Your property website is an important tool in your multifamily advertising toolkit. But paid search isn’t the only way to drive traffic to your website — and it may not even be the most cost-effective. A new white paper from Apartments.com highlights the important role that your Apartments.com listing plays in driving traffic directly to your property website and breaks down how this referral traffic compares to other sources.
Traffic from high-intent renters
When renters find your property on Apartments.com, many of them will click through to check out your property website. In early 2025, Apartments.com tested adding a prominent link to property websites at the top of property listing pages. As a result, leads skyrocketed, with some properties seeing leads increase by two or three times.
Compared to other traffic, leads directly from Apartments.com are highly qualified. These renters have browsed your listing page and are likely to have viewed photos, floor plans, and pricing information. In fact, renters who visit property websites directly from Apartments.com spend twice as much time and are three times more likely to submit a lead than the average property website visitor.
Tracking for accurate attribution
To optimize your advertising, you need to know where traffic is coming from. How can find out which of the visitors to your property website are coming from Apartments.com? Tools like UTM codes and dynamic number insertion (DNI) make it easy to track different sources.
You can work with your property management software to add UTM tracking or DNI to your Apartments.com listing. Get step-by-step instructions for all the top software providers.
Cost-effective referrals
Compared to paid search campaigns, Apartments.com referrals can be less expensive and more effective. In paid search, the average cost per click is $2 to $10, according to Google. Additional fees can push the total to as much as $14. Visitors who find your website through search without first researching the property on Apartments.com may not be serious prospects, driving down your conversion rate.
Apartments.com referrals, on the other hand, are already included in the cost of your advertising package. This traffic comes from highly qualified renters who are more likely to convert into residents. As a result, clicks from Apartments.com deliver up to 10x the value of a Google click.
Get the full picture
For a closer look at how Apartments.com drives traffic to your property website, check out the white paper.
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