For years, multifamily marketers and operators have been trying to bridge the gap between online digital marketing metrics and how they impact in-person (now virtual) tours and leases. The use of Urchin Tracking Modules or UTMs, is a great way to ensure you are properly tracking the referral traffic to your websites from all sources. This creates a custom tracking URL from each advertising source your apartment community is using and gives proper credit when a prospect reaches your site from those sources. UTMs can be applied to ILSs, PPC campaigns, paid social media campaigns, Google My Business listings, reputation management sites like Yelp, and even print ads or signage. Multifamily marketing teams should look to create a UTM library to save on file. They can then apply their UTM nomenclature to all of their properties, creating a consistent tracking methodology for their entire portfolio. This will allow for simpler, more concise analysis for how your apartment marketing and advertising listings are working for you.
In the screenshot above, one can see an example of how applying UTMs to your online ads will help you track the referral traffic to your property websites. In this example, you can see that Facebook Traffic campaign, PPC campaign (here labeled as cpc), Facebook retargeting campaign, and direct traffic are the top traffic generators for this website. If you are interested in creating your own UTM library, simply use this site https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/ to generate your own. Once created for each of your sites, be sure to send them to your vendors, so they update your listings properly. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to reach out to dk@streetdigitalmedia.com.
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