Conversions vs Leads: Why Your Campaigns Might Be Doing Worse than You Think

Did you know that the average apartment community spends $35.52 per lead when running search ads? (source: Wordstream, 2022)

Finding new residents requires intentional groundwork. Although some may consider marketing as eating away at their bottom line, successful apartment managers understand that it’s imperative to hitting leasing goals.

Making decisions solely on conversion rates and leads can be misleading without a robust understanding of the two. Read on to learn more about leads and conversions and their role in apartment marketing.

At Flair we have a saying:

What are Leads?

A prospect who expresses interest in your community is known as a marketing lead. Most communities main goal is to produce as many leads as they can. Through advertising, they aim to move prospective renters through the sales funnel.

What are Conversions?

Conversions are the metric used to indicate how many people took a desirable action on your site. Because signing a lease involves different steps, there are different types of conversions that contribute to your community’s ability to attract new residents. In today’s post, we will discuss lead conversions, click conversions, and engagement conversions.

Each of these indicates various interest levels in your community. A multifamily marketer's job is to help guide prospective residents through these different conversions until they land the lease.

Lead Conversion

Lead conversions can be defined simply. Any conversion that gets you the prospects' information is a lead conversion.

Lead conversions are the most important for apartment communities. They allow you to widen your sales funnel so you can generate more leases.

Some examples of lead conversions include:

- Tours scheduled

- Phone calls

- Contact form submissions

- Application submissions

Click Conversions

Click conversions or click-through conversions show a higher level of interest in your product. When a person has landed on your website, if they click through to specific pages to learn more they are expressing more intent.

Examples of click conversions are:

- Floor plan page clicks

- “View amenities” click

- “Apply now” button click

Engagement Conversions

Engagement conversions refer to how prospects interact with your website. Do they stay on for 3+ minutes, or do they exit the second your homepage loads?

Common engagement conversions are:

- 3+ minutes on site

- 3+ pages viewed

- 75% scroll

You need to be careful when using engagement conversions, these often inflate conversion rate and cost per conversion in marketing reports, and can make performance look better than it really is.

Tip💡:If you’re seeing conversion rates of 40%+, it’s likely that engagement conversions are in play (unless you're a marketing legend, in which case you should apply for some of our open roles).

Conversions vs. Leads Summary

The infographic on the right should sum up the difference between the two.

Where To Go From Here

Knowing your advertising metrics, such as leads and conversions, is necessary to make data-driven decisions for your apartment marketing and determine their true effectiveness.

Don’t be afraid to ask your marketing provider for clarity in their reporting. If most of your sources (i.e. ILS) are being evaluated on a cost-per-lead basis, make sure to hold your marketing suppliers to the same standard.

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