Measuring Marketing As A Home Builder - Which KPIs to Track

Effective marketing strategies are vital for home builders looking to achieve effective lead generation and brand exposure resulting in strong sales. After implementing tactics, it’s also important to understand the effectiveness of your marketing plan by consistently assessing monthly results.

To increase your website’s performance and draw in new homebuyers, you first need to understand how your marketing as a home builder is working for users right now. If there are issues preventing success, you can assess to see where improvements can be made. On the other hand, you can also evaluate where your company is seeing the most success and expand on those strategies.

It’s important to ensure that you’re measuring metrics both consistently and effectively by tracking the most relevant factors that will drive improvement and traffic to your website and communities. Determining the most important indicators to track comes down to your company’s overarching goals and how your website can help you achieve them.

In our digital world, homebuyers are relying on the internet from start to finish to find the right properties. You may already be tracking basic digital marketing metrics like traffic sources and conversion rates. But how can you go above and beyond to identify what potential homebuyers are looking for from your site? It all starts with tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs).

What Are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is any quantifiable measurement that reveals progress toward achieving specific objectives. Tracking your KPIs offers your business prime opportunities to gain insight into your marketing performance, evaluate methods for strategic improvement, develop targets as a basis for decision-making, and measuring ROI. KPIs are also a highly beneficial way to keep your team on track and place focus on the most important factors for achieving success. Not only do KPIs support your marketing strategy, but they also inform how your approach should adjust to improve results.

Things are ever changing in the real estate market, and having a deep understanding of your online customer activity is key for continued sales. In this article, we’ll cover both the basic KPIs you should already be tracking, as well as five outside-the-box KPIs to add to your reporting metrics to ensure your marketing messaging is resonating with homebuyers while working to grow your brand.

Here is a quick recap of the basic KPIs you should be tracking:

• Leads Generated: The number of leads generated through various marketing channels, including website inquiries, phone calls, email signups and form submissions. Tracking leads helps assess the overall effectiveness of your home builder marketing campaigns in generating interest and inquiries from potential home buyers.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that convert into sales or other desired actions, such as scheduling a tour or requesting more information. Monitoring conversion rates helps identify areas for improvement in the sales process and marketing strategies.
• Website Traffic: The volume and sources of traffic to the home builder website. Tracking website traffic provides insights into the effectiveness of different marketing channels, SEO efforts, paid advertising and content marketing initiatives in driving visitors to the site.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): The average cost incurred to generate a single lead. Calculating CPL helps assess the efficiency of marketing campaigns and allows for budget allocation optimization to maximize ROI.
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): The average cost incurred to acquire a new customer or make a sale. Tracking CPA helps evaluate the cost-effectiveness of marketing efforts in relation to revenue generated.
• Return on Investment (ROI): The ratio of the revenue generated from marketing efforts to the cost of those efforts. ROI measures the profitability of marketing campaigns and helps prioritize initiatives that deliver the highest returns.
• Engagement Metrics: Metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), email open rates, social media engagement (likes, comments and shares), and average engagement time on the website. Monitoring engagement metrics provides insights into the effectiveness of content and messaging in capturing and retaining your target market’s interest.
• Sales Funnel Metrics: Monitoring metrics at various stages of the sales funnel, such as lead-to-opportunity ratio, opportunity-to-sale ratio, and average sales cycle length. Understanding the conversion dynamics within the sales funnel helps identify bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization.
• Customer Satisfaction and Referrals: Track customer satisfaction scores, reviews, testimonials and referral rates. Satisfied customers are more likely to become brand advocates and refer others, contributing to organic growth and reducing customer acquisition costs.

In addition to these basic KPIs, here are five more ways to gain valuable insights into the performance of your marketing efforts:

1. Use UX Tracking and Screen Recording To Streamline Your Web Experience

The user experience (UX) is one of the most important parts of your website. No matter how interesting or complex your site is, it won’t convert if it doesn’t provide a smooth and positive experience for your users and visible Call to Action opportunities.

For example, when a user gets to your homepage (or landing page), it's important they know where to go next. Important links, such as those linking to virtual tours, need to be easy to access. But how can you always be sure what links and buttons to prioritize? By tracking your users' behavior.

Tools For Tracking

HotJar is a tool that generates heatmaps for your website, showing which parts of the site have received the most clicks. This can indicate if your visitors are clicking on CTA buttons, or if your interactive experience is flowing the way you want it to.

HotJar also offers screen recording tools, which show you exactly where your visitors are moving the mouse to give you a more detailed look at their activity on the site.

Another great tool – and one you may already have access to – are your exploration templates in Google Analytics 4. The funnel exploration reports allow you to track a predetermined path, or you can explore free-form path tracking. Replacing the Behavior Flow reports from the previous version of Analytics, these new reports provide more in-depth data with more customizable information.

Imagine your website as a store and you want to see how customers move through it. A funnel exploration report in GA4 is like a video camera tracking them. It shows you which aisles they visit, where they drop off, and how many reach the checkout. This helps you understand what makes them buy (or not) and improves your store layout for more sales.

Ever wonder how people find their dream home on your website? Path tracking in GA4 is like following their footsteps. It shows you which pages they visit, in what order, before reaching the “contact us” page or exploring specific house plans. This helps you see what grabs their interest and makes sure they don’t get lost on the way to finding their perfect home.

We know potential homebuyers are relying almost entirely on the internet to find the right home builder. So whatever the tools you use to track their movements, it’s important that your site is intuitive and provides a seamless user experience. The tools you choose should be capable of generating valuable insights that you can put to use within your digital marketing strategy.

With an increasingly digital world comes shorter attention spans. Most people, especially digital native Millennials, aren’t willing to spend much time on a website that doesn’t hook them right away. User experience screen and behavior tracking can help you identify exactly where you’re losing your audience. Then, you can rework your design accordingly to better engage your audience and ultimately achieve higher onsite times.

2. Monitor Your Website Bounce Rate To Identify Pain Points

Your bounce rate is the percentage of unengaged visits. This is when a user enters the site and then closes it without clicking on any other site pages.

As a home builder, a high bounce rate is something you want to avoid. It indicates that users are leaving your site before taking a virtual tour, reading any key informational pages or most importantly, filling out a lead form.

Google Analytics 4 offers tools to not only help you calculate your bounce rate, but also to indicate where they’re dropping off from. Setting up a custom Exploration report in GA4 allows you to see where visitors are deciding to leave.

By identifying which pages have the highest bounce rate, you can use this information to guide page optimization efforts and content strategy. Businesses can optimize their pages by examining your website’s design, copy and calls-to-action (CTAs) to craft a page that delivers content that is truly relevant and engaging for your intended audience. Does your copy offer valuable information for visitors? How many CTAs are incorporated throughout the page, and could more be added? Does the page’s design support effortless user experience and navigation? Is the site easy to use on every device type?

This information helps you restructure both the flow of your site and your SEO strategy. That way, visitors will find the most important information about you and – eventually – convert.

After digging into this data, you’ll be able to discover several insights that provide a deeper look into the behavior and expectations of your audience. For example, you may notice that traffic to your homepage is steadily increasing but your traffic-to-lead ratio is lagging due to a high bounce rate. This reveals that your page is missing the mark somewhere. It may be an indication that your website isn’t providing the information that users are expecting to find, calls to action aren’t clear, or your site is offering content intended for more qualified leads.

Alternatively, you might find that users are not actually starting on the landing page or homepage. In this instance, you can restructure the flow of the site so that it leads to virtual tours, available homes and other key selling points.

3. Observe Average Engagement Time to Learn Where Your Website is Successfully Engaging Users

As opposed to tracking users that quickly come and go from your website, it’s also beneficial to keep an eye on the users that stick around longer. That’s why home builders should track the average amount of time users remain on your website each month. The average engagement time takes the average length of all site visits combined during a certain period.

If the average duration is longer, this indicates the website is consistently engaging visitors and providing compelling content. These users are likely browsing through floor plans, taking virtual tours or reading blog content. This is a good sign!

However, if average durations begin to dwindle, it may mean visitors can’t find the information they need or the website feels outdated. Use this as a cute to refresh your site with new page content or designs.

By tracking engagement time, you gain valuable insights into how well your website is capturing and holding visitors' attention. This allows you to tailor your content strategy to keep potential homeowners engaged and dreaming of their future home.

4. Track Your Conversion Sources To Manage Your Home Builder Marketing Strategy

To fully optimize your marketing as a home builder, you’ll need to know exactly where your digital leads are coming from. If you don’t know where your leads are coming from, it can be difficult to allocate your online marketing budget effectively. By tracking each conversion, you can put more of your budget toward the channels that are working and cut back on the ones that aren’t.

Conversion tracking will also place each visitor into a category indicating where they are coming from. These include paid and organic search, paid and organic social media, email marketing, and more. From there, you’ll be able to drill down into each of the categories to determine exactly where your website visits and conversions come from.

There are a few different ways to approach tracking for this KPI. GA4 has a goal tracking feature that will tell you the percentage of visitors coming from major ad channels. However, if you have a nuanced marketing strategy that includes smaller ad channels, you’ll have to manually set up UTM tracking parameters for Google Analytics to track these unique channels.

If you’d like a more streamlined approach for tracking your conversions, paid marketing tools like Hubspot and Pardot can do this automatically.

However, the difference here is that Google Analytics can follow users as they move through the site. This will tell you which pages they visited, as well as the length of their visit. Automated tools like HubSpot can only indicate where a visitor came from. So, for the most comprehensive source tracking strategy, consider using both tools to get an idea of the bigger picture.

5. Use SEO/SEM Keyword Position Tracking To Move Ahead of the Competition

Ultimately, the goal for your website performance should be for the majority of its traffic to come from organic search as this means your site is providing relevant content. The best way to indicate this, of course, is by developing a strong SEO strategy supplemented by effective keywords.

You’re likely already tracking your SEO and SEM growth relative to your past performance, but you should also be tracking your performance relative to your competitors. You’ll need to start by understanding exactly what keywords you want to rank for. For home builders, location-based keywords are important. Think key phrases like “best community in [city]” or “home builders in [state]”.

SEMRush offers a tool to help you see where you are ranking with these keywords compared to your competitors. In their Position Tracking tool, you can enter your chosen keywords and see exactly where you are in the rankings. To see how you stack up, SEMRush also helps you identify your top-performing competitors, as well as their estimated traffic.

Knowing the current positions for your target keywords can help you further refine your SEO strategy. Assessing your search rankings offers you a great opportunity to evaluate how your content builds your authority with search engines. For improving your paid keyword targeting via Google Ads, SEMRush also provides detailed information and recommendations.

Other tools you can consider using for keyword strategy:

• Google Search Console
• Moz
• Keywords Everywhere
• Answer The Public

Final Thoughts on Measuring Marketing as a Home Builder

In today’s real estate market, your home builder website will be your most powerful tool for drawing in buyers and hitting your sales goals. Use your digital marketing strategy to connect with your target audience and convey the quality of your homes, ultimately driving them to your website.

Looking to further differentiate yourself from the competition? Milesbrand offers comprehensive branding and marketing for home builders. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.