For some, 2020 was a year to forget. For others, 2020 marked a record-setting year of sales. For everybody, 2020 marked a year full of challenges to overcome, opportunities to grasp, and lessons to learn. So what worked? What did we learn in 2020 that we didn’t know in 2019? And most importantly—what does that mean for 2021? Let’s review.

The Pulse of Our Digital Industry

We were a website company first, and our websites have always been at the core of our digital innovation. While there are certainly other ways buyers can browse houses for their new home, homebuilder websites get more exposure with every passing year.

When we sit down at the end of each year and run all of our queries to get the final numbers on traffic and engagement, one thing we want to make sure we do is compare like numbers year over year. If you’ve been following along on our blog and Pro Tip series, the landscape of digital marketing changes—a lot. When those changes happen, we have to change with it. With that being said, we prefer to track the change in organic traffic only to measure 2020’s effect on web traffic.

Organic traffic is simply traffic you don’t pay for. It comes from a host of different places and consists of many different original sources. For example, a successful Google Ads campaign can (and most of the time does) lead to a healthy increase in organic traffic, because users will come back to your website a second, third, or even fourth time by way of Google search or typing in your URL directly. Organic traffic can also be a sign of SEO success. A solid SEO strategy means you’re ranking well for the keywords people are searching for, and therefore, more users are coming to your site from Google’s search engine results page.

But the biggest thing organic traffic tells us is how big the digital marketplace actually is—here’s what it looked like in 2020.

Organic Web Traffic - 2020
All Builder Designs websites

This graph helps us visualize exactly what COVID-19 did to the industry in February, March, and April. Here’s how those months traditionally look...

To keep reading, download our free ebook: 2020 Builder Designs 2020 Year in Review :What Worked, What Didn’t and Where We Go From Here