Before I get into how to create a great campaign on Facebook or Google or some other medium, I need to address the most important piece of Advertising/Marketing and that is the dreaded TRACKING. Yes I capitalized the word for effect because it is that important. Who knew you needed a math guy in a room with creative types to make the thing work.
You spent $100 and received 3 leads. So your cost is $33 a lead right? But what if 1 of those leads cost you $2, another cost you $10 and the 3rd one cost you $88? You would probably want to know that right? Because if you eliminate the $88 lead and save that for the $2 and $10 leads, you could have gotten an extra 12 or more leads out of the campaign.
How are you tracking leads that come into you?
Let's start with the basics: Google Analytics
It is free. It integrates with adwords and it is a pretty powerful tool. Don't worry if you don't understand everything it is telling you, just focus on the area that tells you that you got leads and here is exactly where they came from. To do this, you will need to use the tracking codes provided by Analytics. Your web developer can help you with putting this code on the right pages.
Now let's get a little more advanced: Named Pairs
We use this quite a bit because it tells us more than the straight Google conversion tracking. We use 2 variables that we then store in a database or attach to the email generated from a contact form. Some companies that we work with use a single variable that is an ad id, but you get the idea. We tag each ad with what site it was generated on, what keyword was used in the ad and what creative was used. This tells us exactly how we spent our money and by looking at the costs, we can tell if we spent it wisely or not.
This is more advanced and does require that your web programmer know a bit about managing sessions or cookies and storing and retrieving information from a database. There are a few products out there that do this as well, but typically they are fairly expensive for a realtor with a minimal advertising budget.
Let's take it to the top: A/B Testing
So we figured out that Google Pay Per Click worked the best for our particular campaign. We further tested it and figured out that the keyword of "Bob Sells Atlanta" was our most popular and most cost effective ad for generating leads. Now we just need to know which ad gets people to sign up more frequently. That is where A/B testing comes in.
We can now test our ads in Google and other programs out there, by weighting our ads and showing them in rotation. With our detailed tagging, we will now find out that the ad that shows Bob's Picture converts better than the one that shows a fancy house.
So now when we spend our $100 we are looking to get 50 leads not 3 leads all because the creative guys let the bean counter in the room.
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