We are a small local real estate agency around Guarda, Portugal. Our area is a bit remote and close to the Spanish border, where we have many hills - and a lot of sun.
My name is Berit Steinberg, I'm responsible for our online website, and webtests.com asked me to share my experiences in a short case study.
Our main challenge is finding good prospects interested in buying real estate around Guarda. We make use of all channels to attract new clients, and so far most of our clients came through word-of-mouth.
Finding new clients, and gaining their trust online without them knowing us, was quite hard for us. Especially in a business like real estate where the amounts involved are quite high. So people usually refer to people they know, and ask for advice.
Thus, our objective was to be more trustworthy in the eyes of prospects not knowing us and visiting our website.
We had the assumption that adding the webtests.com certificate to our website should have an impact, and that we should thus receive more requests. Most website visitors give us a call, or contact us via WhatsApp.
"Finding new clients and gaining their trust online without them knowing us, was quite hard for us."
We would have obviously loved to run an A/B test, but as most of our website clients contact us via WhatsApp or phone call, an integration like this, and tracking was not possible for us. Especially as a small agency, we do not have all these resources available.
So, what we did was, we compared the incoming requests of the 90 days with certificate with the 90 days before, and also with the same 90 days of the previous year, as obviously we have seasonal changes in our industry.
We signed up on webtests.com with the help of Salah. Honestly, it was much easier than we thought. It really only took 10 minutes, and then I added the certificate myself to our website.
When you go to our website https://awaitingsun.com/ you can see the certificate on the bottom right. I implemented it in a floating way, so it means it keeps scrolling and stays on a fixed place at the bottom right.
Additionally, I added it to the footer as well, to increase the visibility, and also because our footer was a bit empty before. The complete implementation took me around 40 minutes (sign up + adding on our website).
As already mentioned under "3. Methodology", we compared the number of requests in the 90 days with the webtests.com certificate vs. the previous 90 days (without certificate), and also vs. the 90 days 1 year before (without certificate). Our other numbers all stayed quite the same, so we are confident the certificate made the difference.
Requests: Each new request is worth for us around 250 EUR. In the 90 days with the webtests.com certificate we had 67 requests via our website vs. 48 requests in the 90 days before vs. 51 requests in the 90 days of the previous year. So compared to the previous year, it's a +31% increase of incoming requests for us.
Revenue/ROI: We calculated that one incoming request on average has around 250 EUR of worth for us. As we got 16 requests more than at the same time of the last year, for us, we calculate the value of those additional requests with 16 * 250 EUR = 4000 EUR. We spent 3 * 99 EUR + 79 EUR one-time = 376 EUR. Thus, we achieved +840% ROI for us.
More incoming requests
ROI
"We are very happy that we added the webtests.com certificate to our website, +31% incoming requests are amazing."
"I can definitely say that it helped our business, and even if it "only" increased incoming requests by 15%, it's more than worth the money for us."
"I think I really underestimated before how much trust matters online, especially in the real estate industry."
We are very happy that we added the webtests.com certificate to our website, +31% incoming requests are amazing. Yes, our numbers are very small, I have to admit.
But I can definitely say that it helped our business, and even if it "only" increased incoming requests by 15%, it's more than worth the money for us.
I think I really underestimated before how much trust matters online, especially in the real estate industry.
