It seems so easy, right? Anyone can take a new home and throw it up on Facebook and get some likes. That’s great on your Facebook page, but does that actually give you any leads? 

While you know you should be posting on Facebook, it’s hard to know exactly what’s working. You can turn to Facebook for some help with data and analytics but it’s easy to get lost in the nearly 300 metrics Facebook provides. So, in theory, you should only focus on one metric: followers or likes. Although it’s important to keep an eye on followers, it’s dangerous to select only one metric to measure your overall Facebook efforts. One metric cannot tell the entire story of your Facebook success. Not to mention, it’s easy to go online and pay for likes or even impressions for your posts. That doesn’t make them relevant likes and impressions for homes you are selling. Having the goals in place is necessary to drive traffic and gain leads. When measuring overall success on Facebook, look at metrics in three categories: engagement, traffic, and conversions. To bring in the best leads, these components must work together both on your Facebook page and the ads you are creating. 

Engagement gauges the interest of your audience. This metric tells you whether your content is relevant and interesting or whether your audience skips over your posts. Start with three key measurements related to engagement: engagement rate, people taking action, and content clicks.

Engagement Rate

Your engagement rate is the ratio of people engaging in some way with your content over the number of views your content has received. This helps show whether your viewers are reading your posts or ads as relevant. If 1,000 people see your post and only 3 people click, comment, like, or share, you need to rethink the post. Typically, you want to see an engagement rate of 5-6% for content on your page.

People Taking Action

People taking action are the number of people that have performed some action on your page or ad. This number is more representative of your followers than the page likes you receive. Why? Because these people are actively engaging with your page. It’s not a one-and-done like that never means anything again. Plus, you can easily see if people are continuing to engage with your page long after the initial follow or like.

Content Clicks

And the last measurement for engagement is the number of clicks your Facebook content receives, what we call content clicks. Again, this shows the relevancy of the content you are publishing on your page. These clicks include photo or website clicks, likes, shares, comments, clicks to see more, etc. While you may get 10 likes on your photo, it’s better to get 10 clicks to your website or Facebook page. Looking into these metrics give you a more comprehensive view of your followers’ actions. It goes beyond the numbers that are apparent and shows deeper insight into your audience.  

Moving on to the second key metric, traffic, we focus on your overall number of sessions, your bounce rate, and your average session duration.

Sessions

The overall number of sessions from Facebook shows the amount of traffic being referred to your website from Facebook. Depending on the type of builder and your online following, this number should be around or above 10% of your total sessions. You can find this all in Google Analytics.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate shows the number of people who landed on your website and left without taking any further action. This measurement shows how relevancy of your Facebook traffic. We typically look for a 45-55% bounce rate, although some campaigns can still be successful at a higher rate if other metrics are performing well. If you are using Facebook ads, your bounce rate might be a little higher than your followers’ bounce rate. This data can also be found in your Google Analytics.

Average Session Duration

Like your bounce rate, your average session duration helps determine the success of the Facebook sessions. The session duration is the average amount of time spent on your website from all sessions. This is a signifier of not only a good Facebook audience, but also your website content. If people are staying on your site for 1:30 to 2:00 minutes, they must be interested and find the website content appealing. And as we say, the longer they stay, the more interested they become in your homes.   

Using conversion goals is the biggest indicator of quality leads. It doesn’t really matter how long or interested a person might be in your content unless they perform some conversion action. We break conversions into a couple measurements: pageviews and lead actions.

Pageviews

This is where both contact us page views and available homes page views come into scope. People must be looking at the homes you are ready to sell or looking to see where they can find a model home to really be a quality lead. People clicking on a contact us page or your available homes page is signifying they are interested in learning more.

Lead Actions

Depending on the website, we can even go as far as measuring the phone clicks, downloads, and form submits on your website. All these conversion metrics really tell you the value you are receiving for your efforts. It’s a pretty straightforward return on your investment.   Although we still provided you with a ton of information, the good news is you can start simply by measuring your engagement rate, session duration, and contact us page views. Start small and then start implementing the rest. Again, you will never have overall success on Facebook if you only look at one metric. To see the full picture, you need to focus on your engagement, traffic, and conversion. So, go dazzle your team with quality leads from Facebook -- leads that actually sell homes!   For more information on social media for homebuilders, reach out to our sales team today!