One of the things that I love about what we do is that the process is never over. 

I first got into digital marketing in my early 20s; I found it fascinating how the “offline world,” was impacted by the online world – which now almost sounds quaint to say. We were able to communicate this crazy thing called the Internet to real estate brokers who knew that it was going to impact their business. Many of those brokers are still clients today. 

Fast forward almost 25 years later and we’re still testing, experimenting, and tinkering with what we do every day to try to make it more successful for you, our clients. And, we’re excited to share the results of an experiment we ran this past summer deploying forced registration on our real estate websites with our new Map Search.  

We tested a number of different ways in which we could require site visitors to provide their name, email address, and/or phone number in order to see more information about listings. When creating this test, we had to balance not alienating site visitors (so they left too soon) and also asking for their contact information soon enough so that we were able to get it before they moved off of our client’s websites.

The results were fascinating!

Let’s start with the baseline: our new Map Search is industry-leading and provides a really solid user experience. It keeps buyers and sellers on our client’s sites longer and helps them conduct more searches. (See our new Map Search in action!)

With the new Map Search, we can use both encouraged and forced registration. Encouraged registration is a pop-up that suggests to the user they register with our client’s website while forced registration requires a user to register with our client’s website in order to see more information.

What we found was that encouraged registration didn’t generate enough leads. Website visitors could simply X out of the encouraged registration request and continue to look at more properties.

With forced registration, we experimented with the best time to deploy the pop-up. Our testing helped us determine that it was best to let website visitors run a search. We put a lot of effort into getting visitors to our clients’ sites and the last thing we wanted to do was to send them away too quickly.

We began placing forced registration pop-ups when a user wanted to see the property detail view page about a specific home for sale. At that point, they had engaged with a site, ran a search, and wanted to get more information about a home. Because we felt like we were handing over something of value to the users, we thought they might be willing to hand over something of value to our clients, i.e. their name, email address, and/or phone number.

During the testing period, we put websites into three groups. We tried popping up the forced registration after the 1st, 3rd, and 5th property detail view requests and ran these experiments across a statistically significant number of websites in different markets.

Here are the results:

• 425% increase in user registrations on websites with forced registration popping up after the user tried to click on the 1st property detail view 
• 213% increase in user registrations on websites with forced registration popping up after the user tried to click on the 3rd property detail view 
• 159% increase in user registrations on websites with forced registration popping up after the user tried to click on the 5th property detail view

As my cross-country coach said in high school “The clock doesn’t lie.” We believe in data. Forced registration works and has the biggest net impact on our total number of conversions by placing it after the user tries to click on the first property detail view and is now our recommended setting for our websites with the new Map Search.

Do you want 425% more leads? Please contact us using the form below and we’ll make it happen!