How to create a truly engaging online experience

1. Five Key Principles of Conversion-Focused Website Design
How to create a truly engaging online experience.

2. GetG5.com © 2016-2018 G5 Search Marketing, Inc.
Introduction
Did you know that 97 percent of consumers use search engines to research products and
resources?1
Now more than ever, the Internet is consumers’ first stop when conducting
research before making a purchase decision. According to a study by Yahoo! and
Universal McCann, more than two-thirds of respondents said that they trust the Internet
for researching their purchases. Compare that to 43 percent who said that they trust
magazines, and only 35 percent who claimed to trust TV.2
Clearly, when consumers want to get the full story, they go online.
The reason is simple: the Internet enables consumers to do their own research based on
a seemingly endless supply of data. They can source and vet their own information. They
feel a greater sense of control over their own buying decisions.
These trends are true across the board, whether someone is buying a book or choosing a
place to live.
And you can use consumer habits to your advantage. G5 has found that when you create
a truly engaging online experience for consumers, a full 20 percent of your move-ins can
originate online.3
Your top priority is to engage prospective consumers in their online property search. You
need to position your site so that it attracts the most qualified visitors and you need to
offer an engaging online experience that inspires those visitors to take action and become
a lead — and eventually, a move-in.
Following are the five key principles of great website design. Read on....
02
1. Turner Research 2. Ad Age, “More Shoppers Trust the Internet Than TV,” May 2011 3. G5 client research

3. GetG5.com © 2016-2018 G5 Search Marketing, Inc. 03
A website isn’t simply a print ad that happens to be
attached to a URL. It’s an interactive ecosystem that
can help you locate prospects, give them relevant
information on a property, and deliver them to your
door as highly qualified leads.
So what’s the risk of ignoring your online presence
or not optimizing your website design to create an
engaging experience? Considerable. A site that
engages prospects by embracing the fundamentals
of good website design can deliver an exponential increase in leads.
A site that disappoints can mean fewer leads, fewer move-ins, and
suboptimal returns on your marketing spend.
High-quality traffic should translate into leads. The percentage of this
conversion depends on a few factors including the quality of your
website and the ability of your property-level employees to convert
those quality leads into move-ins.
In general, common internet-wide recommendations from your
website are:
• 10-20% of your website visitors should convert to high-quality leads
• 2-4% of leads should convert into move-ins
• If you have 2,000 visitors to your website, that would translate to
200-400 quality leads and 10-20 move-ins
These numbers assume that you have it all together — you have a
great online presence driving high-quality visitors, you’re capturing and
converting those visitors with strategic website design and functionality,
and you have a solid property-level team helping to convert those
leads into move-ins.
When compared to traditional marketing efforts like print ads and
Yellow Pages, a high-performing, engaging website can slash your cost-
per-lead, not to mention your cost-per-move-in. A print ad can cost as
much as $2,500 per move-in, but a high- performance website can cut
that number by more than 90 percent.
The conclusion is clear: If your website isn’t engaging your prospects,
you’re paying more per lead and per move-in than necessary. You’re also
giving the competition an opportunity to scoop up valuable leads.
The Lead to Move-in Opportunity
Creating an engaging experience.
EXAMPLE COSTS
ILS
INTERNET LISTING
SERVICE
TRADITIONAL
PRINT, YELLOW
PAGES, ETC.
OPTIMIZED WEBSITE
HIGH-PERFORMING
& MAINTAINED
COST-PER-LEAD $25 $50-$100 $4
COST-PER-LEASE $350-$1000 $2,500+ $175

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Conversion-based design is not just a new web design buzzword or digital
aesthetic that we are accustomed to seeing come in and out of vogue
every few years. It is an approach that insists on using measurable data to
gather results, and then designing a user experience around those insights.
This means that you are creating experiences that are not only useful to
your users, but additionally meet your goal: Converting your users!
It truly pays to engage with an expert who can align the look-and-feel
of your site with proven design principles. Here are several design best
practices to point you in the right direction:
1. Pay attention to attention
Common practice when creating a website — the crafting of the
structure, the layout, the design, and finally writing rich content — is to
try and create a site that does it all. And that means your site is doing too
much. A user’s attention is a finite resource, so be sure that when they
land on your website, you spend it wisely!
Determine what your most consistent source of traffic is, and craft all of
your content on page — from the words on calls-to-action buttons, to
headings and paragraphs — around that driver of traffic. If it is a paid
advertising campaign, what is being advertised? Does the ad reference
pet-friendly apartments? If so, be sure that the landing page is only
about pet-friendly apartments, and not other offerings with pet-friendly
relegated to just a minor mention or link on the page.
Count the number of links and features asking for users’ attention, and
then count how many times you offer them the one thing that brought
them to your page. This is called the “Attention Ratio.”4
If the user clicks
on your ad for pet-friendly apartments, and it is listed on the same page
as pet-free apartments, student housing, and senior-living communities,
your attention ratio is 4/1. The simple principle here is to gun for a 1/1
ratio. Each page of your site should be built around a singular goal, and
the user should not be asked to pay attention to anything other than
that. Imagine the typical web page and how much attention it asks users
to spend on graphics, navigation, links, and buttons. This is taxing on
their attention and makes the one thing you want them to pay attention
to a lot less likely to get the focus it needs.
2. Get to know your users
While analytics platforms are the norm to have included on a website
— and rich information about site visitors, time on site, bounce rates,
demographics, etc., are all incredibly useful to understanding your
users — there is another simple insight that can significantly impact the
usability and user experience on your website.
User flows can be generated by most major analytics platforms and
deliver powerful insights about how users are actually engaging with
your website. This will allow you to make informed decisions about
your design and how you drive users to a conversion decision. If you
understand that most conversions occur after a visit from the home page
to an internal page with a resonating value proposition, design your
home page around that flow. Make getting to that page easy, and make
it important. This achieves two critical objectives: designing your site
around your users’ needs, and reducing the effort of the users to arrive
at their end goal. Getting to know your users and how they interact with
you is key in designing a beautiful experience for them.
Designing a Site that Engages Visitors
You must align your site with proven design principles.
4. Gardner, Oli. “Attention Ratio - Conversion Marketing Glossary - Unbounce.” Unbounce
Conversion Glossary. Unbounce. Web. 5 Jan. 2016.

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3. Simple isn’t easy, but it should feel like it
One of the hardest feats in modern web design is to make complex
decision-making processes feel easy. And often, asking a user to
purchase a product or make a commitment online is far from easy.
Reducing the friction (making things easier) should be a key goal if
you are looking to increase user engagement and conversions on your
website. Here are a couple of strategies that can significantly decrease
friction and increase ease of use.
Default values drastically increase the usability of your lead forms and
client-entered information. For instance, if a form field that requests
users to enter an address can be pre-populated with the geo-location
information available from the browser, you have significantly decreased
the amount of information requested from your user and increased the
ease of use. This is a simple, yet easy-to-implement strategy for most any
end user inputs and interactions.
Reducing the steps needed to collect information, or walk a user through
a process, is one of the most complex interactions that we at G5 try to
simplify. And this certainly is not easy. Some common tricks to achieving
this are to follow the lead of Amazon, Ebay, and even Uber: allow users to
have one-click interactions that transform the information on page so that
they feel like it is all part of the same interaction. We have implemented
this in our search and leasing products, and the increases in user
engagement and conversion are something that we are most proud of.
4. Make it fast
As users continue to flock to all manner of devices, screen sizes, and
networks, your ability to deliver your website to users quickly will
significantly impact their engagement with your site, reduce your bounce
rate, and lead to more conversions. This principle is easy to forget during
the design-fevered process of creating a beautiful experience that has all
of the modern bells and whistles (video backgrounds, parallax scrolling,
etc.). This has become increasingly important as users access your site
more and more on mobile networks rather than wi-fi. Here are some
cost-effective ways to build a more high-performing website that loads
quickly and delivers your users to the content they want.
Deliver the right image to the right device. The assets that take the
longest to load are your photos. And luckily for all of us, there are some
excellent ways to make sure that you are not trying to load a 2000
pixel wide image on a 480 pixel wide device. One option that we have
employed to great effect is a server-side script that slices images into
six different sizes, from thumbnail to full width, and then delivers the
smallest asset to best fit the screen width of the user. This means that
you can deliver a 70 kilobyte image instead of the original 780 kilobyte
image. That is savings!
Lazy-load your images. By not loading every asset on a web page
until a user scrolls down to the portion of the page that image
appears on, you will be able to greatly decrease your page weight and
deliver a tremendously faster page. We have seen the page-weight
(a Google Page Speed scoring factor) reduced by as much as 60%
by implementing this strategy. It isn’t rocket science, but can be the
difference between a user staying on your site or bouncing off of it
because the page is taking too long to load.
5. Test, test, test
Usability is a word that web designers use often, and it simply refers to
how easy your website is for visitors to use. Can they find what they’re
looking for quickly? Do they know what you’re offering right away? Or
are they frustrated by the experience of interacting with your site?
As usability consultant and author of Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The
Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, Steve
Krug observes, “testing one user is 100 percent better than testing
none.” He also suggests that one morning per month is all you need
for usability testing and that tests don’t need to be overly formal. At
the very least, ask a few of your colleagues to spend some quality time
poking around your pages. Don’t allow your prospects to discover
website glitches before you do. Make sure that every link works, and
make sure that every page makes clear and simple sense.

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Now that you’ve created a fast, intuitive website to engage online visitors, it’s time to take them
to the next step. Here are a few best practices for capturing the maximum number of leads.
• Limit the calls-to-action. A “call-to-action” is what you want the
visitor to do next — schedule a visit, leave their information, or
just give you a call. Keep in mind that too many options can inhibit
some people’s abilities to make a decision (scientists call this the
“tyranny of choice”).6
We recommend one call-to-action; otherwise
you’re likely to overwhelm your visitors. We also recommend that
you place your call-to-action strategically on the page, so that it’s
prominently placed — above the fold is always best.
• Make your calls-to-action specific and easy to follow. As always, keep it simple: clearly
state how you would prefer your online visitors to proceed, and make it painless for them
to do so. Enable click-to-call functionality for mobile users. And keep in mind that the
faster you get the prospect off the computer and into your property, the closer you are
to a signed move-in.
• Make your forms simple. Only ask for the minimum amount of information that you
absolutely need to contact each prospect. Four form fields is a good number as a rule of
thumb. And only require two fields, if possible. Keep in mind that for every field you add
to a form, you could lose 25 percent of your leads.
Transform Those Visitors into Leads
Engage your online visitors.
Clearly state how you would prefer
your online visitors to proceed, and
make it painless for them to do so.
6. Barry Schwartz, “The Tyranny of Choice,” Scientific American Mind, December 2004

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Your website isn’t simply a placeholder with a phone number. In many
cases, it’s the first point of contact for prospects and your property’s
first impression. You must design an online experience that actively
connects with prospects, transforming them from leads into move-ins.
By embracing the principles of strategic website design — with a
particular focus on simplicity, usability, and speed — you can deliver
an online experience that perfectly reflects the essence of your
property. That will bring a higher number of qualified prospects into
your office — and help you transform more leads into move-ins.
Summary
Your first impression.
You must design an online
experience that actively connects
with prospects, transforming them
from leads into move-ins.

8. Next Steps
Are you ready to create a more engaging online experience for online prospects?
G5 is the leading provider of digital marketing effectiveness in the real estate sector. In today’s increasingly mobile and social world,
reaching and converting prospects is more complex than ever before. G5 simplifies the complexity of digital marketing with an
innovative cloud-based platform that creates, measures, and optimizes the entire customer experience — from awareness to advocacy
— for a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing approaches. The G5 Marketing Cloud delivers best-in-class experiences across
search, sites, and social, as well as tools that measure and optimize results.
Founded in 2005, G5 was recently named one of the fastest growing private US companies by Inc. magazine (4th year), one of North
America’s fastest growing technology companies by Deloitte (5th consecutive year), and one of Oregon’s fastest growing private
companies by Portland Business Journal (4th year). The Bend, Oregon-based company is backed by private equity investor Peak Equity
Partners. To learn how to gain confidence in marketing, please visit GetG5.com.
550 NW Franklin Avenue, Suite 200 :: Bend, Oregon 97703 :: +1.800.639.1389 :: GetG5.com
Choose an expert partner with deep experience in creating richly
interactive websites. Better yet, find a partner who knows how to drive
engagement specifically for the real estate sector.
At G5, we know how to help you gain greater confidence in marketing:
• Reduce dependency on Internet Listing Services
• Generate more qualified leads with a higher conversion rate
• Stay agile and up-to-date with digital marketing changes
Find out more about the
G5 Marketing Cloud. Request
your demo at GetG5.com.
TM