I would love to get some real hard facts from agents that are actually tracking stats with goals through analytics. Not just agents that think one way is better than the other based on their feelings and their comfort level, but real data. Most likely the agent that is not going to call somebody that signs up is going to feel that a voluntary sign up is better than requiring a user to sign up and the agent that loves calling users as they sign up is going to have the opposite opinion.

The goal here is to compare real stats to see how agents can convert more business from their sites. I would like to share some stats from my Hawaii site from goals we set up and we will hopefully get some agents contributing what they are doing and their stats.

Here is how my site works so you can get a better idea of the stats and what they represent: It allows the user to search easily and get results quickly. I then have it set up to load the actual property detailed page when they click on a property from the results to get more details. Then a light box sign up form is displayed to them. They can see what they are going to get. I think this is the most effective way if you are going to require a sign up.  (It can also be set up to let them view a few properties and then prompt the sign up process.  I ran A/B testing and found the way I am currently doing had a 4-5% higher sign up rate.)

Here is 2 months (end of last year) of stats with goals set up in Google Analytics:

Sign Up Form Displayed = 14,816

Sign Up Form Completed = 3682

Email Requests Submitted = 766

Actual sign ups were 26% and of those who signed up almost 21% sent in an email request about more information. That gave my team 3682 people to call and 766 to engage in further conversation about real estate. Plus we also had 3682 people now signed up getting daily email alerts of new properties, which will result in more contacts with the potential homebuyers and sellers. I truly believe the more chances you give yourself to make contact with your users the more sales you will be able to do.

I would be interested to see if anybody has some stats on either required or voluntary sign ups. I would really like to see some stats that somebody has been tracking on their voluntary sign up sites (Percentage of users to sign ups and percentage of those to email requests, etc….).

If you are not tracking these things you probably should start so you can make a business decision based on real stats instead of just feelings.