Visitors to agency websites 'stay loyal' and don't visit rival sites - claim

A data analytics firm that has studied over 2.7m visits to UK property company websites claims that once a visitor arrives at an estate agency’s site they tend to stay loyal to it and probably do not go on to visit a rival firm.

The firm, Giosg, already works with eight property firms including Connells, Knight Frank and Savills.

Chief executive Ville Rissanen says: “Once visitors arrive at the estate agent’s website, more often than not via a click through from a portal such as Zoopla, they are very loyal to that agent’s website. Just 4.6 per cent of the visitors we monitored go on to browse other estate agents’ websites.”

On average, visitors view 8.8 pages during a browsing session although results vary between the best performing site which generated 14.9 page views per visit and the worst with only 2.8. This demonstrates that the best site is performing more than four times better than the worst, says Giosg.

“Implementing live chat can be a timely and effective solution as it gives visitors a channel to ask for help with navigation and to find what they are looking for. It's also a popular route with estate agencies who are looking to engage more with their visitors to gain stronger insights into what they want and which aspects of the customer experience could be improved” Rissanen continues.

Property companies have most online visitors during the working week between 6am and 7pm, although their chat operators (the average is three per company on a weekday, although the range is from one to 15) are most online between 9am and 6pm.

Of the eight companies analysed, the chat conversations were about booking a valuation (30 per cent), a specific property enquiry (28 per cent), a more general enquiry (20 per cent).

Technical issues and site content, enquiring about branch contacts and recruitment made up the bulk of the rest of the chats.

“Property companies have been one of the early adopters of online chat but there is more that can be done, watching potential customers’ ever-changing habits and actions. We know that today’s consumers expect to get a response from property companies around the clock, not just between the hours that most customer service representatives are in the office” says Rissanen.