What should you measure in real estate content marketing?

If you don’t know which pieces of your content are working and which aren’t, how can you expect to drive great results.

If you are just starting out in content marketing it’s going to take a while to build trust and credibility within your community and to see tangible business results. However, from the beginning you can be tracking some simple metrics.

We explore more complicated metrics in the Advanced Guide to Real Estate Content Marketing but here are some simple metrics you should be collecting and analysing each month.

Website traffic

Use Google Analytics to track monthly changes to your website traffic. Look at:

• Users – the total number of people who have visited your site
• Unique users – how many individuals have visited your site
• Sessions – how many times people came back to look at your site
• Organic traffic – how many people are finding your website because of SEO
• Page views – What are the most popular pages on your website
• Pages per visit – how many pages are your visitors looking at when they are on your site
• Time on the site – how long are people spending on your website?

It’s a good idea to drill into the “Behaviour” drop down in the Google Analytics report and look at your site content and exactly what pages people are engaging with, are they reading certain blog articles, or market reports or purely searching for listings. You’ll want to try to understand what is working with your audience so you can keep building on that.

Online Appraisal requests

Most real estate agents websites that I know have an online appraisal form. In fact, it would be stupid if you didn’t.

Each month you should measure how many people submit the form and track this to see if there is an increase month on month.

Contact us requests

Again, this is a simple way to see if people are reaching out to your office more regularly. So, keep a monthly report on how many online contact forms are received and if this is increasing.

Social media metrics

Assuming you are using Facebook as a way to share and promote your content, have a look at the number of:

• Posts you published each month
• Followers is this growing?
• Shares, comments, likes on your posts
• Overall reach of your posts
• If you have boosted any posts – “ how did they go? What was the reach, shares, comments, likes on these posts?
• What was the most popular post/s of the month – is there a pattern here?

Email reporting

Most if not all agents have a monthly or weekly newsletter that they send out to their database.  This may contain an overview of listings and open homes, but as you’ll be creating great content each month it is also the perfect tool to share your latest blog post or market report.

Tools like Mailchimp are super easy to keep a record of:

• Number of subscribers – is this growing
• The open rate of the email
• The click rate
• What article or section was the most viewed

Again, look for patterns here, can you start to see trends around what people like and engage with. These patterns should help direct you and what content you create.