With regard to the portal using the stats to find better results I remember this in another thread once before when a UK portal who found that simply changing the colour to orange I think it was on the reply form increased enquiries massively. This is the sort of thing I believe you are talking about the portal doing their own analysis for the benefit of their clients.

They now have the ability to do this sort of testing and analysis lets hope they do.

There will always be those that know how to use statistics to evaluate their listings performance and those that have no idea or just don’t want to bother. My point is that REA as a service provider, and because everone pays the same rate to them, data should be dumbed down so that outcomes are given to the client and not a bunch of numbers that need a time resource, at the agents office, to produce outcome.

For example lets take three agents at the extremes of analytical abilty:

Agent A- Takes the data supplied by REA
– identifies the leads that came from REA
– analyses the rate of activty against these leads ie number/ % of floor plans viewed, number/% of video views etc
– conversion to sales from these leads- from sales staff
This will tell this agent three things:

1.the best way to present advertisements and
2. what best practice is being used by successful sales staff
3. uses the data to follow the sales principles of a). do more of, b). do less of c) scrap altogether.

Agent B- Collects the data and gives it to his admin staff for analysis and passes it onto his sales staff

Agent C- ignores the data and expects their service provider to provide the analysis/recommendations.

I would daresay that most will fit the category of Agent C and REA should recognise this as it is this critical mass that keeps them in business.

Your analysis in the latter part of your article in part proves my point. You have analysed statistics which tell me our advice to our portal users should be:

- include a floor plan
- ramp up social media

There is much more that can be espoused on the subject of use of statistics and perhaps some “expert” could do an article of this, but for now the debate is on whether the new stats regime from REA will help the majority of paying customers and my simple answer is NO.

Cheers

I have to agree with you…

As I mentioned earlier for most agents the data wont mean much. Some agents will be able to extract more out of it than others. You can use it for some rudimentary split testing but if we could get the same numbers at a property level it would be easier….

But best of all is if REA use this information to work out what works best and to report back to us.

What is a shame is that most agents will not delve deeper into the stats and they will take the Enquiry, Engagement and Views at face value and use these numbers to compare against other portals …… of course that would not be their goal all the time would it?

Thanks for the article.

Having been at both ends of the scale ie corporate and client, I know that statistical data sets needed by both to run their business are quite different. The swathe of statistical data coming out of REA would be of little interest to me as a client (agent) in running my day to day business.
However, simple statistical data showing how many leads came from each listing would be invaluable.

The way I would like to see REA use the stats is to do analysis, and come up with recommendations to agents as to how or what they should do to achieve better leads outcomes.

The only real data an agent needs to know is where did the lead come from.

Every agent needs to do these sort of calculations for their own office and if they do i reckon they might look at their eMarketing a little differently. Maybe agents need to wrestle back our own share of our own wallets

As an example using real stats why individual agent results are unreliable is it also depends on what product that agents utilises.

Looking at one agent in the statistics I quoted in the article…. They use a lot of add on products and they certainly generated a bucket load of email enquiries. Given what they spend if you used email enquiry only as a base metric it was costing them the equivalent of $45 per email enquiry over the past month.

A simplified view I know because they also generate phone calls etc etc.. but it is the sort of numbers we are talking about using for comparison.

If they just had a standard platinum subscription they would obviously expect their email enquiry to plummet…..

so statistically if their email enquiry dropped by as much as 50% in that case this means that the first 50% of all enquiry per month were priced at a little over $8 and the second 50% was costing them over $80.

If the drop was more like 75% then the first 25% of the enquiry cost them $16 and the last 75% cost them $55 each.

The problem is without all that extra information how does another agent use it as a comparison to theirs?

Of course, to the agent themselves this data is critical. If I was them I would be asking myself if the extra $39 to $72 per enquiry would be able to generate more enquiry and better spent elsewhere but that is a whole other discussion and the decision itself certainly involves more than these numbers anyway.

Agents that dont look too closely will take it at face value, and some who dig a little but dont pay attention to whats happening will wonder where all their emails are going.

I just had a interesting idea however. I’ve recently done a extensive integration of a client’s website with Google Analytics. Any tech people here should check out Custom Variables. You can create some incredibly powerful stats with them, for example the client can now get a full breakdown of search behaviour on their site.

Now if you could present that data to agents on a portal….