As agents spend more and more of their marketing budget on online advertising, it is important that they truly understand what does or does not work for them. This becomes doublely important with agencies throughout the world under financial pressure and needing to make sure that whatever they spend on marketing generates results.
The following excellent article was recently published by Mike Carter in his Zoomf Blog under the title 2009, year of tracking the conversions.
Online advertising is heavily data-centric. By this I mean that most advertisers online analyze data to the nth degree. This is both the pro and the con of internet advertising. It’s a pro that you no longer have to ask that old adage of advertising -
I know that 50% of my spend is wasted, I just do not know which half.
With internet ads, you can understand what is working and what is not just by looking at the data.
The con is that you can be buried in data.
In the property lead generation space, not a lot of thought is given to data and the power of conversion. Not yet. We here at Zoomf believe that agents will start to get familiar with ‘conversion’ over 2009.
So how can you get a step ahead in the game? It’s pretty simple. Ask yourself the following questions -
- What do I consider a conversion on my website ? (hint - its a call or a registration)
- Who are the top 20 websites sending me traffic ?
- How many calls are generated from my site every day ?
- How many registrations ?
- Which sites in the top 20 have the best conversions to calls or registrations?
Once you know the questions to ask, then you get your IT or software provider to enable the tracking. Now you’re ahead of 80% of the competition and part of the movement gaining momentum today.
If your website is on Analytics, have a look at goals and funnels within the interface. Perfect starting point for conversion tracking.
At propertyadguru.com we couldn’t agree with the sentiments more. It is extremely important that agents and realtors around the world truly understand how effective their online advertising spend is.
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I think that the majority of agents don’t have a clew were the enquiry comes from. It appears what happens in the Capital city’s as compared to the regional areas is quit different I think that’s because the press is not as accessible in the city.
We are spending more money in all areas press, internet, yellow pages etc and driving people to our own web site and picking up a ever increasing amount of listings through our own site. We only get 2000 odd unique visitors per month out of a population of 130,000
We have found that realestate.com’s claims have not lived up to the spend other than the Feature Listings, the Top spot is poor designed module we feel as it puts to much emphasis on the agent profile and three small photos as compared to a larger photo does not work.
The e brochure thing we are told by buyers becomes a pain if you are bombarded and Domain subscribers are unsubscribing because of this.
We have tried the listing generators like myhousevalues and they simply don’t seem to be on the money yet.
We think that realestate.com has got the potential to increase its revenue from us however there needs to be changes to the listing presentation and functionality, no ones listening.
There also needs to be discipline in the administration of major portals as re-listing the same properties each week just stuffs up the alerts and the bad city address needs attention, both the buyers and the sellers see this and causes them to require a closer look in person to check the info as compared to the press were they respond a lot faster.
We break all the stats down to two groups buyers and sellers then the actual conversion to enquiry and inspection which is the only 2 things that lead to sales and listings.
Our ad spend is around $250,000 to 300 k per year.
Realestate.com gets a further $8400 subscription and a projected $24000 feature properties this year.
Yellow pages both online and the book gets $16,000 this year.
The spend on our own web site this year will only be $15 - 24,000 and will be just maintenance , pdf changes and graphics with some banners ads that will promote our sales people better.
We invested heavily in the development of our own site 4 years ago although it took as a bit of money and effort to make it pay, the offeronline process brought a lot more people to using the our site and we pay more to realestate.com to connect the offeronline link through our listings, As we sell a lot of property to people moving here from interstate using offeronline to start with.
I would describe us as a very small non franchised agent that does not do rentals or have a shop front and we sell well above our franchises competitors volumes, we do not cold call or canvas any other agents listings.
The Internet is very important to us and if we could get more enquiry, inspections,sales and listings we would spend the money to acheive this.
Regards Chris Ford
0419 781 1861