Jonathan Stanis, Director of User Experience, and Frank Isca, a strategist at Weidert Group, joined John Bonini on an episode of the Metrics and Chill podcast to discuss how they improved one key metric for their client: Goal conversion rate. 

Weidert Group is a dedicated inbound marketing agency and a HubSpot diamond partner with 32 full-time team members. They specialize in helping clients in complex industries, primarily industrial manufacturing, supply chain, and finance. 

Here, they discussed how they helped one of their clients, a developer of apartment communities across the country, set up tracking, and more importantly, how they improved their dwindling conversion rates.

Read on for more details, or listen to the full episode here:

The Metric: Goal Conversion Rate

For this client, generating traffic wasn’t a problem due to their presence and popularity across 56 locations in the country. 

But traffic is nothing without conversions, right?

So, they needed help getting those visitors to actually convert by requesting a tour or speaking with a leasing agent.

And that’s where the Weidert group came into the picture.

Once onboard, one of the first things the team did was set up a brand new website focused on conversions to help their client scale.

The Opportunity: Using a Growth-Design Approach 

Combining Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and Databox to simplify reporting and visualize performance

Before Weidert came on board, their client had to manually identify which website pages bring the most conversions and see which properties were getting the best conversions.  

“You can only imagine how time-consuming it is to go into Google Analytics, select your different filters for each of these communities and manually pull these numbers in a way that they could be passed  on to leadership.” 

“So we said let’s address this right away with this new site and set up some automated reporting.”

Rather than have them run things solely through Google Analytics, using standard tags, the team at Weidert group started using Google tag manager to track the events for each property. 

Additionally, through Databox’s goal tracking and Google Analytics integration, they could also see data on a per property basis and segment out the conversion rates for each property to show their client.

With this setup, they could track the goal conversions and see where exactly users are converting in the funnel. 

“And obviously, Databox and what we set up to track these goal conversions has really allowed us to act on that data.”

Using Special Offers to Boost Conversions

“I believe the best conversion funnel is an organic search followed by a direct landing on their page.”

Due to the vast number of communities and the properties that their client has across the country, they had people finding them organically.

The Weidert team’s main task was to figure out how to convert these prospects into conversions.

“The typical buyer journey for someone who’s looking for an apartment, believe it or not, is pretty quick from the moment they come on the site to them, converting to them, signing a lease.”

So they decided to go for the bottom of the funnel with special offers, such as discounts for the first three months, or get one month free kind of offer.

This kind of urgency managed to get website users into the funnel faster, ultimately leading to conversions — signing a lease.

Thanks to their approach, this was a remarkable success in 2020. 

The Results: 77% Increase in Year-Over-Year Growth

With all these improvements made, coupled with the fact that 2020 was a unique year (pandemic), the results recorded in 2020 were nothing short of impressive.

“In 2019, we saw goal conversion was averaging around 3.2, 2% on the page. In 2020, through improvements on the new website, we managed to bump that up to 5.72%, which is a 77% increase year over year.”

Also, thanks to the team at Weidert, manual reporting is now a thing of the past for their client, with the help of Databox.

“So not only has it impacted her productivity and alleviated her, the leadership team is happier.”

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