Real estate’s median conversion rate increased last year—but given the hot market, it’s less than you might think. The good news is we’ve uncovered some promising insights to help you keep homebuyers knockin’ on your door.
There’s a whole lotta form-fill pages in this industry, but not a lotta conversions. Reducing your form fields and adding more ways to convert could clear a path to more leads.
Social users only make up one-tenth of traffic to form-fill pages, but they’re converting better than those coming from other channels (like paid search). Sounds like a new investment opportunity.
The use of all types of emotional language—positive and negative—increased in real estate this year. But our data shows that it might be better to just stick to the facts.
Access the full Conversion Benchmark Report for detailed industry benchmarks, in-depth conversion rate insights, top-performing channels, and more.
What’s this mean? This graph (called a “box plot”) shows how the conversion rates of landing pages are distributed. The dotted horizontal line is the median conversion rate, while the “box” shows where most pages sit. The vertical lines (or “whiskers”) represent the range of the remaining pages, excluding any extreme outliers.
Forms are one of the lower-performing conversion types in real estate (like they are in most industries). But we wouldn’t suggest property marketers change all their form-fill pages to click-throughs. You need forms to generate leads.
So, how do you optimize? One thing you can try is shortening them to less than four fields. Our data shows that most real estate forms have four or five, but there’s a correlation between longer forms and lower conversion rates. Or, put another way: Each field you add could be costing you valuable leads.
If your campaign goals allow it, try incorporating more ways to convert. For example, you could add a click-to-call button for visitors who are on-the-go (or otherwise reluctant to fill out a form). We recommend using Smart Traffic to track your experiment and pinpoint what’s turning those digital looky-loos into leads.
Use Smart Traffic to test and optimize your form. Shortening forms to under four fields and adding more ways to convert are both good places to start.
Wanna get the most outta these insights? Here’s how we recommend you use ‘em in your marketing.
Do pages in your industry convert better when they’re short? Maybe your copy is giving off the wrong vibes? Take note of the findings that are relevant to your campaigns.
Create a variant of your landing page and make the changes recommended in this report. Use A/B testing to see how it performs.
Use the results from your landing page variant to inform the creation of more variants. Keep improving your pages and watch as your conversion rates climb.
Search engines are the top traffic source for real estate, driving over half of all visitors to form-fill pages (60.0%). Meanwhile, social platforms like Facebook and Instagram only contribute around one-tenth of traffic (7.9%) to lead gen pages—but they’re converting visitors much better.
Looks like there’s a sweet investment opportunity here. While most property marketers are using their budgets on search ads, we’d recommend you try marketing in the white space available on social platforms.
For real estate lead gen, social traffic converts better than search. See how it performs for you by allocating more budget towards social ads.
The percentage of emotional language on real estate landing pages increased across the board this year—more fear, more joy, more anticipation, you name it. But is that a good thing?
Eh, not so much. We looked at how different sentiments impact conversion rates in real estate, and correlations tend to be neutral or negative. We even dug into whether any specific industry subcategory (like, say, vacation homes) benefited from increased emotion—and fell flat.
This boom in emotional language could reflect a uniquely challenging year, but real estate has also never been an impulse purchase. (Or it shouldn’t be, anyways.) If your page runs high on emotions, you might wanna rejig your copy to focus on the listing details instead.
It’s generally a good idea to avoid emotional language in your copy. Focus on the specifications of the property rather than tugging at your visitors’ heartstrings.
These types of emotional language saw the biggest change in use (increase or decrease) on real estate pages over the past year.
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