Data Post October 30, 2009 - Forced vs. Unforced Registration Test

Website Data for October 22 - October 28, 2009

Here is the 4th week of reporting data for our Forced vs. Unforced Registration Test.  With this data set, we now have reporting for a full month worth of statistics and the results are starting to show some obvious trends.  If you are a serious web-geek or are just plain interested in this test, check out these resources for more information from Contributors around the Country: www.forcedregistration.com and www.realestatewebmasters.com/blogs/mattbarker.

Raw Data:

Analysis:

Conversion Rate:

As always, we begin with a side by side analysis of the website conversion rates.  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 1.00% (11 net leads ÷ 1,100 unique visitors).  For Barkerhedges.com (the Forced Site), the conversion rate was 4.43% (57 net leads ÷ 1,288 unique visitors). While the 1st week of the test provided the highest conversion rates thus far for both sites, www.Saint-Paul-Real-Estate.com has trended downward each week (now an all-time low) while www.BarkerHedges.com has trended upward.  This week marks the 1st time that BarkerHedges.com has recorded a conversion rate that is more than 4x's that of Saint-Paul-Real-Estate.com.  More about this later...

Leads:

Consistency is one of the things we are looking for with this test.  Cal Carter has written rather extensively on this topic and gave a great explanation on our previous post of how Forcing Registration creates more predictable and consistent results.  If we compare to last week's data, the unique visitor numbers are almost identical from week to week...for both sites.  BarkerHedges.com showed a slight increase, but the real number that relates to consistency is the HUGE spike in Total Visitors for BarkerHedges.com this week!  Could it be that we are collecting more leads (i.e. more IDX registrations) and actually sending those leads emails and IDX updates with links to the website and encouraging them to come back?  Hmmm...

Here is another trend that seems to be reoccurring: the forced site generated 5 non-IDX leads this week and the unforced site generated 6 non-IDX leads.  Do these numbers sound familiar?  That's because the sites have been trucking along at the same spread from week to week.  Consider this: the unforced site has generated 27 non-IDX leads since we started the test.  The forced site has generated 23 non-IDX leads during this same time.  I've read several arguments in support of unforced registration that claim the number of "quality" leads (i.e. non-IDX) is much greater with an unforced registration website because users are not alienated or turned off by the greedy real estate agents who try to collect their contact information.  While this seems like a logical claim, the spread between our 2 websites was 4 leads over a 4 week period (27 unforced site leads vs. 23 forced site leads)  BUT...our IDX spread was 145 during this same 4 week period (24 IDX leads for the unforced site and 169 IDX leads for the forced site).  I can't help it...with 4 week's of data I need to extrapolate: that's a whopping 1,885 additional IDX leads over the course of 1-year for our Forced Registration Website.  During that same year, we would have "missed out" on a total of 52 non-IDX leads during that same year. Hardly a fair trade!

Can't wait to see what happens next week...

Cheers,

Brandon