Digital marketing allows us to push apartment marketing ideas to an incredibly wide audience, but that’s just half of the digital marketing advantage. When we look beyond the targeted ads and the flashy website design, we find a wealth of data at our disposal. This data has builds up over time, but if we take the time to sift through it, we can glean insights into how people actually interact with various forms of digital marketing.
As a full-service digital marketing agency, Threshold/Carve has been designing, developing and hosting client websites for years. We have data telling us how users find websites, how they interact with the sites, and what they’re doing before they click away from the site.
In an effort to help our clients make smarter, more cost effective marketing decisions, we analyze all this data, spot trends and change our practices based on our findings.
Let’s dive into the data
Google Analytics data from our most-visited student housing websites can show us how 40,000 users interacted with these sites. Of the 40,000 people who landed on the homepages of these websites, 32,000 of them clicked on multiple pages.
An overwhelming majority of those users go directly from the Homepage to the Floor Plans Page.
Not all Floor Plans Pages are created equal, however. Floor Plans Pages with 3D Floor Plans have lower bounce rates than pages with 2D Floor Plans.
The data shows that 3D Floor Plans are a worthwhile investment, but the same cannot be said about professional photoshoots on the property. People don’t visit Image Gallery Pages nearly as often as they visit Floor Plan Pages.
In fact, the Gallery Page isn’t even the second most popular page. If people aren’t going to the Floor Plans Page first, they’re going to the Amenities Page. It’s only after they visit those two pages that they end up clicking to the Gallery Page.
Getting people to click around the site is great, but we all know that conversions are the most important statistic. However, only 40% of websites had the Contact Page as one of their top 10 most visited pages.
So, how do we respond to the data?
Should we display CTAs prominently on the Homepage, or would they make more sense on the Floor Plans Page? Should we spend a lot of time on the Contact Page, or should be putting contact info on one of these more popular pages? The answers are in the analytics.
We can use this data to improve website design and provide our clients with better strategies and marketing ideas for apartments. The data tells above has given us a few actionable items:
Instead of buying high quality images for the Gallery Page, properties should purchase 3D Floor Plans. The data shows that 3D Floor Plans lower the bounce rate on some of the most visited pages, keeping more people on the site for a longer amount of time.
We all know that clicks don’t matter as much as conversions do. Gathering contact info is a kind of conversion, and a key step in the sales funnel, but most websites aren’t getting a lot of clicks on their Contact Pages. This tells us that property websites should add contact forms and CTAs on their most visited pages — the Floor Plans Page, the Amenities Page and the Gallery Page.
UX design is about creating websites that are easy for users to interact with. However, users don’t always interact with a site the way we intended. We can create a better user experience by creating websites that are designed to be used the way people are actually using them.
Data-driven design helps us convert online surfers into online renters. If you’d like to learn more about how our apartment complex marketing ideas can help your properties prosper, please shoot us an email or give us a call today.