I sat at the meeting table, across from the principal of one of our longest serving broker firms. Faintly in the distance, I could hear a clock ticking. We’d both decided to skip the coffee as we’d both already drunk far too many that morning. I stared and him, and he stared at me…
“Well” I began, “When marketing Management Rights on our portal, it’s really important you take advantage of all the feature listing allocations included with your broker plan.”
“hmmm” he nodded sagely before pausing. He looked up at me from the table ”But why?”
“Well…” I continued, ”because they are way more effective than Standard Listings. They have bigger photos, they are prioritised in search results, we include them with our newsletter that is sent to over 8,000 people each month, we run them on our social media channels they are shown as display ads to our audience even when they are no longer on our website!”
“That’s all great Nick… but why should I bother to upgrade to a feature?”
“I just told you why, because of all those fantastic reasons.”
“Yeah but you haven’t explained… The WHY?! How many more enquiries will I get from a feature listing than a standard? In this industry we don’t get tire kickers, because tire kicking management rights is very very boring. If someone enquires about a management rights listing, it’s because they actually want to buy that listing. Enquiries are everything to my business… how many ENQUIRIES will a feature listing get me over a standard. That’s what I need to know, that’s the data I need to give my vendors. That’s the WHY!”
“No problem… let me get some numbers over to you on that one right away!” I answered confidently, but in truth, I was embarrassed to admit his question stumped me. It shouldn’t have, I ask the exact same questions to my REA and Domain reps all the time, but I’d never actually sat down and crunched the maths on our own Management Rights portal. I mean… I knew it had to be more because of all the extra exposure… but I’d never quantified it… until now.
At the conclusion of our fruitful meeting I bid the principal farewell and immediately set about calculating the answer to his parting riddle: How much more effective were featured management rights listings over standards?
I wrote some code to figure it out! I firstly dumped a spreadsheet out of Google Analytics showing exactly how many enquiries we’d had over the last month on the site, and to which listings.
I then loaded that spreadsheet as a CSV string into a php script I’d written that split out every listing ID of every email enquiry, and ran a check against our live database to ascertain if the listing was a feature or a standard. I then counted the total number of standard and feature listings on the site, to determine exactly how many email enquiries, per month, we generated on a per listing basis, and then compared the two numbers to work out the exact increase. Here’s how it went (These numbers relate only to email enquiries, on MR Listings we also track telephone enquiries, which occur at a rate of about 2 calls per email per month):
Feature Enquiries to Feature Listings: 80 / 93 = 0.86021505376344 email enquiries per feature listing per month.
Standard Enquiries to Standard Listings: 158 / 645 = 0.24496124031008 email enquiries per standard listing per month.
Therefore Feature Listings get 351% more enquiries. Three and a half times more sales prospects. I then ran a similar calculation for the number of times Feature Listings were clicked into, it was 250% more than standard listings.
I promptly drafted an infographic for my broker to show to his vendors. All brokers receive a set number Feature listing upgraded on the site each month, so when you’re engaging a broker to sell your Management Rights make sure you ask them to upgrade you to a Feature! The difference is huge.