Each year, our agency culls a great deal of real estate website data in order to provide the most up-to-date benchmarks for key marketing metrics. This guide presents the 7 marketing metrics that real estate companies tend to track in a simple table. Afterwards, it offers key insights into each metric, including why it matters in the context of your firm’s overall growth and how you can improve upon it.
Having the right metrics allows you to both track the success of your real estate marketing program and better predict future revenue.
Real Estate Marketing Metrics & Benchmarks
| Metric | Benchmarks |
| ROI | PPC: 36% |
| SEO: 1,389% | |
| Social: 182% | |
| Webinars: 430% | |
| Total MQLs | +40% YOY |
| Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) | Organic: $660 |
| Paid : $1,185 | |
| Cost Per Lead (CPL) | Organic: $416 |
| Paid: $480 | |
| Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate | 2.2% |
| Lead to MQL Conversion Rate | 27% |
| Clickthrough Rate | Organic Search: 39.6% for Position 1 |
| PPC: 1.9% | |
| Email: 4.9% |
Real Estate Marketing Metric #1: ROI
| ROI Benchmarks | |
| PPC | 36% |
| SEO | 1,389% |
| Social | 182% |
| Webinars | 430% |
ROI evaluates the overall health of your marketing programs, comparing the total investment against total profit. At the end of the day, your ROI determines whether or not your efforts are successful, particularly when your main marketing goal is lead generation.
Our real estate clients have found organic channels to have a much higher long-term ROI than paid ones because users trust them more. Real estate firms seeking to increase ROI tend to divide their marketing investment among various inbound demand generation programs. This does not obviate paid lead generation, however, as paid marketing can be effectively used as a short-term supplement while slower, higher-ROI channels ramp up.
As important as it is, ROI does not tell you what your strengths or weaknesses are when evaluating a single marketing campaign or channel—it only tells you if those efforts are strong or weak. To adjust when a single channel is underperforming will require consulting the other metrics in this guide.
Real Estate Marketing Metric #2: Total MQLs
| Total MQL Benchmark | |
| Growth Benchmark | +40% YOY |
Total Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) is another high-level metric that allows marketing teams to evaluate their overall performance. Like ROI, it can quickly indicate whether your campaign is performing, but it comes with the drawbacks of not taking into account your marketing spend, the quality of the MQLs, or the cost of converting them into sales.
Because it is divorced from Sales and Operations, Total MQLs is a much more accessible metric for marketers at larger real estate companies who may not have access to data on the full journey from website visitor to customer. However, the person evaluating your marketing program should be careful not to treat all MQLs as equal, since the potential LTV of one MQL vs another could be vastly different.
Real Estate Marketing Metric #3: Customer Acquisition Cost
| Customer Acquisition Cost Benchmarks | |
| Organic Benchmark | $660 |
| Paid Benchmark | $1,185 |
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total expense involved in bringing in a single new customer. CAC tells marketing if they are overspending on each new customer. As with ROI, CACs vary widely based on channel; but unlike ROI, CAC does not take into account the value of each customer. For example, the average CAC of Account Based Marketing is extremely high – $4,644 – but ABM targets larger prospects that can produce a disproportionately large return, so may well be worth the cost.
In other words, CAC is best used in conjunction with ROI.
To achieve low CACs, the best strategy is reserving higher CAC channel for targeting particularly high-value audiences, while using lower CAC channels (e.g. SEO or LinkedIn Organic) for the bulk of your lead generation.
Real Estate Marketing Metric #4: Cost Per Lead
| Customer Per Lead Benchmarks | |
| Organic Benchmark | $416 |
| Paid Benchmark | $480 |
Cost Per Lead (CPL) refers to the investment required to generate a new lead from the website. By this extent, CPL is similar to CAC in that they both measure investment vs return, but they differ in that CAC focuses on the entire marketing and sales process, whereas CPL measures only the cost of filling the top of the lead generation funnel.
Comparing CPL and CAC side-by-side allows you to identify breakdowns in your marketing and sales processes:
| Low CAC | High CAC | |
| Low CPL | The ideal scenario for marketing and sales. No changes needed. | Marketing is generating leads, but those leads are expensive to close.
Solution: Target lower-funnel leads with your marketing to shorten sales cycles. |
| High CPL | Marketing is producing only warm leads that require little effort for the sales team to close.
Solution: Invest in marketing programs that reach a broader audience to allow for faster growth. | Neither marketing nor sales is effective at generating new business.
Solution: First address marketing—generating higher quality leads will improve CACs as well as CPLs. Reevaluate after lead generation has improved. |
The above metrics allow you to evaluate both digital and traditional real estate marketing channels. Our next 3 metrics focus on digital marketing.
Real Estate Marketing Metric #5: Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate
| Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate Benchmark | |
| Growth Benchmark | 2.2% |
Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate is the first of the core digital marketing metrics. It tracks how many of your website visitors leave their information via a contact form, sign up for an email list, or perform any other conversion event that your marketing team defines.
This metric tells you how well conversion-optimized your website is, as well as speaking to the quality of the content on your website. To improve this conversion rate, ensure that you earn attention all the way down the page with engaging formatting and graphics, and include clear calls to action so visitors know how to reach out.
Real Estate Marketing Metric #6: Lead to MQL Conversion Rate
| Lead to MQL Conversion Rate Benchmark | |
| Growth Benchmark | 27% |
In contrast with the Visitor-to-Lead Conversion rate, the Lead to MQL Conversion Rate measures how many of the leads you generate turn out to be actual real estate sales prospects. This excludes, for example, visitors who sign up for a blog and are only interested in learning more about the real estate industry.
In other words, this metric measures how well your marketing targets an actually valuable audience. The best way to improve is to refine this targeting by creating detailed customer personas of your potential customers.
Real Estate Marketing Metric #7: Clickthrough Rate
| Total MQLs Benchmarks | |
| Clickthrough Rate | Organic Search: 39.6% for Position 1 |
| PPC: 1.9% | |
| Email: 4.9% | |
Clickthrough Rate (CTR) is the ratio of how many people see a link to your website versus how many actually click on it. The most common 3 ways this comes up in the real estate industry are in organic search results, PPC ads, and on email marketing lists. We’ve provided separate benchmarks for all three above.
This metric helps strategists identify high-traffic channels for the type of content they produce — for example, if an article about the best way to flip houses for a profit has a particularly high CTR on your email campaign, it may indicate an audience that is more receptive to that channel.
Improving your CTR is a trial-and-error process; often content needs to be repurposed for differing channels, so content teams may need to test several options before finding one that speaks to your audience’s needs.
Evaluating Your Real Estate Marketing Metrics
Because of the expertise required to navigate these metrics, many real estate companies choose to work with an experienced agency while training their own marketing team. Our agency specializes in generating organic leads for real estate companies by combining SEO and thought leadership content. If you’re interested in learning more, you can contact us here.
