Checking the Pulse
Delivering initial screen content to Web visitors, whether they come via mobile or desktop systems, is going to increase bounce rates. An apartment prospect looking for the phone number or address of a community he wants to tour is understandably going to bounce when that information is succinctly provided on the splash page he’s been directed to.
“There might be cases when high bounce rates are not a cause for concern,” says Lynette Hegeman, vice president of marketing for Atlanta-based Gables Residential, an apartment owner with 38,000 units under management nationally, 16,000 of which are also owned by the company. “For example, most mobile traffic is for contact information and availability, so those types of content pages might have a higher bounce rate for search users when they find what they are looking for, right on that page. Google and other search engines often take users to the exact pages they are looking for, as well, which could in turn reflect a higher bounce rate.”
Indeed, sophisticated apartment operators say that bounce rates—like a pulse or heart rate—provide no information in and of themselves. Instead, they are a symptomatic data metric that points to changing variables elsewhere on a multifamily Web platform. “Any increase or decrease in bounce rates is analyzed to uncover the reason behind the change,” Hegeman says. “Our bounce rate from organic searches from search engines is low, around 20 percent, but the bounce rate from direct traffic is around 50 percent. Why? Because most Gables employees have Gables.com as their home page and tend to navigate off of it when they go to use the Web, creating a bounce.”
The apartment sector is also finding that bounce rates are affected by referring source and apartment pricing and availability. Bounce rates resulting from incoming traffic from social media sites such as Facebook tend to be high, ranging from 50 percent at Gables up to 75 percent at Englewood, Colo.–based Archstone. While the reason behind social boomeranging is still unknown, social media survey evidence points again to how information on a website correlates with user expectations.
According to an ongoing study on social media habits of apartment residents by Houston-based J. Turner Research, the No. 1 reason apartment denizens hit a social media page is to look for community event information, typically not a top item for inclusion on the splash pages of resident and prospect portals.
And while bounce rates remain a revered metric among the transactional e-commerce set, the limited supply of units in any given apartment community makes them less important as a measure of business success. Simply put, bounce rates are likely to jump in tandem with pricing and occupancy increases as Web visitors self-qualify out of the transaction. “You don’t want to rent to every single person out there,” says Property Solutions’ Brasher. “Your website acts as your No. 1 filter and is going to reduce the qualification workload of your property managers. If someone comes to your website and is not the ideal prospect and they create a bounce, that’s OK.”
