Quick: Which ad sources generate the most calls to your multifamily property? What about prospects? Leases? If you don’t know, you could be wasting money on advertising that isn’t paying off. Or you could be leaving money on the table by not allocating more dollars to ad sources that are giving you great returns on investment.
Follow these three steps to learn exactly where you should be spending your advertising budget next month.
Step 1: Track Calls With DNI
Good analysis begins with good data. Knowing whether a prospect learned about you from an ad or by word of mouth isn’t enough; you need to know exactly which online ad sources are generating calls. But in the age of fleeting attention spans, asking prospects how they heard about you is unreliable and inefficient—who remembers what they clicked on five minutes and 10 webpages ago?
That’s why Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) is so important. It assigns a unique phone number to each online ad source—whether banner ad, Google, Yelp, Apartments.com, or anywhere else you advertise—and then displays that phone number on your website to the visitor. That way, you know exactly which ad source drove them to your website and what ultimately made them pick up the phone and call you.
Step 2: Separate Prospects From General Call Volume
To avoid skewed data and obtain a true picture of ad effectiveness, next, you’ll need to filter out non-prospect calls. Divide calls into two categories: prospects and non-prospects. Non-prospects include residents, vendors, employees, and any others who may call in on your advertising numbers. Then, filter out the calls from the non-prospects to get a true idea of which ad sources are generating leads rather than just calls.
Step 3: Match Caller Data to PMS Leasing Data
Knowing which ad sources are generating the most calls and prospects is great, but what you really want to know is which ones are converting to leases. But not all leads sign leases the same day, week, or month. So how will you know if a lead ultimately became a lease?
One way to do so is to connect leasing data from your property management system (PMS) with your caller data using a business intelligence software program, such as LeaseHawk. Combined with its LeaseTrace tool, LeaseHawk software can trace a signed lease back to the very first call associated with it.
For more information, visit leasehawk.com/hawkeye.
