In the multifamily housing industry, marketing “box scores” — those dashboard metrics in CRMs (like Knock or RealPage) and property management systems (PMS) that attribute leases to specific sources (e.g., ILS listings, Google Ads, social media, or organic search) — are essential for budgeting and optimizing campaigns. However, these attributions are increasingly unreliable due to two major factors: over-reliance on auto-tagging and evolving privacy laws.
Auto-tagging relies heavily on third-party cookies, pixels, UTM parameters, and tracking scripts to automatically assign a lead or lease to a marketing channel. For example, a prospect clicks a paid ad, a cookie is set, and the CRM tags the eventual lease to that source.
While convenient, this method has inherent flaws:
Inaccurate auto-tagging skews attribution, misallocates credit across channels, and creates unreliable data buckets.
Recent privacy regulations have accelerated the decline in tracking accuracy:
In multifamily marketing, this manifests as dropped signals in retargeting, paid search conversions, and cross-channel tracking. Prospects who opt out of tracking or use privacy-focused browsers appear as “direct” or “unknown” traffic, inflating those buckets and distorting ROI calculations.
Relying solely on static, auto-tagged box scores can lead to misallocated budgets — overspending on seemingly high-performing channels while undervaluing broader brand efforts. Industry experts recommend shifting to first-party data (collected directly via websites, emails, and apps), multi-touch attribution models, and holistic analytics that incorporate offline touchpoints like phone calls and walk-ins.
In summary, while CRM box scores provide a quick snapshot, they’re not the full picture in today’s privacy-first world. Multifamily teams should treat them as directional insights and supplement with comprehensive strategies for more accurate performance measurement.