We are currently living through what may prove to be the greatest shift in work culture and business practices in human history. For property management, most leasing offices are closed, teams are pre-recording video tours of vacant units, and virtual tours have become more useful than ever before. It may come as a surprise to some, but according to firsthand data property website traffic is actually up over 25% when comparing April to March. With prospects' leases coming to an end as Spring and Summer leasing season approaches, along with the current economic uncertainty which may encourage more people to move, online web presence in multifamily has arguably never been more important. We have one suggestion to help all property management companies and owners better assess your current advertising and website performance.
Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to setup what are called "tags," a piece of code that collects data as defined by you, on your property website without manually having to adjust the code on your site each time. Our team is happy to assist if needed, but your web development team should be able to simply add the one-time GTM to your site. From there, you can setup event tracking for key actions on your website that you want to track. Other than saving time and streamlining your "tag" setup process, Google Tag Manager has become increasingly more important because you find what events are taking place on your website and what sources are causing those events. Ever wonder how many A1 floor plan clicks your Facebook campaign created last month? How many prospects actually clicked on our virtual tour that we uploaded last week? These types of questions can be answered with the proper setup of Google Tag Manager, which reflects these metrics in Google Analytics.
In our new virtual world one thing is for sure, we will have to measure the referral traffic to our websites and our website activity more closely than ever before. With prospects shopping for new apartments online now more than ever, tracking such website events will show what online sources are leading to the most important website events and which sources are not. From there, multifamily marketing teams or operators can make more concise decisions on ad spend than just based on directly attributed leads and leases.
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