Last week, I encountered a white paper by Contentsquare titled “2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks.” This paper resonated with me because of Victor’s article, “High-Tech vs. High-Touch Brokerage—AI May Change Strategy,” which discusses the consumer experience with real estate brokerages.
Every brokerage has an online presence with a website. Still, I have only seen a very select few who revere it as a marketing asset that must have an ROI attached to it. Brokerages spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure the website has the proper branding narrative; they seldom focus on the digital experience that their audiences demand.
As brokerages experience shrinking margins, it is crucial for them to focus on differentiating their website experience and measuring return on investment (ROI). To achieve this, brokerages and their teams must stay ahead of emerging trends in the ever-changing digital landscape.
Efforts are needed to enhance their digital strategies, improve customer engagement, and drive conversions. This article benchmarks today’s consumer digital behavior and offers guidance on enhancing website digital experiences for consumers.
Who is Contentsquare?
If you haven’t heard of Contentsquare, it’s a digital experience analytics company that assists brands in creating better digital experiences through its AI-powered platform. Over the past four years, they have acquired Heap and HotJar to enhance the services offered in their digital platform solution. I have used both tools to gain insights into how consumers interact with brokerage websites.
In my experience, these technologies benefit brokerage businesses by providing deep insights into customer behavior on their websites and apps, helping optimize user journeys, and improving conversion rates.
By analyzing billions of digital interactions, Contentsquare helps companies uncover vital insights that can enhance the human digital experience.
This white paper by Contentsquare highlights critical shifts in website traffic, user engagement, frustration factors, and conversion rates in Q4 2024.
This summary of the white paper is intended for brokerages and prop-techs seeking to enhance their customers’ online service experience and help them continue growing their business in a more competitive and demanding market.
Key Digital Trends
The 2025 benchmark report from Contentsquare analyzes data from 6,000 websites, 90 billion sessions, and 389 billion page views across various industries, including real estate, fintech, investments, insurance, and banking. Its findings reveal significant changes that should influence how brokerages approach digital customer interactions.
The following comes from the financial part of the white paper, which covers real estate websites.
1. Declining Website Traffic
Overall, traffic has dropped by 3.3% year-over-year, with a noticeable decline in unpaid (which includes organic) traffic (-5.7%). I have seen the same result across the real estate and other industries I consulted.
The explanation is simple. Transaction volume has decreased by 30%, which leads to fewer conversions and reduces the number of people actively searching for or purchasing property in the current market. Additionally, there is less inventory available, resulting in lower session counts and decreased consumer engagement on real estate websites.
Paid traffic increased slightly by 0.4%, but organizations continue to spend more on digital ads, driving up the cost per visitor by over 9%. I have experienced the same spending increase with Google Ads, Bing Ads, Adwerks, and other digital advertising programs.
As SEO traffic declines, businesses are increasingly turning to paid channels like Google, Meta, TikTok, and Connected TV (CTV) as part of their advertising strategy to boost sales.
Implications for Real Estate:
Brokerages must diversify their traffic acquisition strategies beyond traditional SEO and PPC. Emerging channels like industry media networks and niche advertising platforms offer new opportunities for audience engagement. According to EMarketer.com, Connected TV (CTV) is the fastest-growing advertising ad channel, surpassing spending on traditional social media and other advertising platforms.
2. Decreased User Engagement
Overall content consumption (page views per visit, time on site, and scroll rates) has declined by 6.5%.
While returning visitors consumed more content (+0.5%) than new visitors, new visitors viewed fewer pages (-1.8%).
Product Detail Pages (PDPs) are now the most common landing pages, increasing bounce rates.
Implications for Real Estate:
New visitors need better on-site experiences tailored to their needs. Brokerages need to optimize landing pages for first-time visitors. Local real estate websites have many types of landing pages for first-time visitors, whereas retail space does with PDPs. Some of the possible landing page opportunities that match homebuyer and seller interests are:
- Interactive Neighborhood pages
- Geographic and Price-Point Specific On-Market Property Search Result Pages
- On and Off-Market Property Detail Pages
Engaging consumers on these landing pages requires brokerages to implement interactive content such as virtual tours, market stats, and dynamic property listings.
Consumer interaction data is a topic that is near and dear to WAV Group’s core. Aggregating this data is becoming more crucial as it allows brokerages to enhance their clients’ personalized experience.
3. Frustration Factors Undermining Digital Success
Several factors frustrate consumers with websites. The most significant are slow-loading pages, broken links, and excessive hovering on a page, which can lead to rage clicks.
According to the white paper, while frustration levels dropped slightly (-1.8%), it still affects 1 in 3 visits to a website. Companies that actively monitor and reduce frustration experience 4.5x fewer negative user experiences.
Implications for Real Estate:
Slow and frustrating digital experiences drive potential buyers away and inhibit homeowners’ trust in listing with a brokerage. Brokerages need to ensure they:
- Optimize website speed (reduce JavaScript errors and improve mobile performance).
- Implement real-time monitoring tools to detect user frustration.
- Improve website navigation to reduce excessive hovering and rage clicks.
4. Conversion Rates Are Declining
In real estate, a conversion event occurs when a visitor submits a website customer inquiry form. The report takes this into account. We should measure website conversions by converting customer inquiries to sold transactions as our sold conversion ratio for website visitors.
The white paper states that conversion rates have dropped by 6.1% year-over-year, with new visitor conversions falling by 7.4%. I have observed varying results based on digital ad spending. When a company increases its digital ad spending, conversions tend to fluctuate between a decrease of less than 1% and an increase of around 1%.
While paid traffic brings in more visitors than unpaid traffic, it converts at a lower rate (1.83%) than unpaid traffic (2.66%). This result is relatively standard; consumers selecting digital ads tend to be shoppers, whereas those not choosing digital ads are typically buyers.
User engagement affects conversion rates. Companies that enhanced user engagement, measured by session depth, experienced a 5.4% increase in conversion rates.
Implications for Real Estate:
To increase conversion rates, brokerages must focus on deepening user engagement through high-quality content and interactive tools. They must also improve lead capture forms and reduce friction in the inquiry process. Improving conversion includes performing A/B testing of their forms.
A/B testing of fillable forms is accomplished by changing the layout, design, type of information gathered, and placement. I have seen how each test produces interesting results and insights into the website’s audience behavior.
What would an article today be if it didn’t include AI as a solution? Brokerages must consider using AI-driven personalization to match visitors with relevant listings and services.
5. Need to Improve Retention Rates
The 30-day visitor retention rates have declined by 7% year-over-year and have not shown improvement over the past five years. While returning visits increased by 1.9%, retention rates from paid traffic grew by 5.6%. This indicates that returning consumers to the site has become an expensive strategy through paid advertising.
An interesting fact from the paper is that websites with the highest retention rates had 17% fewer frustration clicks and 18% more page views per visit.
Implications for Real Estate:
Retaining digital visitors is crucial for long-term business success. Brokerages should:
- Implement retargeting strategies to nurture leads over multiple visits.
- Reduce frustration factors that contribute to bounce rates.
- Leverage customer feedback tools like NPS surveys to understand user pain points.
Actionable Strategies for Real Estate Executives
The benchmark report highlights five critical areas where real estate businesses can improve their digital experience. Below are key strategies for each leadership role.
CEOs:
- Invest in AI and automation to improve website personalization.
- Diversify marketing spending to reduce reliance on paid traffic.
- Implement data-driven decision-making for digital strategy.
CMOs:
- Optimize landing pages for both new and returning visitors.
- Leverage interactive content such as video tours and live chat.
- Focus on emerging channels for traffic acquisition.
- Perform A/B testing of fillable forms to improve conversion.
COOs:
- Enhance website performance to reduce user frustration.
- Streamline lead management and follow-up processes.
- Improve cross-device customer journeys.
CTOs:
- Invest in real-time website monitoring to detect frustration.
- Optimize website speed and mobile responsiveness.
- Implement data analytics tools to track visitor engagement.
Summary
The 2025 Digital Experience Benchmark Report reveals that digital transformation is no longer optional for real estate companies. With website traffic declining, engagement falling, and frustration impacting conversions, real estate executives must adopt a proactive approach to digital strategy that should involve a conversation with their website vendor partners.
Real estate businesses can thrive in an increasingly competitive online environment by optimizing traffic acquisition, improving engagement, reducing frustration, and enhancing conversion rates.
Recommend Next Steps:
- Conduct a digital experience audit.
- Optimize for mobile and page speed performance.
- Leverage AI-driven personalization.
- Expand traffic acquisition beyond traditional channels.
Today, real estate is digital—are you ready to adapt? If yes, contact the WAV Group!
