What shouldn't surprise you is that many vendors (like me) are in the business of advertising. What might surprise you is that if you are an agent, broker, or FSBO seller, you are too.
Selling real estate is really about being a successful advertiser. You have a product and need to convince members of the public to come and at least take a look at it. Some of that advertising is done offline but more and more is being online. The rub is this: if you have been online for over a week's time, you quickly figure out that just because billions of people may be online and millions may visit a particular website, there is no guarantee than even a dozen will visit your website or property listing.
Successful advertisers measure everything and, just as importantly, focus their efforts in endeavors that bring eyeballs and results. As an advertiser, you should be doing the same thing to analyze your level of success in any given online advertising medium - video tours, virtual tours, or simply property listings. Generate they divide their costs in their desired results.
Having an estimate of what those results should be can be very helpful. Most online advertising platforms are forthcoming in their data to you. "How many eyeballs can be expected in N timeframe" is the question that needs to be answered by any advertising platform. Poking around the site should make it easy to verify at least order of magnitude for data that has been provided to you.
On the video side, we've looked at length at video view data for Youtube and other sites as they relate to property videos. The results are paltry, easily replicable, and match what you see when poking around the sites looking at property videos. In a shameless plug, the results for our own real estate video platform are below. We are really focused on two timeframes - the fist 14 days of a video and the first 30 days. These are the same timeframes that our real estate video customers have indicated as being important
In cases where there is an absence of hard data or verifiable data, be more skeptical. Request a trial period or otherwise establish the minimum bar for results.
The keys to success are:
- Think like an advertiser
- Measure results like an advertiser
- Focus on places where you are getting desired results
Tony
---------------------------------Vidlisting.com Most Recent Results-------------------------------
First 14 day Numbers (actual data) for last 5 properties posted on our own real estate video website
- Los Bosques (Panama): 541 video views in first 14 days (just shy of 1200 views in first 30 days)
- Ebenezer Farm (Atlanta area): 417 video views in first 14 days
- Cheshire Manor (Atlanta area): 573 video views in first 14 days
- Ednam Drive (Charlottesville, VA): 626 video views in first 14 days
- Diego De Mendoza (Santa Cruz, Bolivia): 669 video views (we are on Day 10 of this posting)
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