Data Post October 22, 2009 - Forced vs. Unforced Registration Test

Website Data for October 15 - October 21, 2009

This is the 3rd week reporting our data and the results continue to be interesting.  Most pointedly this week is the total visitors and uniques are nearly identical for this reporting period.  The unforced site, www.saint-paul-real-estate.com continues to set new records for weekly traffic.  Just 3-weeks ago the unique visitors were 752, then in week 2 they increased to 964 and now they are at 1,103.  Could this be a result of the efforts of the SEO guru's at Real Estate Webmasters?  I think so...

Raw Data:

Analysis:

Conversion Rate:

The conversion rate is the percentage of Unique Visitors who convert into a lead.  We calculate leads including all lead types, minus those that give invalid contact information.  For Saint-Paul-Real-Estate.com (the Unforced Website), the conversion rate was 1.08% (12 net leads ÷ 1,103 unique visitors).  For Barkerhedges.com (the Forced Site), the conversion rate was 3.92% (45 net leads ÷ 1,149 unique visitors). Both sites showed increased conversion rates, albeit very slight for saint-paul-real-estate.com and more sizeable for barkerhedges.com.  The conversion rate spread is now almost 4x's greater for BarkerHedges.com!  So what does this mean?

Leads:

Most interesting with the first 3 week's of data is that it appears the # of unique visitors on Saint-Paul-Real-Estate.com does not necessarily increase the # of net leads.  If you look at the week 1 numbers, Saint-Paul-Real-Estate.com had 15 leads from 752 unique visitors and this week it produced 12 leads from 1,103 unique visitors.  This means the conversion rate has decreased as the # of leads has increased.  Unfortunately, BarkerHedges.com has been fairly consistent during this same timeframe so it is difficult to gauge whether this is a market trend or a discrepancy between the Forced and Unforced nature of the sites.  We'll keep monitoring this trend to see what happens in the coming weeks.

Last point of discussion for this week's data is the non-IDX conversion rate for both websites.  The unforced site produced a net total of 6 non-IDX leads this week.  The forced site produced a net total of 5 non-IDX leads this week.  Keeping in mind that the total number of unique visitors was nearly identical for both websites, this is a telling sign.  Much has been written about the process that IDX users go through when searching on a website.  It has been said that they start with an IDX registration, then re-visit the site over the course of weeks and months and eventually take action to request a showing.  Cal Carter gave a great explanation of this process when he commented on our Week 1 Data Report. This week, we are reporting nearly identical non-IDX leads (6 vs. 5) for the websites.  BUT, the Forced site logged an additional 33 IDX leads during the same 7 day period.  This is an increase of a whopping 4.7 leads per day for the Forced site!  It's looking more and more like Forced Registration is the way to go over an extended period of time...but we'll keep monitoring the trends each week.

Cheers,

Brandon & Matt