. Whether you’ve decided to invest your advertising dollars in an internet listing service, social media platform, print publication, online search engine, or a combination of each, you ultimately want to know which mediums are truly proving most effective with your allotted budget.

No matter where you market your property, you need data to support where and how you invest your hard earned advertising dollars. Take a look at these common online marketing metrics that can be used to more effectively optimize your advertising spend:

Cost per lead/lease

Cost per lead or lease is a common metric used by many apartment communities today. It is derived by calculating the costs you used to generate one lead/lease divided by the total leads/leases that you acquired over a given period. For instance, if you spent $500.00 in one month on a pay-per-click online campaign and you signed 20 leases or received 20 leads in this period, then your cost per lease would be $25.00.

When using the cost per lead/lease metric, you will ultimately want to have this number fairly low, as your primary goal should be to secure a high return on investment while using as minimal resources as possible. Your department will have to determine, however, what this goal figure should be.

Bounce rate

Your bounce rate will tell you how many visitors come to a particular page on your website and leave without visiting and other pages. This metric is useful in that it helps you identify, to an extent, how engaging your website is and if it meets their needs. For instance, if you notice that a majority of your visitors are landing on the page that lists your rent prices and then exiting, you may want to consider performing another rent analysis among your competitors.

While you always want your bounce rate to be a low number, this percentage provides the most insight when combined with other complementary metrics such as time on page, time on site, etc.

Conversion rate

Maybe you’re already receiving quite a bit of traffic online.  Visitors are coming to your website, viewing your webpages, but are they giving you a call, sending an email or stopping by in person? Your conversion rate will tell you how much of your traffic is actually taking action—and not just any action, but the actions you define. Popular conversions to measure include phone calls, emails, applications, scheduled tours, etc. All monitored and tracked by Google, you can see how and if your visitors are converting so that you can ultimately tailor your messaging to be effective across your targeted audiences.

Referral source

The referral source metric is included in Google Analytics and details where all of your visitors derived. Say you have numerous online campaigns running at the same time on various mediums. Through the referral source function, you’ll receive insight on which campaign is performing most effectively. This metric is important in that it quantifies all of your visitor traffic in one place and helps you identify which medium your visitors are using prior to visiting your site. Whether it is a search engine, Facebook page or alternate website, you will be able to easily identify where you may need to concentrate your advertising spend most.

Rentbot can help.

Knowing where to invest your dollars to receive the most bang for your buck is a puzzle that many in the apartment industry struggle to solve. However, the first step is ensuring that your website is effective. At Rentbot, each and every site that we design is unique to your property’s needs. By offering features such as high-definition photos, online contact forms and real time rental availability, your site will attract the attention you’re looking for, while making your property looks it best. And with each Rentbot site already equipped with SEO and a responsive design, you’ll be on your way to securing more leads in no time. Do your property and tenants a favor, try a Rentbot site today!

About the Author

Jonsette Calloway joined the Rentbot team in 2015. With a background in public relations, advertising and copywriting, she has helped a multitude of clients achieve their marketing and communications goals within various fields, but she particularly enjoys working with the apartment industry.