Multi-Touch Attribution: Changing Your Investment in Marketing
How can we know which leads coming from multiple digital sources are the best for our properties? The 14th Annual Apartment Innovation and Marketing Conference (AIM 2019), which took place at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach on May 5-8, 2019 convened a panel of experts to determine best practices for multi-touch attribution. Moderated by Arthur Kosmider, the Marketing Director for Lefrak, panelists
- Cassie Khaing, Director of Marketing, Mill Creek Residential Trust LLC
- Michelle Moriello, Director of Digital Marketing, WinnResidential
- Katie Nelson, Director of Marketing, CAPREIT
discussed both the challenges and “wins” for this relatively new proptech.
Opening the discussion, Kosmider defined multi-touch attribution as “giving credit where credit is due.” Not focusing on any one tech solution (“because no model is perfect”), he added that the discussion would focus on making marketing decisions informed by the various resources now available through multi-touch data.
Changing the game. At Mill Creek, said Khaing, where digital marketing is seen as an extension of the property management team and asset management team, “They’re looking at us to be the experts on multi-touch attribution. To tell them where to place their money.” Mill Creek recently conducted a six-month trial to develop a “fully agile marketing strategy” that has “blown up the way we budget. We’re not seeing changes at the community level yet,” she added, “but we’re definitely seeing it on the corporate budgeting level.” The work that Mill Creek put into its model creates report that indicate where leads come from and even how brand campaigns are working. Data, however, is only as good as what you put in. “From a corporate level, we have spent a lot of time on this,” said Khaing. “For example, we actually track every click for each of our communities. That, she concluded, “is a full time job!”
Nailing down the source. “It’s still a very manual process,” agreed WinnResidential’s Moriello. “We’ve made great strides with this data, but it’s not flawless.” Displaying some Google Analytics samples of customer journeys, Moriello noted the number of steps between paid and organic search, paid ads and direct touch before the customer filled out a guest card. “That is not unusual,” she added. “Google recently released information that, in the real estate purchase journey (which is similar to the rental journey), a purchaser will hit 19.2 sources before making a decision.” Knowing the scope of the journey, however, “allows us to be nimble and make decisions for all of our campaigns.”
Hear my song. What has been learned, said CAPREIT’s Nelson, is that the journey is no longer linear. The customer journey tends to look like “notes of music, going up and down.” For one thing, she noted, “It takes about eight touchpoints before the customer has brand awareness,” and “20 touchpoints to convert to a lease.” And brand recognition is important: “Typically those will be your secondary sources that you don’t spend a lot of money on, but you get a high impression count. So you’re not spending a lot of money the first or second month of pre-lease.”
Takeaways:
- Nelson: The first thing we do is create psychographics and personas - before budgeting.
- Khaing: If you see another persona pop up, you can change your marketing pattern.
- Nelson: Combine data insights with those of your on-site team to catch any on-the-ground trends.
- Moriello: Don’t be in a rush to sign up for 12-month contracts; shorter contracts can make you more nimble and strategic.
- Kosmider: Multi-touch attribution shows us that our marketing efforts are a long-term game.
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