Popular Pages & Not-So-Much On Real Estate Websites in 2015

Almost two years ago we discussed page view distribution on real estate websites to see where most consumers click once they reach our Realtor®’s websites.

. . .

Still All About Listings & Photos

It’s 2015, and we have a more up-to-date set of numbers, although the core messages remain the same – listings, listing photos & the homepage remains the most consistent performers, while viewership of buyers/sellers, or neighbourhood guides remain relatively flat. However, we were surprised to see the rise of page views allocated towards those informational pages even though the changes were minimal.

Pageviews are still heavily focused on listings & listing photos, like it or not.

There are a few factors we believe affects this:

  • Last time in our 2013 post, we didn’t include the page views that landed on the “Not Found” pages as part of listing views. When a listing is no longer on the MLS® and removed, those pages will then go to our custom /notfound pages. With these excluded from the number from the listing page portions, the numbers may have been slightly off.
  • The sites we used are some of our higher-performing benchmark sites, which means their visitors may be more active, and also those pages may be viewed by more marketers who are targeting new SEO customers (our customers are solicited by shady SEO service providers all the time).

Using This To Your Advantage

Serve to your customers what they want to see. Here are some ways you can leverage the photo-centric, or product-centric short attention span of the general public you face as a Realtor®:

  1. Share listing detail pages, or sets of listings by certain criteria on Facebook or Twitter (i.e. “Today we want to feature all 1 bedroom Condos in Yaletown under $400,000 for first-time home buyers..”).
  2. Make sure your homepage has listings as a slideshow, or links to listing pages. This can either make or break your bounce-rates from your homepage.
  3. Make sure photo/video of each home is the first thing on individual listing detail pages.
  4. While you are at it, please start using Instagram. It’s a visual, short-commitment medium that can do wonders for brand marketing on social media. We have our own in-house developed, ad-free Instagram widget available. Check out Terry Osti’s website footer for an example.

*Note on the above statistics

  1. These statistics are based on 6 of our more active & established sites, randomly selected out of a candidate of 20 top sites based on high level of traffic.
  2. Naturally this does not reflect all of our websites, nor the industry standard. Individual websites may experience different results.
  3. These statistics exclude page views to blog pages, as not all sites have it, and blog pages get direct traffic from social media shares, so we felt they do not represent the average visitor behaviour accurately.
  4. The dates used for this research was July 14 ~ Aug 13, 2015, from Google Analytics data. Different times of the year may show different proportions.