| Hey all, I wanted to pick up where we left off in our Fix What Matters Most series--getting inbound visitors to your website , but first an apology and a quick request. Our training emails have been coming out in bursts and then going away largely because of delivery problems. Sorry for that. If you have think these training emails are valuable, it would mean alot to us if you add this email to your contacts or "whitelist" so we can make sure and get them to you. We left off talking about attracting high quality buyers and sellers and today we are going to focus on paid traffic sources. Some of you are already cringing and grabbing your wallet to hide it. But if you do it correctly, paid traffic doesn't have to be expensive. Before you get started, you have to know how much you can afford to spend. We have gone into great detail on building a budget before so I won't do it again here (email us if you need help). Let's say you are in a market where the average home price is $250k and the average commission rate is 3%. Your GCI is $7500 and a reasonable marketing budget per transaction is 10%. That means you can spend $750 for a single transaction, or if you know your closing rate--the average is 1 transaction for every 24 leads-- you could spend around $31 per lead and still have an ROI of 10 to 1. But before we get into the options we DO recommend, I'm going to start with one big one that we don't--Facebook. I know I know…this is near blasphemous these days in online circles, but let's take a look at paid Facebook marketing for a moment. Because of its popularity among real estate agents, the price per click has risen to be as much as or more than other similar paid options. The problem is that Facebook is not a destination site for home buyers and sellers. As opposed to seeing an ad when a particular search term is entered, Facebook consumers see an ad when they are otherwise looking at photos of friends or engaged in heated political debates 🙄. This results in a lower conversion rate from your website and a much lower quality lead for the same money you could spend through other advertising options. There are two options that have proven effective that we want to share though. First, there is Google Adwords. Customers search for terms like "homes for sale in Anytown USA" and your ads display as among the first search results. You pay when someone clicks on your ad as opposed to when someone views it and then if your website converts well (we covered this as the first thing to fix), you get a high quality home buyer who was searching for homes and went to your website. Google Adwords is fairly intuitive to set up and there are thousands of options for a campaign, but I will give you just a few tips to get started. Make sure your keywords are relevant for both your market(s) AND real estate. It does you no good for your ad to come up for anytime anyone searches for "real estate" or "homes for sale". There are millions of searchers across the country who will see your ads and potentially click on your ad costing you money for customers you can't work with. Don't try to compete on a per click basis with the top dogs in your market. Set your max CPC (cost per click) at a low level and then gradually increase it until you are getting enough traffic to max out your daily budget. It may take some initial tweaking to get it just right, but after you have it dialed in you will have an ad campaign that runs while you sleep with no input from you. It's a thing of beauty. The other option we like is Homegain. They are a real estate lead generation company and while we do NOT endorse their lead sales programs, we are big fans of their buyer and seller link programs. The way they work is they run ads nationally on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and then the traffic that they generate, they redirect to your website for your specific area. Because they are already running effective campaigns, there is no managing or tweaking from you. Just give them your website link and set your budget depending on your transaction goals. Again, this is an option that requires no input after you have it set up. I want to make it clear that I do NOT recommend either of these options until you solve the first problem--make sure your website converts at least 20% of inbound traffic into leads. I have seen many agents burn through thousands of dollars on Google, Facebook or Homegain because they were sending traffic to a website that didn't convert. If you want to skip the work and grab a site that already does it, check out the website included with our Pipeline Pro Tools. You can even get a live demo of the site in action. Click here. Until next time, Levi Jones Guerilla Realty |
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Paid traffic & leads
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