
Yo,
Permanent Roommates, Created by TVF and produced by CommonFloor.com.
Lets start things by understanding the business objective of CommonFloor.com, which is an online real estate lead generation portal. At the time of creating this post, the online real estate market in India is nearly 250 crore Rs. and is expected to grow at 50-100% CAGR.
Now, who are the customers of CommonFloor.com? People looking for properties? Nope. Its the brokers and real estate developers.
The way it works for these real estate portals is that they work on a service based model where brokers and developers subscribe to their packages and in return get the leads from these portals.
So, what is the fundamental Key Performance Indicator for these websites? Yep, no brainer – the leads. The trend of leads, the total leads generated during various time frames etc etc
So, the more leads they generate the more they can attract the brokers and developers.
And the more property seekers they can attract to the website the more leads they can generate. Sounds simple, but as usual its is not,
The reasons –
1. There are presently 9 players in the online real estate market – So, obviously the property seeker is not having a dearth of options
2. There are presently 9 players in the online real estate market 🙂 The brokers and developers( OK only the brokers, developers are you know..pretty happy) will spend their money after considerable contemplation before subscribing to the services of any of these portals.
So now, what are these portals to the property seekers? Basically, they act as a research tool. So, essentially they need more variety, more choices, easy to use interface and authentic listings. Cool.
But, how to attract the users?
Generating more brand awareness and understanding the property seekers’ journey and experience on the portal. Now, meri dukaan meri website hi hai, and as things get more and more digital the human contact looses out. So, if a user comes to one website, pukes and leaves to other website, there is no one to ask the fellow – “didi what happened? color pasand nahi aya?” And here my friend you need people like me 🙂 the Analytics guys who will evaluate the entire customer journey, research upon it and give the answer to
“Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who Is the Fairest of Them All?”
ummm..ok I am finding this interesting. Lets make an analytics map for CommonFloor.com.
So, what is a regular customer journey?

To generate awareness of course they have to communicate across various customer touch points. The collaboration with TVF on YouTube is one such touch point.
As far as my understanding goes, they are trying to generate brand awareness, one, two, they are trying to promote their App downloads.
Hmm, so lets make a layered cake of descriptive analytics.
But first, lets set the goals. I strong believe in doing this. Goals essentially are the motivation behind doing something and the more focused we are with the goals the better are the returns on our efforts.
Again, what is the ultimate goal of CommonFloor.com? ……Lead Generation (macro goal)
What would be one step behind this Goal conversion ?……Getting visitor to the property listing page (micro goal 1)
What would be one step behind this?……Getting the visitor to search for a category (micro goal 2)
What would be one step behind this?……Acquiring the visitor (micro goal 3)
So, my analytics layered cake should satisfy the taste buds with the above four goal flavors
Lets start with micro goal# 3 Aha
In all the digital analytics tools we have the birth right to set any goal completion as a metric. So, to analyse the completion of the above goals i will configure them in my analytics tool as metrics.
Since we are analyzing a marketing campaign the analytics will be around that only.
I wish to add here only that TVF has shared the commonfloor.com URL in their description but have not appended any campaign code to the URL. I consider explaining the consequences of that beyond the scope of this particular entry.
Ok, in layer one of my analytics cake I want to cook reports that tell me about the total number of brand impressions through the TVF videos.
So, the mentions are being made once at the start, once somewhere in the middle and once in the end.
As CommonFloor’s marketing manager I will ask TVF to share YouTube Analytics data with me to see the percentage of video completes and corresponding numbers. As in how many people saw 50% of the video, how many saw 75%, how many 100%
So my total impressions will be like = total number of video views where video was seen less than 30% + twice the total number of views where video was more than 30% but less than 100% and thrice the total number of views where the complete video was viewed.
I used 30% here, because in the last video the brand was mentioned somewhere near the 30% mark, thus this of course will vary from video to video.
So, this will give me total impressions. Layer one baked.
For the second layer we need to take a certain leap of faith. But, yeah it won’t taste bad either.
I would like the see the rise in traffic on my website post the launch of the videos.
Now, I would look at the average traffic volume for the certain periods like daily, weekly, monthly before the first video was launched. Fine.
Now, Any rise in traffic volume above the volume i have been regularly experiencing can be attributed to the video launch. Again, as I said we have to take a leap of faith here.
Now, the traffic can come to my site in four ways.
One, after clicking on the commonfloor’s link provided in the description of the TVF videos.
Two, by typing the commonFloor’s address in the browser.
Three, sometime later after watching the video, may be through a different device.
Four, they have not seen the TVF video but someone who has seen the video suggests them this site like Tanu does with Mikesh.
So, we need to consider the above four cases to give TVF a justified credit.
For case one all the web analytics tools have a referral and campaign report which tells about the traffic being brought by a particular referrer or campaign. The tools also provide attribution reports which credit the success of a goal (the metric set) to channels through which the visitor has come to my site.
First, as mentioned above I will set a metric to count my micro goal 3 that is number of times my landing page was loaded.
Next I can see the Acquisition > All traffic > Source/medium report to see the number of visitors YouTube has brought to my site and what % of those visitors are new to my site that is they are coming to my site for the first time. Isn’t this great?
For cases two three and four the deployment of leap of faith comes into picture. The traffic that comes directly to my site without clicking on the link provided by TVF video.
All the web Anlytics tools will consider this traffic as “Direct”. And thus you need to add a temporal context to your analytics and compare the direct traffics you have been getting post video launch and pre video launch.
You can use the Attribution tools for further deep down analysis
So, with this I have my two layers. Layer one the brand impressions through the communication and layer two the traffic that those brand impressions brought.
Micro goal # 3 delivered. Lets have a voyage for micro goal #2
My micro goal #2 is getting the visitor to search a category.
Now, on CommonFloor.com following is the space where the visitor is submitting the requirement –

The above is on the home/landing page.
The next is on the listing page –

First I will work with my developer to set an event that this send data to analytics server every time a user submits a query, be it on the homepage or the landing page.
Then i will set a goal metric to track the number of times the query was submitted by the user.
I will again open my source/medium reports to see how the users coming from YouTube are completing this particular goal.
Again i will compare my direct traffic’s goal completion pre and post the video lauches.

The above is a screenshot of the report I am trying to explain. As you can see you can choose your goal from the drop box. So, i can set this as micro goal # 2 for this case.
Layer #2 baked..Tada!
Now layer 3 for my micro goal #1 – getting the visitor to my listing page.
Now, you can question that I could have eliminated goal 2 since anyway I am tracking goal #1 which is not going to happen without goal #2.
The reason behind that is at times the listing page might not load or the users are submitting a query which my site is not providing.
So, I want to see the conversion from users submitting a query to my site satisfying it.
So, the layer 3 is pretty simple. Set a goal metric to count the number of times the listing page was loaded, open the source/medium report, set the goal to micro goal#1 and see the performance.
And finally the top layer. The platform for my insightful bride and groom.
Have a look below how a user submits a lead –

So, i will work with my developer to set an analytics event every time the submit button is clicked. And i will set up a goal metric to count the number of times the submission was made and again the procedure is same open the source/medium reports and check out the performance.
Alright, now my selection of layered cake has a reason. If you look at the structure of layer cake –

The base has the largest area and it gradually reduces as we go up. Which is also the case with the journey of customers that come to our site. To find the effectiveness of campaign we should consider the ratios of each of these steps.
- % Micro goal 1/Impressions = % (total visits to my site with the association)/(Total impressions in the video)
- % Macro goal/Micro goal #3 = % (total leads generate by campaign)/(Total visits by campaign)
- % Macro goal/Micro goal #1 = % (total leads generated)/(Total number of time the listing page was viewed)
- This tells me the effectiveness of my listing page and the quality of my listings.
- I would also see a trend of this ratio. How is it trending as my site is becoming bigger
- % Micro goal #1/ Micro goal #2 = % (listing page loads)/(the query is submitted)
- % Micro goal #1/ Micro goal #3 = % (listing page loads)/(Landing page loads)
All the web analytics tools have some sort for goal flow report. I would definitely look at it to see the goal completion journey of my visitors.
I will also like to track a few other metrics like the bounce rate and time spent per visit.
I will also like to track the location of my users to see this campaign has been popular in which all geographies.
Hope you liked reading this one as much I liked writing it. I would sincerely love it if you can give me a feedback.
I would be extremely grateful if you can share this post.

