How To Use IDX Report Data To Connect With Buyers
People are visiting your website. Site traffic is up, time-on-site is looking good and you’re even getting inquiries for questions on specific properties. All good signs of a healthy home search experience via your real estate website.
That’s good news!
The question now is, how do you identify motivated buyers versus people who are just browsing the market?
Enter the IDX Report Tab
If you’re a dsSearchAgent user, you’ll have access to client profiles and IDX “Report” data. To access the IDX Report Tab…
- Log into your Control Panel
- Hover over dsSearchAgent >> Click on “Contacts”
- Select a contact from one of your Contact Groups
The IDX Report Tab will display the following data:
Here, you have access to things like:
Search Aggregates – this shows the averages of the searches that the contact has made.
Click Aggregates – this shows the averages of the listings the contact has clicked on.
Favorites – this shows all of the listings that the contact has favorited.
Viewed Properties – this is a list of all of the listings that the contact has viewed.
Similar Results – this is a list of all listings that match the search aggregates.
Property Searches – this is a list of all of the searches that the contact has made. Saved searches are listed first with a floppy disk icon.
What to do with the Data:
Send listing suggestions – If the user has not been on your IDX search regularly, chances are they may have missed some of these newer listings that match their search criteria. Put some of them together in an email for the client, or use them as talking points for a phone call.
Get content ideas – Take note of the search aggregates (and more importantly, the clicked aggregates) for your visitors, as these can be great inspiration for blog posts or other articles on your website. If you’re noticing alot of visitors are looking at homes in a certain subdivision, price range, or within a certain school, put together additional content for your site targeting more of those users. On the flipside… if you notice an area that your site already targets with content/links is simply not getting many IDX searches or clicks; you may want to see how you can improve the conversion rate for that set of users.
Get navigation ideas – Review each user’s property search history (or even their viewed property history) to find patterns in how to start in one area and end up in another. If you’re noticing many buyers who start their searches in the city of Irvine end up otherwise looking within 2 or 3 specific subdivisions or maybe in the nearby city of Tustin, consider adding search links, widgets, or even a little bit of content to that effect to your site, such as: “…for home buyers interested in Irvine homes, be sure to check out this neighborhood and that neighborhood as well.”
Tag/group buyers – Every lead in your account is stored in a “group” (like a folder), and can have multiple “tags” (I like to think of these as post-it notes) – – and both can help you sort and organize leads for emailing, distributing, or otherwise sorting. Use the search data to determine what kinds of groups and tags you need for your users, then you can move and assign people as soon as you can tell what kind of buyer/search user they are. Some great uses of groups we’ve seen are: “New Leads”, “Prospect”, “Dead Leads”, “Closed”, “Contacts”; while tags are great for describing the buyers such as: “$100-200k”, “No REOs”, “Seller”, “Coastal”
Create newsletters for buyers – Newsletters can be an effective way to stay in touch with users over the weeks (or months) they spend searching. See what criteria people are searching for, then put together newsletters to match different sets of users (ie: “latest REO news”, “this weeks Irvine home highlights”, or “Luxury homes in Tustin, Oct 2012”). The number of IDX users searching for each topic can help dictate the newsletter frequency – – no one wants to put together a daily newsletter that only 4 or 5 users will read. Once you have your newsletter campaigns setup, you can automatically subscribe users to campaigns based on their search interests, or otherwise email them an invitation to subscribe. AgentReach email marketing is built in to SearchAgent, and provides templates for easy to manage multiple daily, weekly, or monthly newsletters to different groups.
What else could you do with this data?
Those are just some ways you can use IDX data to better connect with your site visitors. What else could you do with this data? Any other ways it might be useful in helping you connect with motivated buyers?