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Real Estate Leads Focusing Your Time, Energy and Money
As a real estate agent, you're no stranger to investing in lead generation tools; however, as you are most likely aware--not all leads are created equal. When evaluating lead generation tools, it's important to know both your cost-per-lead and your lead success rate from various sources. Your goal should be to understand exactly how much you're spending to generate leads and whether your success rate justifies the investment.
Today, we're taking a closer look at how to generate leads for real estate by analyzing the efficiency of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO) based on real, up-to-date data from our real estate clients at Delta Media Group.
Real Estate SEO and PPC: Follow the Data, Find the Leads
- Defining a Lead: One of the challenges with quantifying lead generation is that people have very different definitions of what constitutes a lead. We're not looking for people with a passive, curious interest in real estate or for people who check the right demographic boxes but aren't currently interested in buying or selling a home. A good, qualified lead comes from someone who has actively shown interest in what you have to offer either by signing up for your email list, requesting a showing, contacting you directly or otherwise engaging with your online presence in a meaningful way.
Calculating cost-per-lead is actually pretty straightforward as long as you have access to data about your marketing budget. You simply take the amount of money invested in each lead-generation tool (social media, SEO, PPC, etc.) over a set period and divide it by the number of leads generated during the same period. It's a quick, simple calculation and will tell you a ton about what you're getting in return for your marketing investment.
Here are a few of the trends we see, from our clients at Delta Media Group:
- All of the numbers in this section are from clients who do not use forced registration on their website. There is some reasonable debate about forced vs. non-forced registration, but we're focused on high-quality leads. Forced registration tends to generate more quantity, but not the same level of quality.
- On average, SEO clients invest between $8 and $15 per lead, which makes SEO the most affordable lead generation tool on our list.
- In normal markets, PPC costs anywhere from $8 to $35 per lead. The wide gap in PPC costs is largely due to the fact that some real estate markets are more competitive than others.
- For luxury markets, the average cost-per-lead with PPC is up to $90, depending on your target audience and how you choose to spread your PPC investment.
- With non-forced registration, we find that around 12 percent of leads ultimately make a transaction. The number jumps significantly--around 20 percent--in a competitive lead distribution model.
To help you gauge your current web site effectiveness, Delta Media Group has created a tool so you can gauge how many leads your existing web site would be generating if you were a Delta client today.
One of the most important things to remember is that your lead generation costs depend highly on how much competition you have in your local market, and how you choose to market your real estate business. In a crowded market, it may take a more significant investment to stand out, especially with PPC advertising. Yet, both PPC and SEO are very viable tools in any market as long as they're used strategically. PPC and SEO are both excellent real estate marketing tools, when used efficiently. Since every market (and real estate business) is different, we'd strongly recommend evaluating your own cost-per-lead to see exactly where you stand.
Contact Delta Media Group to learn more about how to generate leads for real estate, and why digital marketing is a must-have for real estate agents.
