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Most lead tracking software models in multifamily today credit the ad source a prospect uses when he or she first contacts a property. Sadly, this direct attribution model fails to show the true impact of all of your marketing and advertising campaigns. Many companies have tried and are trying to include "multi-channel attribution" models within their CRM platforms in an effort to tell the full story of the client journey. The concept of multi-channel attribution aims to credit the advertising sources that a prospect uses at various touchpoints of their customer journey leading up to their conversion. The goal is to answer questions like, "What other sources did a prospect view before calling?" or "Did they visit the website multiple times in different ways before they called?" A great way to shed light on these questions and arguably one of the best ways to see multi-channel attribution for multifamily marketing today is within your own Google Analytics accounts.


In this example, Paid Search (Pay-per-click) was a part of 100% of the property website's leads in the month of June, but this would fail to show in your lead tracking software.


Assuming your multifamily digital marketing agency has linked their Google Ads account with your property's Google Analytics account this is possible for you to see firsthand. By integrating your Google Ads account and setting up conversions on your website, you will have direct access to see Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. This will show how your different advertising channels contribute to conversions on your property website. Below is a snapshot showing how the top five advertising channels contributed to website conversions for this sample property. In the case of Paid Search in the top row, the PPC campaign would only be credited within the property's CRM system with 50 leads. This is shown in the "Last Click or Direct Conversions" column on the far right. This displays the amount of conversions- calls and form submits- that would be directly attributed to your Pay Per Click campaign in your lead tracking platform. What wouldn't show in your ad source reporting, but is incredibly valuable when assessing marketing performance, is the data in the "Assisted Conversions" column. This column shows that this property's Pay Per Click campaign helped contribute to 48 conversions, but was not the final conversion interaction source that a prospect used when contacting the property. This provides great evidence to show that the property's paid search campaign was a crucial part of the prospect's apartment search path that ultimately led 48 prospects to contact the property, in addition to the 50 leads it was directly credited for.



While most CRM systems are not quite there today to show the full picture of the customer journey of a prospect's apartment search, there is a ton of useful information within Google Analytics if you use a digital marketing agency that links their Google Ads account to your Google Analytics. At Street Digital Media, we value linking our Google Ads accounts with our clients' Google Analytics. Doing so allows us to provide more transparency into the customer journey, which leads to more educated and insightful digital marketing assessments and decisions.


Having gone into effect on January 1, 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CPPA) aims to protect the privacy rights and give control over personal information for California consumers. The law requires websites to allow users the option to opt out of having their data and information collected- typically via a pop-up banner on the bottom of a site. Last week, Facebook announced a new feature called Limited Data Use (LDU) that has been automatically added to all Facebook Business accounts to limit the data collection and use of California resident information as identified by Facebook.


As reported by Search Engine Land, "the feature automatically detects if a user resides in California, and applies limited data use rules (more on those later). But that feature will only stay on until July 31—then Facebook requires businesses to update their pixel to include an LDU parameter." Please note, Street Digital Media is not here to provide any legal advice, but we do want our multifamily friends to be aware that if your digital marketing agency does not update your Facebook pixel on your website by July 31st, "your business will take on sole responsibility for compliance (and all associated risks with non-compliance)" according to Facebook. For information on how your agency can ensure that your pixel is updated and that you are in compliance, feel free to share the below link with them:


On June 1, 2020, Street Digital Media was hired to launch the pay-per-click and paid social media ad campaign for The Rise at Flagler Village, a brand new, 348-unit high rise in the highly competitive, downtown Fort Lauderdale market. The 31-story lease up was previously using another multifamily digital marketing agency, but was failing to gain the traffic and leasing velocity needed to meet absorption goals. Street Digital Media was hired to audit the current strategy in place and to launch a revised digital marketing plan to improve lead quality and leasing performance. In the pay-per-click campaign's first month, SDM increased phone calls by 23x (70 in June vs. 3 in May) while leases improved to 14 in June vs. 3 the previous month. Overall website performance improved significantly as well. Street Digital Media helped reduce the PPC traffic bounce rate by 51.8%, increase website pages/session for PPC traffic by 19.6%, and increase PPC average session duration on the property website by 93.74%. Below is a summary of the improved performance comparing the prior agency's performance in May to Street's performance in June.



During our audit and prior to the launch of our strategy, Street Digital Media found that over $300 in ad spend had been spent on search terms associated with "cheap," "affordable," "senior," and "active living" keywords in the month of May. At launch, Street ensured that the PPC campaign would not show for such terms, leading to increased clicks and impressions for more qualified online searches. The adjustment allowed for a substantial increase in quality traffic led to the onsite leasing team, which resulted in the 466% increase in lease volume month over month.


In addition to driving more quality traffic to the property website, Street Digital Media improved the website page speed performance by 49% and decreased load time by over 8 seconds. The change led to increased user engagement on the property website, lower bounce rate, increased website events, and lower cost per click in the Google and Facebook auction for paid ads. The improved quality of the website, leads to a cost savings per click in the property's digital marketing campaigns and better ROI for your ad spend.


If you are interested in a free consultation and audit of your current digital marketing strategy to see how you can improve performance, please email Donald Kleckner at dk@streetdigitalmedia.com.


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