At Waterton, Love tracks bounce rates for all incoming traffic, further delineating the data between residents and prospects and whether or not a visitor is using a mobile device or a desktop/laptop PC. In general, the firm typically sees mobile bounce rates of 30 percent for traffic to the firm’s resident portals and mobile bounce rates of approximately 50 percent for prospect websites. That puts Waterton squarely in the industry average, according to Property Solutions data across Web platforms for more than 500 multifamily clients. For incoming desktop visitors, bounce rates are typically half those of mobile.
Still, although bounce rates remain a revered metric, the value of those numbers from a business perspective has diminished, particularly as companies perpetuate their value proposition across multiple platforms and users find new, faster ways to access the information they need.
Mentally Mobilized
The reason bounce rates tend to trend highly among mobile users is rooted in the evolution of smart phone functionality—and it might not necessarily be a bad thing. “Mobile bounce rates are higher because consumers using smart phones are expecting to quickly access a specific type of information with very little navigation,” says Dan Hobin, CEO of Bend, Ore.–based G5, which specializes in online marketing solutions for the multifamily, senior housing, student housing, and self-storage industries. “That also correlates to time of use. The average apartment prospect using a traditional computer spends about two minutes on a community website. For mobile users, that time drops to 30 seconds or less.”
Frazier says time spent on a site, particularly as it correlates to actionable items and bounce rates, is increasingly becoming a more valuable metric for apartment Internet marketers than bounce rates on their own. “Event tracking is gaining a lot of favor as we attempt to measure how long a visitor is on a website and what it is that they are doing there,” Frazier says. “How long is it until they fill out a guest card? How long until they have called a unique phone number for an appointment? That information can be a lot more powerful.”
Delivering such actionable items, particularly to time-sensitive smart phone browsers, is quickly becoming an essential characteristic of apartment firm Web design and functionality. “Function is everything and defines interaction. You simply can’t force mobile users to hunt for information,” Love says. “Consequently, we have stripped both resident and prospect sites down a lot to give our portal visitors what they are looking for and not bury them in the minutiae. We want to get straight to the point: Lease an apartment; pay your rent; make a service request. That’s our goal.”
