The new web design from Realestate.com.au was built from the ground up. Of course when you do such a major rewrite of the code you have the opportunity to massively improve certain aspects of the site by wiping the slate clean and starting again.
The web analytics for the portal has been beefed up and we are about to have a lot more data to look at. With the old versions we effectively had page views and enquiries.
One of the most noticeable impacts the new site had was on the number of property views to each property. Overnight property views dropped by around 30 to 40% across the board. This was in part due to the new user interface which allowed visitors to see more of each property without browsing on the details page. Without access to page times and other data there is no way for an outsider to know exactly how much this played in the number of page drops but account managers have been using that excuse when copping flak about the drop in activity from clients.
Mark Twain once said “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable”
So the new weapon against agents expectations and justification of the ever increasing cost is the term “Engagement”. Better get use to it!
So accordingly to REA property views are no longer relevant and will no longer be used because “measuring by property views is too limited in light of the new richer ways consumers can interact with your listings and your brand”. The measurement and benchmarking of agents in the future will be based on “total engagement” numbers.
With the focus on engagements rather than property views it means we are not going to be able to quite so easily compare against statistics to last year or even to other portals.
So what do we know now?
There are 21 new sets of statistics across four categories as follows:
Views
- Property Details Pages
- Property Carousel Views
- Property Map Fly-outs
Engagement
- Property Photo Views
- Map Interactions
- Floor Plan Views
- Virtual Tour Views
- Property Video Views
- Street-View Views
Saving and Sharing
- Saved to MyRealestate
- Notes in MyRealestate
- Print Page
- Send to a Friend
- Share on Social Media
Enquiry
- Emails to Agent
- Agent Details Views
- Click-throughs to Agent Website
- Inspection Times Reveals
- Inspection Times Saved
- Auction Times Saved
- Property Directions
I have also been provided with a snapshot of real data that provides some interesting early perspective. This sample is well over 100,000 property views so it should give a great indication of what to expect when it gets rolled out to everyone.
- For every 1 property view there is 7.4 property photo views in the engagement category.
- Property Carousel views are 11.5% of property page views but only 1.5% of property photo views
- Map engagements run around 2.6% against property detail page views and from this data it shows floorplans were far more popular at 3.6% Remember, most properties have a map, but very few have a floorplan so to me this highlights the importance of a floorplan.
- Street view engagement were the least popular at 1.6% of property page views
- Saving and Sharing was very very low and all 5 types combined only added up to 2.5% of property page views.
- Enquiry statistics were even lower totaling around 1.04% of property page views. This was made up with a little under half of those numbers by email (0.45%) followed by inspection times (0.20%) and property directions (0.15%).
I think the level of detail is admirable and it will be interesting to watch how those number relate to our own agency. Right now the markets in different parts of Australia are completley different so there should be some major differences between agencies in each state so the numbers quoted above may have little or no relationship to what you might see for your own account.