Hey, how did you hear about us?

It’s a question many businesses ask new customers in order to pinpoint which advertising channels are most effective. But renting an apartment home is much different than calling a cleaning service or trying out that new coffee shop.

The apartment search process is much more involved. In turn, the way apartment operators attribute where their leads come from should be just as involved. Conventional wisdom suggests attributing leads to either the first or last website the prospective renter visited. The logic is either that the first touchpoint garnered the awareness or the last touchpoint closed the lease. 

With the amount of information available in an increasingly digital world, that method leaves something on the table. An apartment search is an emotional journey for the prospective renter. With Internet Listing Services, community websites, social media, traditional media (TV, radio and print) and word of mouth, every lead can actually be attributed to several sources regardless of when the prospective renter saw the listing. 

To pinpoint where the leads are coming from, a multi-touch attribution model is the most comprehensive solution. Multi-touch attribution is the act of determining the value of each customer touchpoint leading to a conversion. This helps determine which marketing channels should be credited with the conversion, and where you should allocate more budget. 

Multi-touch attribution assigns a weight to each touchpoint in the search process to help determine which sources were most integral in closing the lead. For example, let’s say a winning quarterback assigns high-level praise to his receivers, a fair amount to his running backs and only mentions his linemen in passing. What he is saying about each player is the weight of his overall praise. 

While this model is effective, it needs preparation and diligence on your side. The keys to making it work: 

• Be clear about your data needs when communicating with your partners.
• Be specific about the who, what, when and how of lead data and create a data process and tracking models to match.
• Be consistent in how you capture data by logging all interactions with your community, including those by phone, email, website, ILS and referrals.
• Chart the paths of how prospects go about leasing an apartment from you and identify trends in those paths.
• Work with your partners to improve tracking of leads throughout the process and expect them to participate. 

Seattle-based software company Bizible adopted the multi-touch model recently and had several eye-opening discoveries. Through the first-touch attribution model, the company believed social media was responsible for 37 percent of its revenue. After adopting multi-touch, Bizible discovered social’s impact was less than 30 percent. 

For many companies, John Wanamaker’s century-old assertion still rings true. The former U.S. merchant claims he always wasted half of his advertising dollars. He just wasn’t sure which half. 

If multi-touch attribution had been available in the early 1900s, he would have had a much clearer idea.