Where do the leads for a real estate business come from?

Before this project, there was no reliable way to connect marketing activity to leads. Decisions about where to spend marketing time and money were made without data.

My role

Solo: the tracking plan and reporting design for a real estate business in Honolulu. Day to day, I also make its listing photos, reels, and social posts.

What is drafted so far

An event taxonomy for lead-generation actions. Form submits, phone clicks, and showing requests are defined as leads before any data arrives, written so they can go straight into Google Tag Manager.

Attribution from campaign to search. A UTM tagging strategy so every campaign is attributable, and a plan to connect GA4 with Google Search Console so organic search can be tied to leads.

No numbers yet. The new website has not launched, so nothing is being tracked.

What’s next

• A monthly reporting template
• Local SEO experiments to measure search visibility
• Findings after the first full month of clean data, then recommendations from the first reporting cycle
• The event taxonomy and reporting template in public-safe form, with the owner’s sign-off, alongside the first results

Limits

This is for a real business, so the results follow a rule once the site is live: nothing gets published until at least one full month of clean data exists. Quoting a number before the tracking behind it has been validated would defeat the reason for building it.

What I took from the work

Measurement work is easy to postpone because it produces nothing to look at, which is precisely why the business did not already have it. The discipline that has mattered most so far is settling what counts as a lead before any data arrives, instead of negotiating the definition afterward against numbers someone already has an opinion about.