Building & Property CRO. Turning Website Traffic Into Commercial Growth
For businesses generating significant website traffic, small improvements to the customer journey can translate into substantial commercial gains and unlock significant revenue.
Overview
For businesses generating significant website traffic, small improvements to the customer journey can translate into substantial commercial gains.
Across leading clients in the building and property sector, including Simonds Homes, Porter Davis Homes and EstimateOne, Sonar has delivered a program of 60+ Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) tests designed to systematically identify friction, improve key customer journeys and increase conversion.
Rather than relying on assumptions or waiting for the next major website redesign, our approach combines analytics, behavioural data, UX expertise and structured experimentation to identify what actually influences customers to take the next step.
The Challenge
Building and property websites can involve complex, high-consideration customer journeys.
Users need to navigate products, locations, pricing, inclusions and substantial supporting information before they are ready to enquire. For marketers, the challenge isn't simply generating more website traffic, rather it's ensuring existing traffic can efficiently find what it needs and progress towards a commercially valuable action.
Accordingly, our CRO programs focused on one fundamental question:
How can we systematically remove friction from high-value digital journeys and convert more of the traffic our clients already have?
Our Approach
Continuous CRO & Experimentation
Rather than treating website optimisation as a one-off project, Sonar established structured programs of continuous experimentation.
Using analytics, behavioural insights and customer journey analysis, we identify potential barriers to conversion and develop hypotheses for improvement.
These are translated into controlled CRO tests across areas including:
- Landing pages and key customer journeys
- Calls-to-action and conversion pathways
- Forms and enquiry experiences
- Product and listing pages
- Content hierarchy and messaging
- Navigation and information architecture
- Location and audience personalisation
- Lead-generation tools and interactive experiences
Successful experiments can then be progressively incorporated into the core website experience, creating an ongoing cycle of:
Analyse → Hypothesise → Test → Learn → Optimise → Scale
Turning Product Discovery Into Lead Generation
For Simonds Homes, one opportunity was improving how prospective buyers discovered homes relevant to their individual needs.
Sonar developed and optimised a Home Finder Wizard, transforming traditional product browsing into an interactive, personalised experience.
Rather than expecting users to navigate a large catalogue independently, the experience captures customer requirements and uses those inputs to surface more relevant home recommendations in exchange for contact details.
The experience demonstrated how digital utility can simultaneously improve the customer journey and create a scalable source of qualified lead generation.
Removing Friction From Enquiry
Our experimentation has also identified opportunities to improve the critical point at which customers transition from consideration to enquiry.
For Simonds Homes, introducing relevant Key Selling Points directly into form experiences contributed to a 59% uplift in form submissions.
The learning was simple but commercially important: customers approaching a high-intent action can still require reassurance.
Rather than treating the enquiry form as a purely functional endpoint, supporting content and value propositions can reinforce the customer's decision at the moment it matters most.
Across our broader CRO work, this principle has informed the testing of simplified forms, product-specific modal experiences, supporting content and more direct consultation booking pathways.
Creating Better Pathways To Product
CRO isn't simply about changing buttons, forms or calls-to-action.
Testing the way customers move between inspiration, product discovery and enquiry can unlock considerably larger opportunities.
For Simonds Homes, improving the prominence and pathway into its Home Designs experience contributed to an 82% uplift in visits to home listing pages.
This moved substantially more users from general website exploration into a commercially valuable product consideration journey.
Personalising Around Customer Intent
Property is inherently location-driven.
Our CRO programs have therefore explored experiences that recognise both where customers currently are and where they want to live.
This has included testing and optimisation around:
- Location and map-based experiences
- Local experts and localised content
- Product recommendations
- Audience-specific landing pages
- Contextually relevant calls-to-action
- Customer needs and intended location
Rather than presenting every visitor with the same experience, personalisation can shorten the distance between an individual's requirements and the most relevant next action.
Our Real Estate & Property Experience
The Commercial Impact
Across 60+ CRO experiments, Sonar has demonstrated that meaningful commercial growth doesn't always require more media, more traffic or an entirely new website.
Our optimisation programs have delivered outcomes including:
+59% Form Submissions
Improving the information and reassurance provided around high-intent enquiry experiences.
+82% Product Discovery
Improving pathways from general website exploration into high-value home listing and product journeys.
Significant Qualified Lead Generation
Transforming product discovery into an interactive recommendation and lead-generation experience.
But the value extends beyond individual winning experiments.
Every test generates additional evidence about how customers actually behave.
Over time, these insights inform not only website optimisation, but UX design, content, campaign landing pages, media strategy and future website development.
CRO As A Commercial Growth Program
The greatest value of CRO comes from treating optimisation as an ongoing commercial discipline rather than a series of isolated website changes.
Sonar combines analytics, behavioural analysis, UX/UI expertise, experimentation and performance measurement to continually identify where customers experience friction and where changes have the potential to create measurable commercial gains.
For organisations already investing significantly in traffic acquisition, this creates an important opportunity to extract greater value from every visitor already reaching the website.
Instead of only asking:
"How do we get more people to the website?"
CRO asks the equally important question:
"How do we get more of the right people already here to take the next step?"
That's where website optimisation becomes a genuine commercial growth engine.
