I’ve said this several times before, but it bears repeating. About 80% of home buyers are using the internet now for finding themselves a new home. Considering that much of the online advertising you can do can be done for little or no expense, you should be learning all you can to make your online ads as effective as possible. This article series takes a look at what top producers are doing with their online ads to give them an edge over the competition:
Use Advertising Analytics – many people neglect to track the results and return on their online ads because it didn’t cost them anything to post them except a few minutes of their time. But you should have a sense of what’s working and what isn’t with your ads beyond the number of prospects you get coming to you. As I always say, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.
Try the site getclicky.com for classified ad analytics. You can set things up with this service so that your sellers gets an email every time someone lands on a page advertising their home and provides daily reports on ad activity. You can use this for your providing weekly activity reports automatically to all your sellers. If you find there are a lot of visits to your pages but relatively few inquiries you can use this data as grounds for reducing a home’s price or fine tuning the ad.
Calls To Action – always let people know what you want them to do when they see your ad. It’s estimated 20%-40% of people who see your squeeze pages will do what you ask them, so when you’re posting ads be sure to direct them to click on the links to squeeze pages on your site.
Limit Your Listings Pictures – always remember that your online ads’ main goal is getting people to visit your website and the only goal of your website is getting visitors signing up for your mailing list for receiving updates on new and sold listings and other real estate information interesting to them. With that in mind don’t post all the pictures you have for a listing in your online ads. Just show them enough to pique their interest so that they’ll want to visit your site to see more.
