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Real Estate online lead generation - Google
By klard | August 29, 2006
This might be slightly off topic for this website, but it most certainly pertains to web site design and Google so here goes. The money that funds this site and all of the hardware and software that support it come primarily from real estate. It is a one hand washes the other scenario, I develop a website that generates leads for the real estate business and the real estate business pays hosting fees and buy servers for me to play with so that I can build better websites to generate more leads….and so on. I have recently been doing some analysis of where leads come from, how they are generated, whether or not they are organic, etc with the help of Google Analytics and of course analyzing the physical data…ie sales. What I have determined is that despite the best marketing efforts of sites like homegain and lending tree and all the spammers that solicit my web business daily, sales generated strictly from online leads have an ROI that is no better and evidence suggests possibly worse than traditional marketing efforts.
Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about let me give you some information to support my assertion. My data suggests that pure online lead generation accounts for approximately 25% of sales, note that we are on the first page for our primary keyword “(city) real estate” for a google search and we also rank very well for a plethora of other keyword phrases…so I am talking about a well developed site with good optimization and good backlinks. To get that 25% of sales we spend 40% of our total marketing budget on things like hardware, software, hosting and on occasion outside development (which by the way is very expensive and only worthwhile for targeted projects). This 40% does not account for any outlay for inside development work, if inside development was factored the ROI would be considerably lower.
Traditional marketing efforts including post cards, magazines, newsletters etc account for approximately 35% of total sales for the company. These efforts may also factor in to online efforts from the standpoint that a postcard may drive traffic to the website that may eventually turn into a sale. These types of sales are very difficult to track back to post cards and we are working on ways to more closely track this data including using tracking numbers on post cards so that when the user visits the website they can be associated with the postcard instead of being labeled a “direct visit”, once again Google Anayltics will help tremendously with this effort. The 35% of sales generated by traditional marketing accounts for another 40% of our marketing budget.
The other 20% of our marketing budget accounts for 40% of sales…you might be wondering what this could possibly be. Marketing to past clients. It’s pretty simple, marketing to past clients is fairly cheap but generates a significant portion of sales, we simply send them cards and magazines bi-monthly and their additional sales and referrals help the bottom line by 40%.
The bottom line….despite what lead generation websites and email spam tell you, having a balanced marketing plan is the best way to spend your dollars. Also, unless you are going to go all out and spend $12,000/year or more on a website, do not bother with these guys that are going to “get you leads” for $49 dollars to start and $50/month. Your website will be invisible to anyone not looking for you specifically, what I mean is it will not be found in a search for anything meaningful. If you just want to have a web presence find a real estate template and throw something up on a $9.95/month hosting plan and walk away. Thanks for tuning in.
Topics: Google, Web Design |