What is a conversion for a real estate website?
“What is your conversion rate?” This is probably one of the most frequently asked questions from another real estate agent.
A common misconception which comes up in almost every real estate website or internet lead generation course for real estate agents is that if you have 100,000 visitors to your site and a 5% conversion rate then you should be selling 5,000 homes. Right? Wrong.
A conversion on a real estate website does not mean that person visited your site and then bought a house from you. Oh, if it were only so easy. A conversion is when a visitor to your website does something which you intend for them to do. That action might be to click to another page, stay a certain length of time browsing your website, register for an email newsletter, ask for more information on a listing, request a buyer or seller consultation, ask for the value estimate on a property, request a special report, share your site via social media, forward a link to your site to a friend via email, etc.
Each website has a different purpose. Do not confuse the conversion definition of an eCommerce site like a flower shop, book seller, or music down load spot with your real estate site. People visit an online music store with a reasonable chance that they are going to pull out a credit card and purchase some songs or albums. Not so with a real estate website. (At least not in my experience 
)
People visit real estate websites for similar but different reasons. They want to know how the price of the home, or how many bedrooms, baths, garages the home has. Providing that information and tracking (non user specific) how visitors navigate your website will allow you to better understand how to modify your website to better meet the needs of the people who are visiting your site. Testing and improving is called Conversion Rate Optimization.
You can use a free product called Google Analytics to measure what is going on in your site. Brian Clifton has a great book called Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics Third Edition
Haden Interactive also has a mini tutorial video on getting started with Google Analytics. Haden Interactive is a great resource to learn about SEO, Google Analytics, Copywriting and WordPress. Also Haden has an instructional article on installing Google Analytics
Ken – are you the author? If so, I would like to include the link in the partners press
Hi Sherrie,
Yes I am the author.
Putting it in the partners press would be great. Thank you.