Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘PPC’

I couldn’t believe it when I read the findings of a study done by Real Estate Book. A national survey of “Top Real Estate Professionals” showed that 75% of marketing budgets were spent on internet marketing, personal websites, and print advertising. The study went on to say that these each made up 25% of the spending. Really!?!

That means that top real estate agents are spending at least HALF of their marketing budget online. This sounds almost too good to be true! We often have a tough time getting the offices we work with to spend half of their marketing budget on SEO, PPC, Email marketing and other online media. Maybe we’ve been preaching about this for long enough and real estate brokers and agents are starting to come around.

Other findings:
Not surprisingly, the study also showed that when ranked against one another, the media with the lowest value to those surveyed were traditional mass media. Those included radio and newspapers. I think that calls for repeating. Real Estate professionals will see the lowest value from traditional mass media, including newspapers.

We’ve said it before, a dozen times on this blog, newspapers do not provide good value for real estate marketing. Our clients still try to tell us that an ad in the New York Times or the Boston Globe will produce leads. Yes, of course they do, but look at what they cost you. Spend the same amount of money on real estate seo or on your Google Adwords budget and you’ll get far better results.

Monthly Budget:
The same study showed that the median real estate professional surveyed was spending $622 each month on marketing. They’re spending half of that on their website and online marketing. That’s $311 per month or $3700 per year per agent spent on the web. That means that the typical office employing 10 real estate agents should be spending almost $40,000 per year on online marketing. Now we’re talking. This math makes some sense. If your budget lines up with this kind of spending, then you’re on the right track.

Now, this money should not be spent by every agent on their own. You should be working together. The study said that these numbers were often based on what the office spent. So, this means that the office was putting their money behind a common campaign. We see fantastic economies of scale for our clients when they work together to invest in great real estate websites and well executed real estate seo.

Search Engine Marketing:
The Real Estate Book study showed that 61% of the real estate professionals surveyed, and these were top real estate agents according to the study, used some kind of search engine marketing. And 25% used social media sites as well. No wonder these are top agents.

…

Don’t get left behind. Get ahead of these trends. Realize what these numbers would have looked like just a few years ago and know that leading real estate professionals will continue to invest more and more into online marketing media. Be a leader, not a follower.

Thanks for reading.

If you’re running an online marketing campaign, there are some equations that you should understand. These equations will allow you to understand the effectiveness of your website and the marketing media that you are using to drive traffic to the site.

Now, real estate SEM, that is PPC and SEO, are both online marketing media. So are banner advertisements and email marketing. You can use these equations to examine all of these and many other media. You can even judge the effectiveness of traditional marketing media. It all boils down to the same math.

First, let’s talk about your website. When a user arrives on the site, they are anonymous. If they register to become a lead (or customer in the case of an eCommerce website) we call this a conversion. The ratio of conversions to total users is the conversation rate of your website. So:

1. Conversion rate = Leads / Total Users

For example. If your site is visited by 1000 users and 50 of them register and become leads, your conversion rate would be 5%.

Next, it’s vital to understand your cost per lead. You should be able to calculate the cost per lead generated by each marketing medium in which you are investing. You can also calculate your overall cost per lead for your entire campaign. Tracking each of these number and optimizing them is the key to superior ROI

2. Cost per lead = Amount spent / Number of Leads

Conversion rate of each add is also vital. You could be trying to spend on PPC, but the ad you wrote is failing. Also, you might be sending email marketing messages that aren’t effective. To judge the effectiveness of the ad or ad copy, you’re going to want to know the click through rate or CTR:

3. CTR = Click throughs / Impressions

Now, when you’re running a PPC campaign, your impressions are free! PPM campaigns require you to pay for the impressions. You’re not guaranteed any click-through traffic from a banner or tower PPM ad. So, you better be tracking the CTR of that ad. If it’s not performing, you can change it or stop spending altogether.

When you’re managing your PPC campaign, you need to understand your cost per click. The Adwords and Yahoo Overture systems will calculate this for you. Overall, you should be able to calculate CPC for PPC or PPM advertising.

4. Cost Per Click = Ad buy / Clicks

If you’re spending on any medium, you can simply divide the amount you spent by the number of clicks or the number of visitors that it brought to your site to understand the CPC.

Combining these equations really gives us a way to measure our ROI:

5. Cost per lead = Cost per click / Conversion Rate

If that’s a little confusing to you, scroll up and have a look at equations 1 and 4. what we really want to know is, how can we get the most leads for our ad buy. So, let’s examine this marketing equation.  My goal is to minimize the cost per lead. So, to do this, I need to either raise my conversion rate or lower my cost per click. This will guide how you choose your PPM ads, your PPC bids, and even how much you want to invest into SEO.

I know this is a lot for some of you. Math isn’t everyone’s forte. If I went through this too fast for you, please drop us a comment and we’ll respond promptly.

I’ll be writing a post soon on how we improve campaign performance using these equations. Stay tuned

If I go by what the clients tell us, the world is full of people who are trying to trick you. We’ve heard stories about all sorts of search engine marketing schemes. We’ve heard about folks passing off paid placement as SEO. We’ve heard about companies overseas that claim to be able to SEO a site for next to nothing. We’ve heard about companies that charge your credit card every month and then don’t show anything for it.

One thing is for sure, it’s a jungle out there.

If you’re going to invest in search engine marketing, the first thing you need to understand is the difference between SEO and PPC.

• Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the art and science of building a web presence so that your site ranks well in the natural search engine results for the search terms that you’re targeting. So, parts of your site need to be built in certain ways in order for the search engines to place you higher in the search results. You need to work with the code, content, internal linking structures, meta tags, the list goes on… (Keep reading this blog to learn more about these techniques.)You not only need to build your site in certain ways, but you’ll need to get other sites to link to yours. This can be a challenge, but there are lots of techniques that you can use to do this.If you optimize the pages of your site and work on your linking structures and you do so strategically, focusing on the right terms for your business, then your site will begin to float to the top of the search engine results on the left side of the page. These are the natural or organic search engine results. OK, moving on.
• Pay-Per-Click advertising, or PPC, are the sponsored links that you see across the top and down the side of the search engine results pages. When a user clicks on one of these ads, the advertiser pays for that user to come to their site. Thus the name, pay-per-click. PPC is also an art. The price you are willing to pay for a click, the words in your ad and the success rate of that ad, and the terms you choose to show up for all play a roll in the success of your campaign. You can also control where and when your ads are displayed.

I felt like I had to get that out there. This may sound very basic to some of our readers, but this is just the first in a series of posts on this topic. We had to set the record straight.

More to come soon.

The Boston Logic Team