PPC click through

[MaxSinclair]

I'm seriously considering using PPC. Does any one know how many clicks do we need to generate a lead? I know from a previous thread that some of you have a lead to customer conversion ratio of between 40% to 60%. Thanks.

[San Diego Real Estate]

Max...I can't tell you how many clicks you need to close a deal! However, that being said I can tell you it works... You need to have the proper consultant and Conversion Tools in place just like Organic! ;)

[MaxSinclair]

Thanks Al. I'm just a little nervous about the whole thing. I'm #1 in MSN for lake oswego real estate, and #5 in portland real estate. No where in Yahoo or Google yet. But with that, I'm not even getting more than 4 or 5 visitors a day. Pathetic, huh! That makes me wonder what the heck is going on. Will PPC increase traffic by leaps and bounds in any way? I'm shaking!!! LOL.

[San Diego Real Estate]

Well Max...there are no guarantees in life as you know! However I will say that is the nice thing about PPC...you can adjust the traffic...to fit your needs!

[afm1]

Max,

SDR is absolutely right!!!

Make sure you have a plan in place before starting. I do PPC for some agents in my area. As of recently, it has been working great, but when we first started (1st month), it was a complete mess.

You truly need a system in place to manage the leads coming in. Furthermore, you need someone to manage the calls that must be placed right away (15 minutes of receiving the lead). It is imperative that those people using this lead system be somewhat technically savvy. I would recommend a blackberry or something similar so you can work leads in the car etc. In addition, you should really have someone fielding the leads and making those initial contacts to validate the lead and gather intial information. If you or your people are afraid of picking up the phone, you will fail.

Lastly, Follow up, Follow up, Follow up! You have to work the old or stale leads as hard as the fresh ones coming in. We are making 3-4 phone calls on each lead and then entering into ACT for follow up in the furture if we strike out.

There may be a better way than what I listed above, but we learned the hard way. I can tell you this, it does work, if worked properly.

[MaxSinclair]

afm1...thanks for the advice and getting me ready for it. I'm going to start PPC in 3rd week of June. I've got less than a month to put everything together. This is going to be fun.

[gemini]

Max,

before you start your PPC you need to work out the algorythm of actions of your visitors. How they are coming to your site, what they are looking and where they are going.

I like the design - looks pretty and unique. But I had to stare at the home page for a few minutes to realize what is where. I'm used to read from left to right and comprehend info this way.. you have thin comlumns and visitors have to read each of them separately, it's kinda hard and when I read, columns next to it with different colors are disturbing. I can't really concentrate on the info and figure where I need to go right away... kinda need to take some time. May be its jut me.

MLS search is one of the most visited parts of a web site - I think you're making a big mistake providing listing details without asking visitors who they are (no registration). In your case PPC won't drive you a lot of traffic - too expencive, so you need to try to convert each visitor into lead carefully. People don't like to fill out forms unles they get something for it and they will get listing details if they register, till then you give them free basic MLS search with limited info.

The second most lead generating part of a web site, in my experience, are smaller communities - people would like to leave in a city/town/country but they want to see the exact place, community, neighborhood with nice houses/townhomes/condos etc. What are
* Portland
* Lake Oswego
* Beaverton
* Hillsboro
* Tigard
* West Linn
??
Are those cities? towns? communities? I see now they are cities. When visitor comes in, mostly, they already know where they would like to leave, I mean areas as small as city :)Now, give them communities in different areas of the city, different living, price ranges etc; lots of pictures of those very specific communities, drawings, floor plans if available etc. You have to have a "request more info" form on each community/naighborhood page. People start spending more time on your site just browsing through because you took your time to take all those nice pictures and now they have a good idea on the specific areas. I get so many requests every day on small communities, new developments etc.

Right now I think your site can generate leads on your MLS search, I don't think it will generate you a lot of leads on regular contact forms unless there is no alternative information on your area or you drive tonns of traffic.

I see you have investment page - this is good, add a few links to investment articles somewhere where people can see them right away and read area specific investment info and general knowlagebase. Also, there are a lot of First Time Buyers - I would use this posibility to create a separate page for them just like the Investment page - I'm getting a lot of those. Also, I get a few 1031 Tax Exchanges per week, not too many, but I get them.

Hope this helps, and don't take my advise as criticizm ;) The site is very stylish, looks professional its just feels confusing on the homepage.

[Fiber]

Hello,
Which company u gonna use with ppc?

If u have high budget of course google adward but if ur budget less than $150
I suggest 7search or searchfeed they both nice , I had previous experience with them.

[HHI Golf Guy]

MLS search is one of the most visited parts of a web site - I think you're making a big mistake providing listing details without asking visitors who they are (no registration).

There's a lot of debate over this, and I have tried it both ways. From my experience our agents receive more valid contact information and more MLS information requests by not having visitors fill out contact info before viewing properties.

When we made them fill out the info first, the majority of the email addresses and other contact info were bogus.

We use other ways to collect contact info. While this method does not garner as many email addresses as having a web surfer submit info, 99% of our contact info is valid and over 80% are inquiries from people serious about buying a home.

The net result is that the agent does not have to weed through tons of contact info to find the few good leads. This means that they spend less time on their web site, and more time doing other important tasks (like playing golf :D ).

I do agree that you need a good plan with PPC, especially to track visitors. I suggest that you create a new page specifically for people that enter your site through PPC. You can also create multiple PPC landing pages that tie in to each PPC phrase that you use.

[afm1]

Hey Golf Guy,
Can you elaborate on "doing other things" to obtain information?

My experience (although very limited) has shown that asking too much information can be "threatening" and people will exit the site. I agree however, that more info yields a more serious buyer and better information. However, the hits would be less. Is that what you mean about not having to weed thru BS leads?

[HHI Golf Guy]

Hey Golf Guy,
Can you elaborate on "doing other things" to obtain information?

Sorry - I don't mean to be a butthead - but I cannot elaborate on those items. They are part of what puts food on my table.

I agree however, that more info yields a more serious buyer and better information. However, the hits would be less. Is that what you mean about not having to weed thru BS leads?

Yes. An agent should not have to spend hours sending emails (even form letters) to bad addresses and then have to purge those addresses from their database.

In fact, we try and make it so that the agent has very little work to do on their web site. We handle all listing updates, content updates, web maintenance, database maintenance, newsletter/drip email format and distribution, and more. The agent is responsible for responding to inquiries, posting a paragraph or two to their blog once a week, and developing 3-5 paragraphs of local info every 4-5 weeks for the newsletter/drip email campaign.

Most real estate markets are booming right now - the less time an agent has to put into their web site the more time they can spend selling homes and property or spending time with their family and friends.

[afm1]

My apologies. I don't know why, but I always thought that you were an agent. It is obvious that you can't divulge that information (lol).

Thanks for the advice otherwise. I am not an agent. I just feed my agents for more business and so far it has been working.

[HHI Golf Guy]

My apologies. I don't know why, but I always thought that you were an agent. It is obvious that you can't divulge that information (lol).


There's no need to apologize. In fact, I do have a real estate license. It's currently inactive until we open our new brokerage late this year.

[gemini]

There's a lot of debate over this, and I have tried it both ways. From my experience our agents receive more valid contact information and more MLS information requests by not having visitors fill out contact info before viewing properties.

I agree, but generating leads from small paid traffic is really hard when you don't pursue lead capturing techniques - you won't get 1000 leads a month, not even 100 if your traffic is really not that high, so in this case my suggestion to capture every one of them since they are all paid for. There are won't be too many to weed out. I noticed that new agents that have little experience in real estate are very good with online leads since this is their only one real resource. When site gets quite a few leads per month and you're comfortable with turning off "required" registration than you should do that, but not from the start when you don't have any buyers to deal with. I generate 900-1100 leads per month with one site for my boss and he is still not comfortable with the idea to let people request info when they want to and not require registration, but don't get me wrong - I have a lot of inquiries without any pushing on daily bases too. Big volume of registrations allowed us to extend agent staff more than twice and open 2 brand new offices in the town. So, its not that bad after all.

[MaxSinclair]

Thanks for all the input, everybody. My PPC campaign has officially been launched for a little over a week now. The result has been quite good. And Max, I have overhauled my site design completely. It's back to a more traditonal approach. So the flow is what most people are used to. I'm averaging 1 to 2 serious inquires a day. Don't know whether that's good or bad result, but for a one man band, that's about all I can cope with.
I'm getting leads, yeah!!!!

[gemini]

Congratulations Max! I'm really happy you're getting leads now. The site looks very nice. Since you're working alone 1-2 leads a day that's all you need and they should be at higher conversion rate if you don't require registrations.

If you don't spend a lot of money on PPC right now - you can experiment with making people to register and see how it goes for a week lets say. I have a few people in my office that created themselves a followup system and everything is automatically schanduled in their TopProducer - their sales are very high and agents are young and unexperienced. One of them started in april and already at the highest split rate with a broker and was giving presentation on how to work online leads for the highest conversion rate - he is doing excellent and doesn't waste a lot of time on incubating - he know hows to prioritize, but doesn't let any leads to get lost. I think such experiment would be good for yourself - incubation of prospective clients pays off in near future while you're working with those that ready to buy.

[MaxSinclair]

Thanks, Max. Top Producer kept coming up in so many conversations I've had lately. What do you think of it? I'm already having a hard time keeping track of every lead using Outlook - what I've sent them, standard follow up emails, etc.. And I know that it'll only get worse. So I know I'll need to put in a solid foundation before it crumbles. Any advice?

[gemini]

Unfortunately I am not a realtor and do not work with their software. I probably need to interview a couple of those agents and investigate on how things work :) Really, can't help you with that. I know when this agent started he reworded a lot of letters from TP (he actually bought descktop version for about $650) and now mostly working from home.

[San Diego Real Estate]

Great Info guys...One thing that has helped us close more deals is our Auto Responder and Drip Mail System! When a Client logs in they get our Auto Responder message Thanking them for coming to our site! Then they are put into our Drip Mail and we continue to send them messages for a year! It really has helped in Conversion Ratios! ;)

[gemini]

We have that too. I noticed that very thought through autoresponders make a lot of people think you responded right away and I get a lot of those "wow I didn't expect to hear from you that soon.."

[ConsiderThis]

Most of the Realtor autoresponder messages that I've seen are very straight forward and say that the person is away from their desk and that they'll get back to the person within so much time... a few hours is what a lot of people say.

And I think the more successful ones say, A message from the desk of... or something along those lines, rather than AUTORESPONDER .

[Phoenix Realtor]

MaxS, Congratulations on the leads coming in. And, on the new design... you must have been a graphic artist in a past life. I have liked every design you have put together so far. You rock! ;)

Max, Why not interrogate that agent in your office and get some info for us to use? I have Top Producer 6i on my computer, but I don't use it to near even 15% of its potential. I really need help setting up an automated system to capture all the leads right away. Some of my leads I don't repond to for days and some slip through the cracks which makes me real mad at myself. I've worked so hard to get where I am, but now I am personally only working probably something like 35-40% of the leads coming in. The rest slip through or get reffered to my buyer's agents. Spy for us Max, get us something solid we can work from, please.

[MaxSinclair]

Hey, thanks, Matt. I love design. One of these days I'm going to get some real training.

Max, really, we'd love to know what other people are doing with their leads from the internet. I think everyone here , particularly new agents like me, will learn so much from other's experience. Don't mean to turn the pressure on you, Max.

[happy home]

Try to make the best use of your knowledge in this field

[mmuench]

Max,

You truly need a system in place to manage the leads coming in. Furthermore, you need someone to manage the calls that must be placed right away (15 minutes of receiving the lead).

Amen! And follow up. Try not to be too aggressive in you email followup, though. Online customers are a different breed. They want to remain anonymous until they're ready to move. Stay in touch, but gove them some space at the same time.