When Halstead wanted to promote its new online luxury listing
initiative, dubbed “S3,” the company put digital signs atop New York
City taxis — an unusual, if old-school, way of driving traffic to its
Web site.
The product and the promotion are emblematic of how many brokerages
are making a significant push to attract certain demographic groups to
their Web sites — and trying to ensure that users “stick” online. S3,
for example, allows a Halstead client who has listed a property with
the brokerage to track how many Internet users have viewed the listing
each day.
In general, brokerages are putting more muscle behind their
Internet marketing efforts, using the savvy of new-media professionals
who try to minimize “bounce” (jargon for when visitors leave a site)
and increase “conversion rates” (selling listings tied to online ads).
“A recent study by the National Association of Realtors showed that
84 percent of buyers are going on the Web, and that’s across almost
every demographic,” said Matthew Leone, marketing manager at Halstead
Properties. “We understand the need to commit larger sums of money to
Web-based products and our approach is cumulative, where we focus on
small, effective enhancements that drive traffic over the long-term,
rather than one big bang.”
It’s no surprise that larger firms dominate the rankings of New
York City-based brokerages on public Web metrics sites (see
accompanying chart ranking brokerages’ presence on the Internet),
because they spend vast resources engaging in search engine
optimization, or SEO, which attempts to ensure that sites place high in
Web search results by embedding them with key terms that are likely to
be typed in by buyers, like “New York City condo” or “Manhattan
apartment.”
By contrast, search engine marketing, or SEM, consists of paying
handsomely for an ad tied to those coveted search words. However, there
are differing opinions on how effective SEM is in terms of drumming up
Web clicks.
“We found that only half the visitors noticed [SEM] ads,” said
Katherine Cartwright, principal at Criterion Global, which specializes
in Internet marketing for real estate firms. “Yet the big New York City
brokerages engage in bidding wars to get generic terms like ‘New York
condos’ . . . paying $5 a click in some cases.”
Tracking traffic and rankings
To measure effectiveness, firms use many different approaches. One
of Google’s auxiliary services, Google Analytics, offers accurate data
for owners of URLs, but it provides only limited comparative data.
Major Manhattan brokerages use this application, along with
internal data generated by their sites and other metrics bought from
comparative Web metric firms, including Nielsen Online, Compete.com and
Quantcast.com, to build a critical mass of data to sift. Measurements
aren’t cheap; subscriptions to Compete.com run between $199 and $499 a
month. Nielsen Online’s NetView service, which tracks the online usage
of about 30,000 people a month, costs $50,000 a year.
The Corcoran Group subscribes to Google Analytics, Hitwise.com,
Quantcast.com and internal log file analysis, said Matthew Shadbolt,
director of Internet marketing for the brokerage, who noted that the
firm also follows other ranking sites, like Alexa, which some experts
argue has a selection bias.
No matter how many numbers get crunched, comparing Web sites is
certainly a tricky game from a statistical standpoint. “The Web
generates way too much data and you can only take a snapshot of
portions of it,” said Mark Gibbs, a Web metrics expert, Network World
magazine columnist and author of four books about computer technology.
“Even if Alexa gives 90 percent confirmation of your thesis, you should
look for other evidence.”
To that end, Gibbs noted that he helped develop the randomized
Nielsen Online method, which employs political polling techniques to
recruit over 30,000 random testers to install a toolbar and have their
Web usage tracked.
Regarding its rankings, the top New York City real estate firms
have such limited traffic that they fall below the public reporting
cutoff, said a Nielsen Online spokeswoman.
Quality, not quantity
Although brokerages use techniques like SEM to get as many people
to their sites as possible, many also say they are focusing much of
their IT know-how on better targeting the types of people who
eventually click on their sites.
“In the past, our primary focus was on how many visitors came to
our site,” according to a published Google Analytics testimonial from
Kristi Graning, senior vice president of IT and e-Business at RE/MAX.
But now, “we want to know more about their behavior in order to serve
them better. For instance: Why are people coming to our site? Where
they are coming from? And what do they do once they get there?”
With that data, according to RE/MAX Web analyst Jeanna Bush, the
company can track leads once handed off to Realtor.com. “Now, in
addition to allowing consumers to search on all listings, we will be
able to capture leads, pass them directly to our agents, and track and
measure our lead-to-sale conversion rate,” she said.
However, “the catch-22 is that all this data is useless unless you
can get advice to help you understand it, mainly by analyzing the path
people take through the site,” said Gibbs.
Many sites initiate A/B projects to test the best design, he said.
In that type of a test, visitors coming to the site in odd minutes
might land on the standard Web site, while others entering on even
minutes would get a completely different beta test site.
Halstead’s S3 program, the one promoted atop the city’s taxi fleet,
is named for a decade-old tagline, “service, service, service” — and it
offers two main components, noted Leone: In addition to providing
sellers with a checklist of agreed-upon tasks that the agent has
completed, it also gives a slate of Web statistics to sellers.
“It provides full transparency and accountability by giving the
seller a log-in password to see everything an agent is doing,” he said.
“The goal is to offer more analytics in the future.”
For now, statistics delivered to S3 clients include the top ten
sites where visitors found the listing, total visits to the listing
site and a breakdown of the links visitors clicked on when they got
there.
For Halstead and other brokerages, the trick is not just to get
visitors to their sites, but also to keep things engaging so they don’t
bounce out. This is where the science of attracting traffic turns into
an art.
“It’s not about volume; we’re trying to get beyond the random
person to get rid of barriers and engage visitors more deeply,” said
Cartwright. “If you’re pushing amenities on a particular project, for
example, and visitors to the site are clicking on floorplans and
bypassing the amenities package, then you should make floorplans the
selling point.”
Customization is key
For Cartwright’s clients, a major goal is to collect registrations
from visitors. “That’s the gold standard for figuring out what they
like and don’t like, and determining what is getting them to spend
money.”
Registrants are requested to provide varying degrees of personal
information. For example, at a Shvo Group open house in the Financial
District held in August for the W Downtown, visitors were encouraged to
register at a couple of computer kiosks, where prompts asked them for
the type of apartment they were looking for, their occupation and their
income.
Firms use this data to send targeted ads, among other strategies,
said Cartwright. “Say someone looks at an online ad for an Upper East
Side two-bedroom,” she said. “A week later, if you log on to a specific
display ad, we would send an e-mail to you based on the criteria you’ve
established. It’s logical and doesn’t waste anyone’s time.”
The key to this kind of campaign is cookies, computer tracking
devices that Web sites embed on the personal computers of site visitors
that allow companies to monitor individual behavior. To some consumers,
the practice smacks of Big Brother, so some online registration
applications require a double opt-in process.
“The merger of analytics and advertising is exciting because for
the first time you can actually get a lot of information about the
people coming to your site, and there’s much more qualified traffic
than ever before,” said Cartwright. “But data mining is a wild card
because if you dig up too much information about your prospects,
there’s a chance you can turn them off.”