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Enhanced Clicks™ from Reply's Marketplace

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Services for Real Estate Pros with Reply.com

We’d like to thank the Active Rain community for feedback on lead generation programs. The responses were helpful, and there are several key takeaways that will not only help us improve our lead generation programs, but help us deliver new marketing products that meet the needs and expectations of real estate agents and brokers. We’re always working on new products, and we’re interested in hearing about and learning from the various online marketing programs that work well for you. Paul Zane Pilzer does a great job of summing up our mentality by offering the quote: “Prosperity belongs to those who learn new things the fastest.”

With that mentality, Reply! launched a simple cost-per-click marketing solution that doesn’t require any keyword generation or ad copy writing, that provides 100% precise geo-targeting, and eliminates a high percentage of low-quality traffic that would otherwise abandon an advertiser’s landing page.

Reply!’s Enhanced Clicks™ are a highly effective form of cost-per-click advertising. Our patent-pending technology is driving profits for the largest real estate advertisers in the country, and we recently made the technology available to individual agents and brokers. Here’s how the program works:

  1. Create a campaign and choose to purchase Enhanced Clicks™ for home buyers and/or home sellers.
  2. Customize your target market area and you’ll receive traffic only in the areas of your choice.
  3. Decide how much you want to pay for an Enhanced Click™ in a given location (auction-style bidding, higher bids win more Enhanced Clicks™).
  4. Provide your website URL so we know where to send the traffic.
  5. Set daily, weekly and monthly budgets.
  6. Start and stop a campaign or adjust your bids at any time.
  7. Access a reporting interface that will help you optimize your account for maximum R.O.I.

Once you create a campaign, our team of marketing experts will immediately begin targeting consumers in your target market(s). At a high level, we acquire traffic from the major search engines and real estate portals, we ask a consumer to identify themselves as a home buyer or home seller, we ask the consumer to provide their location, and then we direct the consumer to your website. We’ve enhanced a click by filtering for user intent and geography, and our real estate professionals receive high-quality traffic that converts at 50-100% higher than traditional search engine marketing.

Why are we offering Enhanced Clicks™? Our team of marketing experts recognizes a variety of challenges in acquiring localized traffic, and we’ve been searching for programs that offer simple, targeted and profitable consumer acquisition. Since we haven’t found anything that works for us, we decided to develop the technology for real estate agents and brokers. Search engine marketing offers the only reasonable form of geo-targeting, and the biggest challenges in search engine marketing are as follows.

1. Search engine marketing is difficult, and a successful campaign requires deep marketing experience surrounding keyword generation, writing ad copy, managing bids and budgets, etc. Investing in a successful program is expensive and challenging, and isn’t realistic for most real estate agents and brokers.

2. Search engine marketing is not designed for local advertisers.

  • Geo-targeting is often inaccurate and causes local advertisers to pay for clicks in geographies in which they cannot monetize the traffic. Even if a search engine accurately identifies a user’s location via IP location technology, the user may be in a location that differs from the area in which they wish to buy or sell a home.
  • Search engines force advertisers to pay a steep premium for geo-targeted traffic, often three to four times the expense of acquiring traffic nationally.

3. Most clicks don’t convert to leads. Advertisers pay to acquire consumers who click the back button immediately upon reaching a landing page. There are no quality filters on traditional cost-per-click marketing programs.

To learn more about Enhanced Clicks™ and the Reply! Marketplace, and to create an account for free, please visit http://www.reply.com/lp/b2b/realestatesignup1.asp.

We’d like to hear your feedback on this program and the concept of an Enhanced Click™. We’d also like to hear about any other forms of online marketing that work well for you. Please share your thoughts.

Comments(5)

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Greg Nino
RE/MAX Compass - Houston, TX
Houston, Texas

much better

Jul 28, 2009 05:55 PM
Catherine Chaudemanche - Edison & Central NJ
Metuchen Keller Williams Elite Realty / Middlesex County, NJ - Edison, NJ
Full Time, Informed and Involved- Results Driven

Hi,

Do you have metrics available you can share in term of average CPC? Thank you-Cathy Chaudemanche

Jul 29, 2009 12:46 AM
Kristina Pratt
St. Louis' Illinois Suburbs - RE/MAX Preferred Partners - Edwardsville, IL
REALTOR - SFR - GoshenRealtyGroup.com

You guys are nothing if not persistent.

Jul 29, 2009 02:38 AM
Christianne O'Malley
Dickson Realty - Reno, NV
Exceptional Service - Delivering Results in Reno!

I would like some third-party testimonials. Are you putting together an evangelist program like GrowthLeader did earlier this year? That might be what it takes to get some good testmonials and get your new programs off the ground...

Jul 29, 2009 05:19 AM
Reply.com Marketing
Reply.com - San Ramon, CA

Brian again at Reply.com - Thank you for the feedback - much appreciated.

CPCs vary depending on your location but on average they are $3.00 at the city / zipcode level. For perspective, key advantages of our program are the following:

  • If you were to purchase clicks from Google, Microsoft-Yahoo, an ad network or any other provider, they are selling you a gross click. That means the consumer has not been qualified for intent and location. 
  • When you buy Enhanced Clicks from Reply!, you purchase a "net click".  That means we have asked consumers, are you interested in buying or selling and if so, where.  Additionally we have scrubbed the traffic for fraud. 
  • The net result is Reply!'s traffic converts 50% -> 100% better than any search engine or ad network.
  • Better yet - you maintain the same ability you would have in Google AdWords to start & stop your bids and adjust any time but we provide you with "perfect geo-targeting" because we ask the consumer where they are shopping for real estate as a part of our process. We are not using IP filters or guessing.
  • The best part is you don't have to learn keyword bidding, keyword management, ad copy creation or how to create banners we do all that for you.
  • It only takes about 5 minutes and you are up and running and directing qualified traffic to your site at the budget you determine.

Sample Real Estate Customers buying Enhanced Clicks:  For transparency, you can find the logos on our homepage, they include the following companies:

  • MarketLeader / GrowthLeader
  • Active Rain
  • Coldwell banker
  • Keller Williams
  • Hearst Netspapers
  • Real Estate.com
  • Zip Realty
  • Bargain Network
  • MLS.com
  • Remax
  • Lead to Realty
  • Realty Store

Regarding a casestudy, we will be publishing the Marketleader casestudy around Inman (in a week or so).  Bottomline, if you are interested in online consumer acquistion, we have launced a platform focused on local advertising that is simple, targeted and will result in profits.

Let's see your thoughts.

Brian Bowman

Jul 29, 2009 07:47 AM