What’s Driving Traffic? How to Track Every Lead from Your Listing

Lead quality consistently ranks as one of the top priorities for multifamily marketers when they evaluate their advertising options. In a tough market with high vacancy and limited rent growth, multifamily marketers don’t just want leads — they want leads that are likely to convert into leases.

But how can you assess your advertising options if you don’t know where your leads are coming from? That’s where lead tracking comes in.

As you refresh your listing for this year’s peak leasing season, keep an eye out for lead tracking. A few simple steps can level up your listing to capture valuable lead sources, giving you a clearer picture of where your leads are coming from and helping you get more out of your marketing.

Why lead tracking matters

When your leads aren’t tracked appropriately, you can get a skewed picture of your performance. One source might appear to be more effective than it really is, while another may mistakenly look like it’s falling behind.

When you rely on misleading or incomplete data to develop your advertising strategy, you can end up investing in sources that don’t pay off, ultimately hurting your property’s performance.

An accurate picture of your lead sources helps you allocate more dollars to your top-performing sources and fewer to those that underperform.

How to track leads from your Apartments.com listing

Let’s take a closer look at your Apartments.com listing. Two of the key areas where you can enable tracking are your property website URL and your phone number.

Optimize your property website URL

When prospective residents find your website through your Apartments.com listing, do you know where they’re coming from? A few tweaks to the URL on your listing can help you track this traffic. Instead of pasting in a bare URL, like thenameofyourcommunity.com, make sure the URL includes special codes for tracking.

One of the most common options is UTM tracking. UTM parameters are simple tags that are added to the end of your URL. They typically have labels like “utm_source,” “utm_medium,” and “utm_campaign.”

For example, your URL with UTM parameters might look like this:

https://www.thenameofyourcommunity.com?utm_source=apartments.com&utm_medium=ils&utm_campaign=apartments.com-lakeside-apartments

When you analyze your website performance in a tool such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, UTM tags will show you which visitors or leads came in through your listing. Depending on what platform you use, your property management software may also read UTM parameters and include this data in your reporting.

With free tools like Google’s Campaign URL Builder, you can turn a bare URL into a UTM-tagged URL within minutes.

Once you’ve created the UTM parameters, include the full URL string on your listing. That way, you can easily track any users who click on the “Property Website” link from your listing.

But UTMs aren’t the only way to track website traffic. Your property management software or customer relationship management tool may also offer its own tracking method.

For example, it may automatically generate a unique referral link for each advertising source, append internal tracking parameters instead of UTM tags, or even redirect traffic through a tracking domain before sending it to your site.

Oftentimes, you can identify tracking by looking for a code added to the end of your website URL, similar to UTM parameters:

https://www.thenameofyourcommunity.com?ref=apartments.com&propid=1234

In other cases, the tracking might take the form of a distinct domain that redirects to your website:

https://tracking.yourcrm.com/redirect?id=123456

Whichever form of web tracking you choose, make sure to copy and paste the exact URL into the “Property Website” field on your Apartments.com listing.

A missing or misplaced character could break the link or result in inconsistent reporting, so don’t forget to test it out. Double-check that it points to your website and is being picked up by your reporting tools!

Track your phone leads, too

It’s not just website links that support tracking. With dynamic number insertion, you can also track leads that come in by phone.

Like URLs that redirect to your website, dynamic number insertion creates a unique phone number that connects to your leasing office and captures the source of the lead.

That way you’re not left guessing where your phone leads came from. You can easily identify whether these renters found your Apartments.com listing, your property website, or another source.

You’ll need to set up dynamic number insertion through your property management software. Platforms like Entrata, RealPage, and RentCafé support dynamic number insertion and integrate with your Apartments.com listing.

With dynamic number insertion, you can attribute the source of each call, identify top-performing sources and campaigns, and break down your call-to-tour and call-to-lease conversion rates by advertising channel.

Get more tips to optimize your listing

For more ways to unleash the full power of your Apartments.com listing, check out the latest tips:

• Renters Want to See Reviews on Your Listing
• Your Guide to Getting Leads Faster
• Go All In: How Price Transparency Pays Off in Higher Lead Quality
• Have You Updated Your Property Description?
• How Unit-Specific Details Help Your Listing Stand Out
• Multimedia in Your Listing: A Key to Better Lead Quality

You can also download a printable checklist (PDF) of all 10 steps to level up your listing.