After a visitor arrives at the home page of your property website, what’s the very first page they are most likely to visit next?
If you guessed it’s the photo gallery, where visitors can see beautiful images of the property, most marketing managers would assume you’re right. But industry studies of property website analytics tell a very different story.
According to Forbes, the photo gallery is only the third-most visited page on a website. Naturally, the home page comes first.
So where do visitors go after the home page, if it’s not to the gallery? Overwhelmingly, they go to the floor plans page.
Two out of three website visitors skip the gallery and go straight to the property floor plans page instead.
UDR, a multifamily real estate company, analyzed the website metrics for more than 100 apartment properties, and reached a surprising conclusion. In the majority of cases, the first interaction on a property website is to click on the floor plans page.
“The floor plans page is definitely our top page. 60% to 65% of our visitors visit it as their first interaction. It allows visitors to view the floor plan diagrams, pricing matrix, apartment features, apartment photos, and so on,” says Chelsea Hoffman, Director of Interactive Marketing at UDR.
A study by online branding consultancy 30 Lines came to a similar conclusion, finding that the floor plans page was by far the most-visited page, getting more interactions than the pricing page, amenities page, gallery page, and contact page combined.
Even putting a thumbnail of a floor plan on a web page increases engagement. UDR found that when a floor plan thumbnail was included on a page, 34% of visitors will click on it to enlarge the layout.
Floor plans pages also have the lowest bounce rates.
Floor plans pages have the lowest bounce rates of any page on most property websites. For properties that have an interactive site map, that page has the second-lowest bounce rate.
Surprisingly, all other pages on a property website — photo gallery, amenities, location, contact, even special offers — usually have a higher bounce rate than the floor plans page.
But some floor plans are more effective than others at capturing attention. A Threshold Agency study that followed more than 40,000 property website visitors found that pages with 3D floor plans have even lower bounce rates than pages with 2D floor plans.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the same study also found that an overwhelming majority of users went straight to the floor plans page from the home page.
Floor plans give you the best marketing ROI for your website.
When it comes to leasing apartments today, high-quality 3D visual elements are more important than ever before.
Based on analytics of actual visitor behavior, floor plans are the most powerful asset you can use to engage visitors and reduce bounce rates. These metrics show that floor plans are even more important than your photo gallery or amenities pages.
Industry studies also show that 3D floor plans have the greatest appeal to visitors, closely followed by 2D floor plans and then site maps.
Does your property need to get more engagement from visitors and keep them on your website longer? Find out why America’s leading multifamily property management companies trust 3DPlans.com to provide floor plans, interactive site maps, and much more.
