Like most brokers across the country, your broker members are most likely advertising listings online so their properties can be viewed by the millions of online consumers searching for properties across the web. Now, they can sit back and wait for the traffic and interest to build, but instead waiting by their phones for online buyers to call, what if they could take a few easy steps that would help to drive more traffic to their listings?

Let’s take a look at some of the tricks and best practices to improve online traffic.

There is a fierce competition going on between the biggest publishers to gain online traffic. In April, Zillow, Trulia and realtor.com® captured 34.4 percent of the 360 million visits to real estate sites last month. It’s no surprise since these publishers have recently launched massive consumer marketing campaigns to attract more online consumers and boost traffic, but most brokerages do not have the marketing budget for that. So what can your members do to compete?

It is actually easier than you might think to boost online traffic by redirecting consumer traffic from the publisher websites to their own brokerage website. Each listing detail page on the publisher websites includes a link to the “source” of the listing for consumers to get more information (we call this a click-through or visit). With ListHub there are generally three options for routing consumer traffic when they click this link:

1. The ListHub-hosted property landing pages are the default for most accounts, except in MLS markets where the property detail page redirects to the MLS public website
2. Brokers can change the redirect (at NO cost) to redirect traffic to their own property landing pages to put their brand front and center and increase traffic to their website
3. Agents may also redirect traffic to their agent website, for a one time fee, with the broker’s permission

To get set up, your broker members must login to their ListHub account and click “support” to submit the request online. The request will be fulfilled within one business day. There is no charge to the broker for this service.

For agents to redirect traffic to their agent website there are two requirements that must be met 1) The broker must give the agent permission to do so within the broker’s account settings, and 2) The agent must pay a one-time setup fee of $99. Once the broker sets the permission, an agent can submit a support request to make this change and the agent will be billed upon fulfillment.

Before your brokers redirect traffic to their website we suggest they gather baseline metrics to measure the impact of this change. How many views did they receive before redirecting traffic to their website? How many are new vs. returning visitors? What is the average number of pages people are visiting when they go to their site? Are they looking around at other properties? Your brokers or their website administrator can easily add a javascript, like Google Analytics, to their website to track this information. Then collect the same key performance indicators (KPIs) after to evaluate the effectiveness of the brokerage re-direct over time.

Do they want to know how their website’s traffic stacks up to the top publishers like Zillow, Trulia, and realtor.com®? Sure they could use reports like comScore to see how much traffic those website are getting but this will not “drill down” to show them the traffic for how specific listings are performing on their website vs Z/T/R. With ListHub Pro-Plus they can showcase their website traffic on the ListHub Reports side-by-side with the national publishers and demonstrate the power of your brand.

Watch this short video to see how easy it is