As a computer nerd and marketing guy I love to see a pile of stats that I can analyze and mine the information. When I do any pay per click advertising I can look at my analytics stats and see how well my individual pages are converting.
One of the things that drives me crazy is marketing in ways that are hard to track. One of the most popular methods of doing advertising in real estate is using classified ads. Classifieds are a tough way to track and the only way that anyone seems to track the effectiveness of classified advertising is by the number of calls that they get after they put an ad in the paper. I remember when people would say things like “That was agreat ad I got three calls on it”
Well times change and tracking should also change and get better. I was just tracking a new real estate site that is not getting any Google traffic. I watched and monitored two kinds of advertising. I had Google Analytics set up to track all visits to the site and had the following types of traffic going to the site.
1. Classified ads running that were advertising the site and a phone number to call if the person wanted to.
2. Google Adwords that were costing about 23 cents per visitor.
In the tracking over the last few weeks I noticed that the classified ads were bringing over about 3-5 visitors a day for a $75 per week adspend and the Google Adwords were bringing in about double the people for about a 11-12 dollar per week adspend.
Here is the breakdown per visitor for the classified ad at best $75 divided by a total of 30 visitors for a total of $2.50 per visitor from the newspaper versus 23 cents per visitor over the Google AdWords.
There are of course other factors that we can look at between the newspaper advertising and the Google Adwords including the fact that some people may phone the number instead of visiting the website.
In the end tracking for newspaper classified ads for Realtors sucks because it is not as smooth and can not be changed as easily for split tested as queickly as web advertising is. If you are looking to test how well a page will convert then doing a quick test with Google AdWords or some other pay per click is a lot better use of time or money then almost any other form of testing. Give up the newspaper and find leads on the web instead.
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