Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘PPC’

How much should I be spending? We get asked this question all of the time, in one way or another.

• How much do I need to spend in order to be successful?
• What budget do I need to allocate for SEO?
• How much should I spend per day on PPC?
• What does it cost to get onto page 1?

It all boils down to the same question: What does it cost to run a successful search engine marketing campaign?

I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to know that there isn’t just one answer to this question. First of all, it depends on who is asking the question. Next, you need to understand the marketing you’re in. Then, you need to do a little math.

Let’s examine one case:

If you’re a broker and you’re looking to invest in real estate seo in order to provide your office with leads (Real Estate brokers asks us this question most often) then the answer starts with another question: How many leads/week do you want to give to each of your agents? 7 leads? 10 leads? 20? These are all fine answers. If you said 3, then I don’t think I want to work for you and your agents are about to leave you for the broker across the street or across town who actually tries to help his agents succeed by leveraging the web. If that sounded a little harsh, well, I’ve seen it happen a number of times and I’m watching it happen in our clients’ favor every day.

Anyway, I digress.

If you know how many leads you want to give each agent/week or per month, then you have the first number you need in determining your SEM budget. Let’s assume that you have 10 real estate agents working for you (this is the average size of a real estate office in the US).

Now, it’s time to think about your market. How much does it cost to source a real estate buyer or seller lead online in your market? Well, this is where guys like us SEO consultants come in. We can help answer questions like this. A mature real estate SEO campaign in a market of medium competition will generate leads at approximately $4 – $7/lead. If you’ve been SEOing for a while, then you can do even better than that. If you’re in a metropolitan real estate market and there are lots of firms competing for search engine placement, then this cost can climb significantly. For the purposes of this example, let’s use $5 per lead.

So, if you have 10 real estate agents working for you and you want to give them each 7 leads/week that’s 300 leads per month. At $5/lead, you should allocate a budget of  at least $1500/month.

Ok, now, if you go looking for a real estate seo provider out there and someone tells you that they can provide seo services and they don’t talk to you about your business goals in a way similar to how I just did, then you know that they don’t understand the business that you are in. They don’t know the real estate market and they don’t know how to generate real estate buyer and seller leads.

One last point here. Frequest readers of this blog know that we talk about the fact that SEO is an investment. You’ll notice that earlier in this post I referred to “Mature” SEO campaigns. If you’re asking how much to invest, you should remember that investing in real estate SEO, like investing in real estate, is not going to bring you returns over night. Superior performance takes time and consistent investment. Proper planning, strategy, and implementation will maximize your investment in real estate seo. Just don’t expect it to make you a millionaire tomorrow.

That’ll take at least a week.  )  Thanks for reading.

Hey folks. For the local readers (we’re based in Boston) the 3rd installment of the course I’m giving for the North East Association of Realtors is happening this coming Monday. Here’s a link to the course outline. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

The next session is going to be an in-depth look a the subject of this post. We’re going to be talking about traditional media as it compares to online media. Of course real estate seo is an online marketing medium. So, we’ll be touching on SEO and talking about how it stacks up against the other media.

Now, at Boston Logic, we’re on the side of those who proclaim the digital marketing mantra “Print is dead!” Well, maybe not yet, but it’s circling the drain.

The basic question is, why is this happening? Why is traditional media losing favor while online media is gaining a larger and larger share of the marketing dollar? From our perspective, there are two forces at work.

First of all, our lives are moving online. You need to market to the customers where they are. Your customers are online. Everyone quotes the fact that 80 or 90 percent of real estate buyers start their search online. But the reality is that we do a lot more than just search for property online. We spend hours each day online. We’re buying fewer newspapers, listening to less radio, and we use our TiVo to skip the commercials when we’re watching TV.

The result of this trend is that the number of impressions that each ad spot gets has come down. A TV spot used to be 25% more effective than it is today. And this is steadily declining. Newspaper circulations are falling off a cliff. The news is free online. The paper wastes trees. Pick your reason, we’re all just buying fewer newspapers at the news stand. All of this means that the value of these media is decreasing. So much so that lots of papers are cutting staff, closing their doors, or moving to a completely web-centric model. This means that they’re only going to offer their content online. Hallelujah.

The second reason that marketing dollars are going on line is accountability. Online marketing media, SEO, PPC, social media, banner placement, and email marketing, are all relatively easy to track. You can know how many visitors came from Google’s organic results to your site and how many of these users turned into leads or customers. This means you can calculate the cost of each lead based on the number of leads and your investment into SEO. Calculating ROI is even easier when you’re using Pay Per Click.

In stark contrast, it’s hard to know if a user came from a TV ad or just typed in your web address. Sure, you can print a promo code in the newspaper ad and use that to try and track effectiveness, but then you need to offer some kind of a discount and not everyone will use the promo code. So, you don’t know if your ad is a flop or if it’s actually performing better than your numbers are telling you, based on the number of folks who entered the promo code.

Most small and medium sized businesses don’t even try to track the effectiveness of their print campaign. To most business owners, marketing is a black box. You insert money on one end and hope that it produces business out of the other end. The black box provides little accountability and really doesn’t help you understand your ROI.

If you are one of the smart ones and you are working to understand the ROI on your many marketing media, then the results are probably quite clear. Most marketers know that they get better value out of online media than they do from traditional media. This is the nail in the coffin.

When the numbers tell you that SEO leads are costing you $5 and PPC is costing $7 but the newspaper produces leads at $35. Well, it doesn’t take an MBA to know that you should stop paying for newspaper ads and invest more of your marketing dollars into SEO and PPC. Everyone who runs the numbers is seeing this trend and they’re all moving online.

I could, very honestly, go on. This topic is quite broad. I’ll touch on it in another post soon. I’ll certainly be going into much greater detail on Monday. I hope to see you there! Thanks.

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.

At Boston Logic, we’ve always had a philosophy and it goes something like this:

“You’re in the real estate business, we’re in the marketing and technology business. You shouldn’t be expected to run your online marketing campaigning. That’s our job.”

Our clients take comfort in the fact that we know what we’re doing and they see the results, so they are happy and loyal. I bring this up because it illustrates an important reality about buying premium services. It’s unrealistic to become an expert before making every single purchasing decision. What you need to know is just enough to make an informed decision. Then, you can go back to doing what you do best, Real Estate.

The other day, I spoke on the phone with a real estate broker who had, unfortunatley, missed the important first step. He hadn’t informed himself enough and therefore had made a poor decision. When I asked him how his PPC campaign was going, he told me that he was encouraged by the number of impressions that his SEM manager had generated for him. So, I asked how many visitors this had brought him, what his click through rate was on the campaign, and what his cost per lead was. He had no answers.

When we’re managing a campaign, impressions aren’t a bellweather. Sure, they’re a part of the equation, but they are certainly no measure of success. This broker wanted to bring more visitors to his real estate website and sell more homes. He is spending money on a PPC camaign and he’s got no idea how it’s performing. All he knows is how often his ad is coming up.

If you’re looking for an SEM or SEO vendor, make sure that they are willing to educate you on the basics of how they’ll be doing their work. If they can’t explain it to you, then you should assume they’re hiding something from you because they probably are.

You need to be an educated buyer. Here’s a useful page about SEO vs PPC. Also, if you read this blog regularly, we touch on many of these topics and we’ll continue to educate you on real estate seo and ppc. If you want us to explain the basics to you, we’ll do so free of charge. Just drop us a line on the contact us page.

If I can leave you with one parting word today: Be an educated buyer. It will make you far more successful.

Have a good weekend and good luck with your SEO.

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