Rosemarie Cook-Manley began her career in multifamily a decade ago with Home Properties. Today, she's the Vice President of Marketing, helping to manage the company's 121 communities located across eight East Coast states and in Chicago. We spoke with Rosemarie to get some insight on how her team implements tracking and allocates the marketing budget to maximize ROI.

Zillow: Which factors do you consider when deciding where to allocate your online marketing budget?
Rosemarie: Early on, when we first start considering an advertiser we haven’t worked with before, we do lots of searches on Google. With so many people starting their apartment search on Google, we know that an advertiser with results on page 3 or 4 won’t give us as much return as pages 1 and 2. It’s one of our important early-stage evaluation tools.

Based on those results, we’ll then want to understand the pricing model for the advertising partner, and if they accept a data feed. We have 121 properties with daily price changes, so there are no resources to manually update listings – we need to be able to enter our data once into a service provider and rely on them to distribute the information to our advertisers.

Zillow: Why is being metrics-driven important to your team?
Rosemarie: We really need to accomplish as much as we can with a limited budget, because we only have so much to spend. It’s important that every penny is doing what we need it to do, delivering qualified leads and ultimately leases. We don’t have the money to put into marketing programs that don’t deliver or we can’t tie a return to.

Zillow: What steps are you taking to make lease attribution as accurate as possible?
Rosemarie: We work very closely with all our on-site property teams to make sure they understand where they’re advertising and how they can try to get accurate lead source information during their conversation with the prospect. We route all of our email leads to our internal contact center – they are extremely accurate in capturing lead source information, so we can be very confident in our email lead tracking. We also have tracking numbers that tie each phone call back to a particular lead source. We use a combination of this information and data from our advertisers to get to attribution that we can rely on.

Zillow: What advice would you give to a company trying to revamp their tracking efforts?
Rosemarie: Take advantage of the technology and tools out there. There’s a lot of technology that makes it easier – I recommend finding the tools available that you can afford and to use them fully. It’s difficult to rely on people remembering and reiterating where they found you.

Zillow: You’re a Zillow customer – can you shed some light on why you chose Zillow to be in your budget, and what makes Zillow an appealing marketing partner?
Rosemarie: When we first started advertising with Zillow, the Google search results were impressive. Zillow was ranked high up in the search results across different markets, so that gave a great first impression. They would accept the data feed we use, and we liked the pricing model – these three were the initial factors that got us started with Zillow. Over time working with Zillow, we’re finding the volume and quality of leads we’re getting is very strong, and we’re happy with that. The cost per lead and cost per lease is very competitive and performing well against competitors. The team is so great to work with and open to feedback – it’s clear Zillow wants to build a presence with rentals. They talk to us, ask for our input and ideas, and get dialogue going, which is wonderful. It’s truly a partnership versus “you pay us and we give you this service.”