Unique Visitors to Registrations, Percentage

[carlos34747]

Hello Everyone,

After searching for a few hours I still don’t have a good notion of what my goal should be for converting visitors to registered users.

As of right now I’m only getting about a 2% registration per unique visitor rate. I know that’s very low, however, I get about 11% of all sales closed in the small area I market.

Given that I get a good return on my investment, should I be worried about this or should I not set a goal and just keep selling as I’ve been.
I guess part of this will have to do with my market share in my farm. Is 11% a good number or should I be shooting for 20% or more? If I’m underperforming at 11% then I would have to increase my registrations ratio in order to increase my market share.

I really look forward to your comments on this one and I thank you all in advance.

[Mitch]

11% market share is huge no matter what market you are in. To answer your lead capture question I have to know if you do forced registrations or not. If not, we have seen about a 3% conversion rate to be fairly normal when we tested non forced registrations. With forced registrations we run as low as 10% on a bad day and as high as 20% on a great day with an average of 14% or so. Our close rate is hovering right at 4% right now from raw leads.

I hope that helps you with your stats.

[carlos34747]

Thanks for the reply Mitch. I actually do force registrations after visitors browse 3 listings (can't change that with my IDX provider). That's what makes it weird that more people are not registering. I think it may be a flaw by my IDX provider not prompting for registration some times. That's why I'm now getting an all new REW LEC!!

I'll see what I can do to increase my numbers. The area I'm covering is so small that I should be able to increase my market share a bit to maybe 15% or so. It's been feeding me enough business to have a great year but at some point you have to turning up a notch.

[webmaster]

Carlos it's important also to know what kind of traffic we are talking about - organic, PPC, filtered PPC (Mitch uses this) or other (sign calls, radio ads, television etc

Conversion rates will differ greatly based on traffic type as well. There is no way you would consistently get mitch kind of numbers from organic, there are just to many less than relevant clicks etc

[carlos34747]

I get about 65% organic traffic and 35% ppc (I only get ppc strait from google adds and main affiliates and not from adsense sites). I recently stopped the google ads and I'm still getting the same amount of leads. So my conversion rate will increase without paying ppc because I'm getting less traffic and about the same amount of registrations. Weird...

[carlos34747]

Forgot to mention that the ppc visitors spend a good amount of time on the site, are from different countries and it doesn't seem as if a competitor is just clicking away my ppc investments. They arrive from different keywords, etc.

[John Landry Phoenix]

Carlos,

I have a new REW LEC and I have been experiencing only slightly better 3.5% unique to leads. I think you are on to something regarding when to force registration. I have been live with my site for about 5 months now and I am not yet on the first page of Goolgle for any of my keywords yet. Since I have a REW IDX I get about 25-30 visitors people Googling MLS numbers and addresses. Recently I implemented goal tracking and funnels in Google Analytics and I have learned more. Since Implementing it I have also started PPC on a small scale to test things out and have discovered that I am doing better than I thought. What I mean by that is I am converting about 13% of visitors who hit my registration page. Since most of my organic visitors are not presented with the forced registration, I do not have the chance to convert them they. Unfortunately with MLS # searches and address searches, the visitors gets what they want right away and most just leave the site. Based on my PPC I am hopeful that ranking for some broader search terms will keep visitors on my site long enough to hit my registration page. I will also test forcing earlier which I think will increase the abandonment rate but might be overcome by the numbers of additional visitors who reach the registration page. I also need to work on making my site stickier to keep visitors around long enough to hit the registration page Right now only about 28% of my unique visitors reach the registration page.

[Bob Crain]

My LEC 2 has been live since 9/23 and it is at 6.22% unique visitors to leads(returning leads included), we went back to forced registration when the new site went live...

[CarlosAT]

I just launched my LEC about 10 days ago and I'm watching to see how it behaves with visitors. I'm not getting a lot of real traffic yet, although I've had my site reached by 3 or 4 people searching naturally on Google. 2 of those have registered and I'm currently working with one through email and helping him find what he is looking for, etc.

My keywords are not really that competitive but google still has me in pages 4 or 5 for my main keywords. The few visitors I've received came from long tail keywords where google has me on the first page. However, I do rank on the first page for "foreclosures near (my area)", and the person I'm working with now, reached my site while searching for "bank owned properties near (my area)".

I'm kind of taking it slow right now to see how things go, but I'll probably do ppc starting next year if I don't see any improvement on rankings.

Have you guys gotten your first sales (at least pending) from your new sites yet? If I don't get at least 2 sales in the first 6 months (even if I have to do ppc), I'll be completely bummed out.

[jamesww]

I just launched my LEC about 10 days ago and I'm watching to see how it behaves with visitors. I'm not getting a lot of real traffic yet, although I've had my site reached by 3 or 4 people searching naturally on Google. 2 of those have registered and I'm currently working with one through email and helping him find what he is looking for, etc.

My keywords are not really that competitive but google still has me in pages 4 or 5 for my main keywords. The few visitors I've received came from long tail keywords where google has me on the first page. However, I do rank on the first page for "foreclosures near (my area)", and the person I'm working with now, reached my site while searching for "bank owned properties near (my area)".

I'm kind of taking it slow right now to see how things go, but I'll probably do ppc starting next year if I don't see any improvement on rankings.

Have you guys gotten your first sales (at least pending) from your new sites yet? If I don't get at least 2 sales in the first 6 months (even if I have to do ppc), I'll be completely bummed out.

Please do not get bummed. Most of the time even after a web lead has turned into a ready willing and able buyer it still takes 2-4 weeks to find them a place. Then now days 30-45 days to close the transaction thanks to HVAC. So, you are looking at nearly 3 months before you could close the average hot lead. Now when you look deeper into the numbers 70% of them will not even respond to you for 90-120 days. So, I think unless you are getting alot of registrations that your 6 month expectation may be a bit lofty. You should take the time to read the following post by Lou. I think it is a good one.

http://www.loulynch.com/when-are-web-leads-ready/