When real estate professionals think of “metrics” and their online marketing, many people think of popular tools like Google Analytics.  While Google Analytics is definitely one of my most favorite reporting tools, it’s not the only one to look at, and when you are looking at….just what should you focus on to start getting more leads that you can turn into closed transactions?

After spending literally thousands of hours looking at reporting tools in Yahoo, Google, and yes even YouTube, I thought I would share a couple of key insights that can help you to get more out of your online marketing.  Note, this will not involve you spending endless hours pouring over spreadsheets that are thousands of rows long!  Although you could get lost in some of the tools, focusing on just a few key items will help you minimize your time, find out the challenges, and get back to closing sales.

Analytics Intelligence

In the newer Beta feature of Google Analytics you can get notification when key events happen.  One of the best things would be to track when your “goals” (aka your leads”) exceed your desired range.  So, if you got an email notification then you would be in good shape, and if not, then you would have a problem to investigate.  Just as you can set Alerts for the positive, you can also set them for the negative (i.e. if you aren’t getting enough leads).  Taking some time set up alerts can save you hours of pouring through reports.

Pay Per Click

Far too often, one of the first items people focus on is Cost Per Click.  While it is important to have a good bid strategy, it is not one of the most important metrics to focus on.  One of the most important metrics to focus on when optimizing your paid ads is that of Cost Per Conversion.  This number tells you much more about your business than the cost per click,

For example, if you were paying $7.50 per conversion (aka a lead) and you knew that every 10 leads resulted in an appointment that you would turn into business then you are paying just $75 for a customer!  Focusing on your cost per conversion will help you to have consistent results.

YouTube Insight

YouTube insight is the reporting tool for your YouTube videos.  While many real estate professionals are still finding creative ways to use video in their online marketing it is helpful to know what to look for.  While many would say, “hey I just want 100,000+ views of my videos” it is probably unrealistic unless you are featuring a video of a dancing cat.

For your YouTube videos, consider looking at two key check points.

1. Discovery - Where are they finding your video?  Are they only playing the embedded player on your website, or have you been found in the search engines?  This can be key to finding out which videos are the best to continue to be produced.
2. Hot Spots - This helps you gauge user attention.  Are people watching until the end or are they just playing a few seconds of your video?  Keeping them longer will show you which videos users are most interested in so you can do more of what people want!

For those that have read our posts before, maybe this comes as a surprise, after all we are major supporters of paid online advertising.  My revelation that ads don’t work comes after speaking with agents all across the country.  One of the most common items I hear is that they want traffic to their websites, but it can’t be with Google Adwords because it “doesn’t work”.

I have to admit that I was shocked that this was one of the most consistent answers.  After all 95% of Google’s 21 billion in revenue in 2008 was made from Adwords, but apparently it doesn’t work for every industry.  Just as I was crafting my notes to write a letter to Larry Page and Sergey Brin I thought it best that I dig a little deeper into the conversations I was having.

The reason that Google Adwords isn’t working for most real estate professionals isn’t Google’s fault (shocker), it’s how it is being used by those in real estate.  The flexibility of the system is what has allowed many online marketers to make millions and also allows many to waste the same amount of money.

Here are three of the most common mistakes that real estate agents (and many others for that matter) are making when they are doing their paid advertising on Google.  Avoiding this will save some serious frustration.

1. Pointing Ads to your Home Page - The home page of your website is not nearly focused enough to be able to convert that great traffic into leads. Take time to point your ads to detailed pages within your website that make it easy for the visitor to volunteer their information. When you stop pointing your ads to your home page you can easily see an increase in your overall ad performance by 50% or more.
2. Bid strategy - Although being number one in real estate is great, being in the number 1 advertiser position seldom pays off. At the top position you generally pay the most and often get the impulse clicker who want take any action on your website. Place your bids that place in your ads in positions 3-5 and watch how your clicks turn into leads.
3. Keywords - Keywords are at the foundation of how you write ads and bid on them. The problem for most advertisers is that too many keywords are grouped with each ad. Taking time to group ads with just 8 keywords will increase your click through rates and lower your costs…yeah!

Google Adwords is certainly one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your real estate website, enabling you to have leads every day.  We certainly don’t want you to be part of the group that says “Adwords Don’t Work” because when done correctly you can get highly motivated clients for less than a cup of coffee.

To your success.

Related Must Reads:

• How to Generate Real Estate Leads for $60 a Month
• Leads, Leads, and More Leads

So we got a comment about the fact that “More leads doesn’t mean you will do more business.” This is just great in my mind that people even want to say this. Now of course you could say that more leads doesn’t guarantee that you will sell more homes but I guarantee you this:

If you generate 0 leads I guarantee that you will fail in real estate

To be honest you will fail in any business that requires you to generate leads. The comment leads me to believe that the person would believe that if more people came to a car lot that wouldn’t necessarily mean the car dealer would sell more cars. Sure it doesn’t mean you would sell more cars but it gives you the best possible chance!

Make Lead Generation a Focus

Yes that magic word of focus. If you don’t spend a certain amount of time every day trying to bring more leads into your real estate business you won’t be getting more leads in. There are plenty of ways to generate more leads and many don’t require you to call people that have never heard from you and don’t want to hear from you.

Here is a small list of things that you can do to generate more leads (just using the Internet):

• Update your facebook profile and let people know what you are doing
• Network with agents in other states or areas on facebook, linkedin, and twitter
• Generate some direct & immediate leads using pay per click advertising on Google
• Write more content for your website about the neighborhoods that you work and what kind of properties can be found in there and make sure you put a picture of what it looks like
• Write a blog post about what is happening in your market area
• Put up a video on YouTube about your market and what is going on
• Go and comment on others blogs and read the post before you comment so the comment sounds good
• Go and post ads on Craigslist and find people who are looking for a deal that you can find them.

By all means though make it a focus to generate some leads each and every day and do it in the morning before everything gets crazy.

More Leads Gives You More Options

The whole point of generating more leads is so that you can sell more property and if you are one of those agents who says “That’s OK I sell just the number I want to sell every year” then I ask you “Do you like working with everyone that you help?”. Think about that for a minute and if you say that you like everyone that you help you are probably lying or the most patient person ever. We all have struggles every year and there is always one bad apple that we try and not remember a year or two years down the road. The thing is when you generate more leads you can do any number of things when you find the bad apple. You can:

• Refer the client to someone else who is “better” suited for them and for you
• You can ask them to change their ways that are causing you issues or you will not be able to help them
• You can just plain out ask them to leave and tell them they can find another agent, brokerage, team or whatever because you don’t have time to waste with people who won’t follow your rules

Any of the above options can be very rewarding and the more leads we generate the more I am thankful for the fact that I have options.

Fast Acting Way to Generate New Highly Motivated Leads

What is the quickest way to generate massive leads and new business for you that my brother and I have been using for years? We generate a steady and reliable flow of leads using Google Pay Per Click Leads and we even are including the e-mails we use to convert clients into appointments.

Check out our real estate lead system and see how you can have a steady, reliable, and consistent stream of leads that you can turn into real clients each and every day.

Related Posts

• How to generate leads for $60 a month
• Why you can’t afford not to advertise on Google
• 5 Real estate ads for success on Google

Do you just have a little bit of money that you need to go a long way? If so let’s cover how to make your budget stretch as far as possible. When my brother and I started in real estate we had no savings, no money to invest in our business, & we weren’t sure when we would close our first deal. The idea of spending $60\month was terrifying to say the least. We realized that we had to spend some money because just hoping that someone would find our brand new websites wasn’t going to work so we took out our favorite friend “Mr. Mastercard” and decided we were going to generate some leads with Google Adwords. Back then it was kind of new now it isn’t and it provides one of the greatest platforms for finding customers that you can imagine.

Set a goal for the cost of leads

The very first part of that is necessary when you have a little (and even when you have a lot) is deciding how many leads you want to get for the dollars that you spend. To start with set an aggressive goal of how many leads that you think you can get for the money. To this day there are certain phrases that I advertise on that I get a solid lead for $2.60. Some of the leads cost me $5.54 and still others are $7.71. To start with shoot for at least 6 leads for every $60.00 and we can work our costs down from there.

We know that every single click costs money and we also know that getting 100% of the people who click to contact us in some way is not going to happen but we can set a goal to make sure we capture as many as possible. In fact we won’t be capturing them they will be surrendering their information to us.

Target a very specific customer

The more specific you are the better off you are going to be. For example if you lived in San Diego, CA you could choose to advertise for two types of home buyers.

• San Diego homes for sale
• la mesa homes for sale

La Mesa is a suburb of San Diego and someone looking for a home in La Mesa probably has already done a little bit of research on areas they want to live. Someone searching on “San Diego” may not know where in San Diego that they want to live and San Diego is a big place and you want someone who is closer to buying today.

Use exact & phrase match advertising

We don’t have time to go into a lengthy discussion on match types(See Choosing your words wisely) but let’s make sure that we only advertise when someone is looking for information really close to what we want.

In our case we want them if they are looking for La Mesa homes for sale. Our keyword list might look like:

• [la mesa homes for sale]
• [la mesa ca homes for sale]
• “la mesa ca homes for sale”
• “la mesa homes for sale”
• “ca la mesa homes for sale”
• [ca la mesa homes for sale]
• “la mesa ca home for sale”
• [la mesa ca home for sale]
• -rent
• -for rent

The [] and the “” are to let Google know we want to use exact and phrase match only and not broad matching. We also through a couple of negative keywords with -rent & -for rent. We don’t want anyone who is just looking for a rental to click on our ads.

Watch your results every day

When we have $60 to spend every month that means we have $2.00 a day (a cup of nice coffee). So we want to make sure that our daily budget is set to $2.00 and that we check in on it in the morning and in the afternoon to see how we are doing. If we aren’t getting clicks we may need to adjust our ad or the price per click that we are willing to pay.

Follow-up on every lead(no matter what)

No matter what your budget you want to follow-up on every lead. No matter what you think of their question, e-mail, or voicemail just keep calling them until  you get an appointment or find out that their best friend is a real estate agent who isn’t doing the job but they are going to use them anyway.

If you follow-up on every lead and you know how much you are spending you will make your $60 go a long way and turn it into some really great clients really quickly.

Want more help with pay per click advertising? We created a free course on Google Adwords to help you generate massive leads quick and cheap. Get this free course at www.OnlineRealEstateSuccess.com/Adwords.

Related Posts

• 5 ads for real estate success
• Why you can’t afford not to advertise on Google
• When to change your Google ads
• 5 ways to success with real estate pay per click

Blogging isn’t for everyone. In fact you might be reading this right now and thinking that it is for you but really you aren’t going to ever be successful at real estate blogging. It isn’t your fault though. You see we all do different things well. Some of us are better in person, some of us are better on the phone, and some of us are better with the written word.

So is real estate blogging for you? We created this short video that will answer the questions you may not have thought of. So take 2 minutes and 48 seconds to see if real estate blogging is for you.

Real estate blogging video

Pay the real estate blogging price

So are you ready to pay the price? The price can be steep or not so steep depending on the level of competition in the area. Really and truly though you have to like sharing information. Blogging is like becoming a news source and helping people with what they are looking for. If you don’t like writing, typing, or sharing you may want to consider carefully your blogging strategy and the level of competition in your area. If everyone in your area is updating their blogs 1-2 a week and you can’t imagine that you should look at pay per click advertising or social networking as a means of generating results on the Internet.

Real estate blogging book

If you watched the video (and I know you did) I made reference to the blog book that you can get. You can get our real estate blog book over at our website or clicking blog book and we will get that to you right away.

Related Posts

• 3 ways snoop dog can help your blog
• Using your blog to generate traffic
• Blogging with Jay Thompson, phoenix real estate guy

Search marketing is a broad term that is applied to pay per click advertising and other forms of advertising on the Internet that are displayed to the user when they are searching for something they just have an itch for.

One of the reasons I say it isn’t always pay per click advertising is some search marketing allow you to pay per impression, per conversion, or just a flat fee based on additional arrangements.

Real Estate Agents Using Search Marketing

So according to Google, and Jupiter Research, 41% of real estate agents were using search marketing back in 2004 and an additional 33% were going to be using it as of the end of 2005. So by the end of 2005 this report is stating that 74% of real estate agents would be using search marketing.

This is interesting because NAR (National Association of Realtors) stated that just 68% of real estate agents even had a website in a report that was done 2005. So there is a bit of a difference here that has to be sorted through.

Informal study of search marketing efforts

In the past year alone my brother and I have spoke to, taught, or coached over 1,000 real estate agents or others involved in real estate. During that time we asked every single group if they were doing any kind of search marketing efforts to increase leads, traffic, and performance of their websites. Out of 1,000 people we found that only 11% were doing any kind of search marketing efforts.

Of those that were doing search marketing they were producing results that were no less than 3 times those of their counterparts who were not doing any search marketing for their real estate website. In other words those that focused on their real estate website and their online marketing efforts for real estate were getting results.

What does this all mean to you?

This means that advertising on the Internet with search marketing programs is going to pay off for you if you do it and if you focus on it. There are a variety of programs and platforms available to real estate professionals out there. The key is to focus on the one that gives you the most exposure for the least amount of cost and of course generates the highest return on your investment.

The report on search marketing by Jupiter with results displayed over at the Google real estate section are of course designed to convince you to use Google Adwords. Now that is not a bad thing as my brother and I have received a solid return on our investment in Google Adwords for well over 5 years. In fact our ROI (return on investment) for pay per click advertising has well exceed 15 times return on our money during that time.

Google Adwords is not the only program out there though and we would encourage you to look at all search marketing programs with a few factors in mind.

Judging Search Marketing programs

Use the following criteria when evaluating programs for your search marketing efforts.

1. Can you control it - it is important to be able to control the where and what you advertising on.
2. Can you set the budget - if you can set the budget on a monthly or better yet daily basis that is best.
3. Can you judge the results - if you can’t get proof of what you get out of it don’t do it. You need to know what leads you are getting out of it.
4. How many people are using the system - if you are the first that could be great or really bad. Be careful if you are the first.
5. Is your customer using the system - if your target customer is on the website that you are going to be advertising on great. If your customer is not using the system you are wasting money. Make sure the system allows you to target your customer.

So whatever search marketing program you decide on make sure you decide on one that gives you the control and results that you need. Our real estate lead system will give you the tools you need to conquer your search marketing efforts and to follow-up with those leads as well.

Related Posts

• 5 Real Estate Ads for Success on Google
• Worse of the Web in Pay Per Click Advertising
• How to write an Ad that Attracts the Right Client
• Google Pay Per Click Generates 103 times Return on Money

As 2009 approaches, most real estate professionals have packed up their bags and are crossing their fingers for a better year that is just around the corner.  Unfortunately for that bunch, doing the same practices and hoping for a market change to save them is not going to yield any tangible results. 

Change is inevitable.  Whether the new year ticks or not the market is constantly changing and the way to get new business changes.  Trying new marketing or implementing is not always easy, in fact, it’s often challenging and painful because we fear the unknown and making mistakes. 

Albert Einsten once said:

“A person who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

If it’s ok for Albert Einstein to make a mistake, I think it’s ok for the rest of us. Too often we fear mistakes because we think it is bad to mess up, or even worse to think that we “failed”. I have often learned better lessons from my mistakes than I have from my successes because I am forced to look at what led me to the error so that I can avoid.

It is not that I don’t fear mistakes, it is just that I must control my fear to try new things. In fact, one of our coaches, Todd Bates, is famous for saying “control your fear” and it helps because it makes you reach to try new marketing that can take you to the next level.

Breaking through your fear often takes baby steps.  We certainly want to help you try something new in your real estate business, so here are some FREE courses that you can try that will take you through learning new skills so you can experience change that will bring results without pain.

• Real Estate Pay Per Click - Getting traffic to your website quickly and cheaply will bring new customers to your doors in days not weeks.  Our 3 day couse on pay per click will get you the fundamentals so you can start dominating online with your real estate website.
• Real Estate SEO - Free website traffic is part of a good balanced online strategy.  In our 5 day course you will learn how to make sure your real estate website comes to the top of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Real Estate Scripts - Your biggest problem really will be handling the volume of leads that you generate from your online marketing efforts.  This 3 day course will show you how to convert the prospects that contact you is essential to feeling the success for all of your efforts.

The courses are designed to get you immediate results so you will have some action items.  I wouldn’t recommend signing up for all of the courses at once as you might have a bit too much homework for the holidays.

Have fun with each course and we can’t wait to hear how your changes produced new success.

Related Must Reads:

• 12 Month Guarantee for Success in 2009
• 5 Real Estate Ads for Success on Google

Have you ever said to yourself “Wow I wish I could work with more people just like that person!”? I mean wouldn’t it be great if you could work with clients that meet your criteria. Clients that:

• Wanted your help
• Needed your help
• And were looking for the product you like to help people with

I like to call this customer the “real estate dream”. Now the great part is you can find more of your perfect customers. You can accomplish the real estate dream each and every month. There are two ways to go about finding more of your perfect customer. You can get referrals from that client (always a good idea) and a great way to do that is with your social networking. The other way is to use pay per click advertising to find more customers just like the one that you really liked. So how do we go about doing this?

Well let’s start by figuring out how to translate that great customer agent relationship into some keywords that we can use in Google.

Figuring out who your customer is (in keywords)

Ok so you like the customer and you like the property that you helped them purchase (in this example) and now we have to go find more people just like them. Since we can’t put in words like “honest customer”, “loyal customer”, & “Nice customer” we have to think differently. If it makes you feel better the customer also can’t type in “Nice realtor”, “Loyal agent”, & “hardworking agent” and find you. They can put it in but trust me they won’t find you and it isn’t because you aren’t hardworking. In fact there are only 4 advertisers on the phrase “hardworking real estate agent”.

So let’s say our perfect customer likes the following & we want to work with more just like them.

• Wants to buy a home
• Likes homes in Big Bear
• Homes that are in Big Bear, CA
• Homes that are on the Lake in Big Bear
• Only really wants homes that are for sale not for rent

Now that we know what our customer is like that we want to help we can go to Google and find out if there are more customers just like that person. Sometimes there aren’t but because Google is so big more often than not there is a market in your area on Google.

Finding the Keywords in Google

I am of course going to be using Google’s keyword and I am going to type in “big bear lake homes” into their keyword tool and see what kind of words it can generate for me.

The screen shot above shows you exactly what Google says about the market. It says that there is a market and that people type in “big bear lake homes for sale” and that there is low advertiser competition on this phrase. This is exactly the kind of customer that we are looking for. In fact there are at least 11 broad match phrases that show there is a market plus if we add in exact match & phrase match that brings the total words to 33 that we can advertise on.

This is of course just the start. Now that we have our words we can begin to write our ads!

Write Your Ads and Find More Great Customers

Now that you know your customer, you know what Google thinks about your customer, you are ready to go. This process is literally one that you can do in an hour or less. Think about your ideal customer first and then work from there.

Need more help? Ready to use Google Adwords to start generating leads of customers that you actually want to work with? Our real estate lead system will not only teach you how to do this for your exact market it will give you the follow-up system to convert them into real customers as well.

Related Posts

• Social Networking…Thousands of Raving Fans
• Use the Social Network of Linked in To Your Advantage
• Point Your Pay Per Click to the Right Page
• 5 Real Estate Ads for Success on Google

Would you meet with a friend to buy them lunch if they had a referral for you? What if they had a referral for you each and every day would you take them to lunch every day? Most of us would and if you wouldn’t think about the effort that the friend would be putting in for you to make sure they had a referral for you to get that free lunch.

Today lunch is not the cheap meal that it may have been way back when. You can guarantee that lunch for you is going to cost you $8.00 or more if you go to anywhere that you sit down to eat and not a drive through and your friend is going to order that iced tea that will set you back a couple of extra bucks. So you know you will be out $10 or more for that referral.

So if you would take your friend out to lunch for a referral and most would take that friend out every day of the week for a referral every day why wouldn’t you want to do advertising with Google Adwords? The strip of information at the top of the post if from one of our ad campaigns that runs each and every month. So each lead cost $7.50 and this is for 1 month. So our friend (Google Adwords) gave us a referral each and every day of the month and never ordered a drink!

What do the numbers mean?

In the example above let’s go over some important notes:

• We bought clicks on average for 41 cents a click. So some clicks where more but many were less but on average 41 cents for a chance at a customer.
• 2.72% CTR (Click Through Rate) - Each time a potential visitor saw our ad 2.72% of the time they clicked it. This may not seem high but direct mail has a response rate of .5% and I always tell everyone that 1% is your minimum to get so 2.72% CTR is pretty good (I believe I can still make it better as well).
• 5.42% of the time someone who visited the page we took them to (not the home page) they decided to provide us their personal information. This can be improved as well and we may even be able to get the number to 8-9% conversion rate which would just get us more leads for the same monthly budget and would cost our lead cost by 33%.
• We spend $239.92 for the month or less then the cost of a full page ad in many real estate magazines in our area.

How can you get started with Google Adwords?

Related Posts

Have you heard the horror stories of real estate agents, lenders, and anyone who has tried to use Google Adwords unsuccessfully? They will tell you how they spent money and they got absolutely nothing out of it. They “tried” but never got a single “good” lead. Often times when pressed on how they “tried” I find out that they were trying in the wrong direction. They were making errors without taking the time to learn how to use pay per click advertising effectively.

I just recently came back from a conference in Chicago by Perry Marshall. My brother and I have long been students of his methods and teachings for pay per click advertising. At this conference there were entrepreneurs that were running their multi-million dollar businesses off of pay per click advertising. These individuals were obviously doing things the right way.

The Wrong Way to Do Pay Per Click Advertising

Let’s look at some of the wrong ways you can do Google pay per click advertising so that you know what to watch out for. Sometimes just knowing you are about to head down the wrong road is enough to put you on the right path to generating leads from your pay per click efforts.

1. Point all of your ads to the home page- if anyone has been to a live seminar that we teach I say this every time. This is the best way to lose money on pay per click advertising.
2. Putting too many words in your ad groups - If you have more than 20 keywords or phrases per ad group you have too many
3. Not starting slow enough - When you pay for each and every click you need to be careful and start slow. I recommend that real estate agents start with $50 a month for 3 months. This is exactly how Jamey and I started in the garage over 5 years ago. By the way we thought we were going to go broke on the $50 a month and had no idea how we were going to pay it back but we did.
4. Bidding on the most popular phrases- if you live in San Diego the phrase “San Diego Real Estate” is probably very expensive. Don’t start with a word or phrase like this try being more specific to start such as “San Diego homes for sale”.
5. Trying to be at position 1 or 2 - in real estate agents want to be number 1 and will often settle for #2 but some of the most profitable clicks are at spots 3,4,5. You need to understand who your customer is and you don’t want someone who is just “click happy”.
6. Not holding your money accountable - many agents just want to throw their hard earned money at Google hoping it will generate more but you need to watch your money so you can figure out what is going on.
7. Not Using Googles Tracking & Conversion Code - You can’t that your work is succeeding if you aren’t tracking your results. Fortunately Google gives you free tracking code to put in your website or blog so you can see if the effort is paying off.

 So really when you have two choices if you are going to do pay per click advertising: do it the wrong way and waste your hard earned money or do it the right way and start generating leads you can convert to real estate clients.

Related Posts

• Point Your Ad to the Right Page
• 5 Ads for Real Estate Success
• Pick the Right Words to Advertise On
• How to Write an Ad that Attracts the Right Client