I watch where my website visitors come from very closely, I monitor my AdWords campaigns to make sure I am not spending too little or too much, AND I do this several times a day FOR FUN!
It is exciting to see where your visitors come from because it tells you what you are doing right and where you should spend your money. I get visitors from many different places including my ILS Castles and Estates Listings, my Ezine articles, my other websites, press releases, search engines and paid placements on Google Adwords. Whenever I can think of some way to drive more visitors to my site I do it (like blogging for example!).
Something wonderful has been happening lately though.... More people are coming from other sources than are coming from Google Adwords! Don't get me wrong, I think if you are going to pay for placement that Adwords beat SEO all day long, BUT it is nice to know that the other things are starting to have an effect. It has taken about 6 months of concerted effort, but it was definitely worth it. For about the last month the paid and the other visitors have been about equal, but this week the others have definitely overtaken the paid!
I am keeping my fingers crossed that this trend continues.
Real Estate Marketing Pro
Showing posts with label adwords. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adwords. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Adwords - Max Out Your Money
I was talking with an agent in the office this week about how to get her adwords cost per click down and thought that you all might like to hear it!
As you know from previous posts www.TampaBayUnder200K.com had a great click through rate. I was getting 2-3 clicks per day at an average cost of $.41/click. BUT I got nothing from that money - no leads at all AND I was mad that I was spending $1/day for no leads. Now I know that other people have much higher budgets and that wasting $1/day is not the end of the world, but it matters to me!
I set out to make a difference in that expense. First I changed the content of the site so that when they came to the site there were lots of good links to my other sites and other listings. Then I started trying to get that cost per click down. You do this by watching the CTR. This tells you how many times your ad is viewed compared to how often it is clicked. The higher that number the less you will pay per click.
You can effect this by making sure your ad says EXACTLY what they will get and that it is a compelling enough to make them click through. Changing just "Affordable Housing" to "Affordable Housing in FL" increased the CTR. Then I made sure that the keywords that made the ad show up were VERY tightly controlled*. If you have wishy-washy keywords like real estate, realtor, new home sales, you will spend a lot of money and have a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks because they are too broad. Use tampa bay real estate, clearwater realtor, trinity new home sales and other more specific keywords to tighten up that CTR.
Perry Marshall has a great (and FREE!) Google Adwords training course that I can highly recommend!
So how did it come out? Am I spending less for more clicks? I now cap my daily spending for that campaign at $0.50/day, last month I got 70 clicks at an average cost per click of $0.22, my CTR is 0.15% and I spent a total of $15.66!
Real Estate Marketing Pro
*If you email me at taradactyl@gmail.com I will be happy to send you what I am using now. Please remember that you need to modify them to fit your campaign or area.
As you know from previous posts www.TampaBayUnder200K.com had a great click through rate. I was getting 2-3 clicks per day at an average cost of $.41/click. BUT I got nothing from that money - no leads at all AND I was mad that I was spending $1/day for no leads. Now I know that other people have much higher budgets and that wasting $1/day is not the end of the world, but it matters to me!
I set out to make a difference in that expense. First I changed the content of the site so that when they came to the site there were lots of good links to my other sites and other listings. Then I started trying to get that cost per click down. You do this by watching the CTR. This tells you how many times your ad is viewed compared to how often it is clicked. The higher that number the less you will pay per click.
You can effect this by making sure your ad says EXACTLY what they will get and that it is a compelling enough to make them click through. Changing just "Affordable Housing" to "Affordable Housing in FL" increased the CTR. Then I made sure that the keywords that made the ad show up were VERY tightly controlled*. If you have wishy-washy keywords like real estate, realtor, new home sales, you will spend a lot of money and have a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks because they are too broad. Use tampa bay real estate, clearwater realtor, trinity new home sales and other more specific keywords to tighten up that CTR.
Perry Marshall has a great (and FREE!) Google Adwords training course that I can highly recommend!
So how did it come out? Am I spending less for more clicks? I now cap my daily spending for that campaign at $0.50/day, last month I got 70 clicks at an average cost per click of $0.22, my CTR is 0.15% and I spent a total of $15.66!
Real Estate Marketing Pro
*If you email me at taradactyl@gmail.com I will be happy to send you what I am using now. Please remember that you need to modify them to fit your campaign or area.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
