The easy answer is: it depends. It’s 2016, and every new year is a time to evaluate business and marketing strategies. Before looking to evaluate pay-per-click (PPC), review your marketing results from 2015.
Your marketing results matter
Were they measurable? Do you know exactly how many new clients and revenue your marketing plan made in 2015? My point is simply that if you had a good year and can prove it, keep doing what you have been doing. If you are not sure, it’ll be important to know what your marketing strategy produces in 2016.
So, I am back to PPC. The nice part of pay-per-click is that you only pay when your ad is clicked on. This only entices businesses to give it a try. The purpose of PPC is to get high-quality targeted traffic to a call to action on your website.
Therefore, you want the clicks. You want the clicks of people interested in what you have to offer. If the main keyword phrase for your website is “residential home lender in Modesto,” these are the targeted folks that your business wants coming in through your pay-per-click campaign so you can create effective home loan packages for them.
Qualified clicks are worth the price
The best benefit of PPC would be qualified clicks that create new business at an effective cost for the business.
For example, I have decided to run a pay-per-click campaign through a company that will manage my campaign for me. I chose a company that charges me $350 a month to manage the campaign plus pay-per-click costs.
We chose to spend $30 per day on ads or $900 per month. Our total monthly expense is $1,250 for this campaign. We know that our revenue for average loan is $1,500 to $2,000.
On measurable side, one loan per month from campaign would make more money than what was paid on campaign. Every loan created above that one through campaign will bring additional profits. Initial benefit, depending on campaign, is the revenue created from conversions.
For this particular campaign, let’s assume that the average cost per click is $3. This is hypothetical. It could be more, and it could be less. This would mean that your business would get 10 targeted hits daily and 300 per month. The business has potentially 300 targeted visitors to convert at least one.
How to evaluate a PPC management company
The reality is that there should be many more opportunities to convert more than one new client. A good PPC management company will stay in touch at least a few times a week.
The company can see your click statistics every day. They want to know if you are getting calls from ads and converting the calls into clients. If this is happening, your campaign is successful.
If you are not getting calls on 10 clicks per day, there needs to be adjustments made to the campaign. Sometimes, it’s just a tweak of targeting location or keyword phrases that will result in success. Other campaigns, require a little more daily effort.
Another benefit is having a company that is focused on your success. This will help grow your business and make PPC worthwhile. The long answer is: PPC can be worthwhile for your real estate business. Insure that you have measurable goals and an aggressive company managing them for you.
Geoff Clark is the director of marketing at Hybrid Brokers Realty. Follow him on Facebook.