However, this AG group represents only a tiny percentage of the real estate web sites out there, and we’ve all seen a bunch of interesting sites to say the least!

Personally, I enjoy checking out web sites. Any time someone leaves an interesting post on one of the 30 or so blogs I subscribe to, I typically click through and take a look at their site. You can get all sorts of ideas for use on your own site by just looking at hundreds of other sites.

Whenever I see a really bad one, what that says to me is that the person behind the site has a very low attention to detail. Also, they are apparently not overly concerned about their on-line credibility, as is being conveyed by their website.

I think we all know why on-line credibility is important, but just in case: if you are seeking leads from your web site and your site looks like garbage, then the potential lead will likely come to the same conclusion and hit the BACK BUTTON!

This business is already competitive enough without running potential leads away from your site!

Ok, so what are some of the major factors to be aware of and possibly improve upon to increase your online credibility?

Navigation – When users are on the hunt for something, if they can’t find it within a few clicks, they are outta there, period. This has been proven time and time again and I do it myself. If your main lure is the ability to search homes, then this needs to be above the fold, top left or center, and big, not buried in some horizontal navigation bar.

Design – Is your site ugly, or is it shiny, attractive, pretty and interesting looking. Does it say “look over here, and here, and here, this stuff is interesting and attractive” or does it say “I was designed in 1999 using WordPerfect?” Let’s face it, web sites are not people so surfers are not going to dig any deeper to see if there’s a good personality hiding inside. Ironically though, sites do represent their owners, who will end up with the same treatment as the site!

Error Free – This is so self explanatory, it’s tough to type here. However, let me assure you that there are many sites out there with: misspelled words, broken page links, functions that do not work, missing images, misaligned elements, incomplete pages, inconsistent fonts, etc., etc.

I’m sure as a web developer myself that I’m harsher than many, but when I see ANY of the above error items, I usually laugh or shake my head, mumble something like “you gotta be kidding me” and click away ASAP.

Theme, Logo, Brand – Every site should have at least one of these. For most real estate sites, this is not an issue as everyone has a Broker and this information is required to be on the web site, so there’s your brand. But this is the minimum and I recommend trying to come up with at least a logo or something to be remembered by. Sites without any branding whatsoever are going to be pretty bland.

Hit the Target

There’s no magic bullet here but if one can avoid at least the most basic mistakes above, this is a great start. Recently I saw a site that was so simple it was laughable, but the site was unbelievably beautiful and its main reason for being was right across the entire top of the site – probably quite effective.

Oftentimes, visitors are not looking for everything slightly related to their target; they are looking only for their target, and as fast as they can find it. Design your site for these folks. The rest of your visitors, the lookie loos and curios types will find everything else on your site on their own.

Sitting on the couch, feet up, MacBook Pro in lap, Angels-Yankees game on, I reconfigured both of my AdWords accounts…..for SIX HOURS! It’s one of those dreaded chores that’s been on my list for like six months now.

After about hour three, the wife walks by and says, “computer-freak-weirdo.” But in my defense, before plopping down, I carved my kids two pumpkins and I probably did something else redeemable that day. Maybe.

I’m sure everyone has heard just about enough from me on AdWords, however during this six hour process, I discovered I’ve learned a heck of a lot in the two years since I initially set up my two accounts. After all, I was a complete newby to AdWords back then. So in case any of you readers are newbies now, here are some basics:

Let’s start out with what I did wrong two years ago

1.    I didn’t know anything about AdWords except that it was an auction, so from the get go I tried to dream up unique keywords that might not be bid on heavily. This strategy was good, but just brainstorming for keywords in like 15 minutes is not the correct way.
2.    No real keyword research caused me to miss out on many great performing long tail keywords.
3.    I didn’t know the difference between campaigns and ad groups, so I ended up with 50 campaigns. Wrong.
4.    One AdWords account can only hold 25 campaigns, so my 50 campaigns forced me to spread across two separate Google accounts. What a pain: funding, monitoring and constantly switching back an forth between two accounts.
5.    Given that I had two accounts, linking them both to my Google Analytics account would be problematic to impossible. I had no idea.

Basically, I set up my accounts using best guesses and common sense and they have performed so well that I have ignored them for a couple of years. I mean, who is going to complain about a large quantity of $0.18 CTs in my market, or any market?

So what do I know now that I wish I knew then?

1.    You must do thorough and expansive keyword research so you don’t miss low competition winners, ones that probably are not obvious to you. It’s a very time consuming process that requires a lot of experience to get right, but it’s very worth it and very revealing.
2.    The AdWords Editor has gotten even better and you should definitely be using it.
3.    Keeping everything in one account is easy. My 50 campaigns are now 50 ad groups in one campaign called neighborhoods. I’ve since added two more experimental campaigns, since this is so easy and manageable now.
4.    Linking one AdWords account to your Google Analytics account is super easy.
5.    AdWords (opportunities tab) will generate a huge list of suggested keywords for every one of your ad groups. You should manually go through every one of these keywords and add the ones that are targeted enough. This takes a long time, but doing this I found over 400 good new ones!
6.    I’ve stopped my ads from showing in certain geographies. You probably wont believe which ones.

With all my AdWords in one account, it’s much easier to run statistics across the entire 3,000 keywords, spread across three campaigns and 55 ad groups. In just a few clicks, you can rank every keyword by Quality Score, CT, CTR, Impressions, you name it, and make adjustments.

Finally, I had one of those light bulb moments where I realized that in the last two years, all but a few of my clients have been people relocating from out of town.  However, 70% or more of my registered leads are local people. So I have turned off my ads in my home state, Georgia!

Who needs these local tire kickers that typically already have Realtors anyway? I always love those folks that use your site and email you questions and already have a Realtor! (Where’s their Realtor’s site? Ok, I digress)

Anyway, my geographic exclusion test is not without risk because as my CTR drops, my Quality Score may come right down with it, and then I’ll be getting no traffic from anywhere. But I’m going to give this a try for a month or so and see what happens. It’s all being tracked in my ONE AdWords account which is also linked to my Google Analytics account.

It all starts with a registration.

Driving lots of traffic to your web site is the minimum requirement for successful lead generation. You could accomplish this with AdWords, or if you’re really good, patient and lucky, you could accomplish this organically with SEO.

Regardless of how people find your site, visitors can’t turn into customers unless they eventually decide to either contact you or fill in one of your forms. Here are some hooks I regularily see out there:

• send me a some kind of report or a CMA
• send me a boiler plate article about real estate (”10 tips for ….” )
• please allow me to search homes on your IDX

Notwithstanding the very lame boiler plate articles and usually weak “reports,” it’s really going to come down to your IDX to capture that lead. This is where the rubber meets the road for your website, and unfortunatley you have limited control.

You get what you get with your IDX provider.

Like it or not, this is what many IDX providers typically offer you:

• a standard look, or choice of a few similar looks
• something that typically gets framed into a page (complete with old timey scrollbars)
• a few different clever ways to require registration (take ‘em or leave ‘em)
• either NO control or some control over the initial outgoing email (I have none)

Given this, chances are that your IDX is exactly like a hundred other agents’ IDX in your area. There are only so many IDX providers and for a given MLS, even a smaller subset.

Check out these two uninteresting looking IDX interfaces. I rate them as POOR, which I can do because they are mine:

Atlanta Real Estate Search – the standard from my provider, yeah…this is IT!
Atlanta Real Estate Search – one I custom designed to try and have something easier and different.

I’m really surprised I get ANY registrations at all from these two and over the coming weeks, they will be evolving.

Ok, so what can we do about it?

Good question. For starters, I think you really have to do your homework and choose the best IDX you can find. Or at least try to go unique for your area. Then, integrate this into your site in a very easy to find, pleasing and simple fashion to your visitors.

I think to hit all level of users, there needs to be a super simple search, a more complex search, and a map search.  Yes, all three, there are fans of each.

I’ve also seen a couple of decent attempts to include a video or two on the site explaining how to use the search interface. Great idea – This is definitely something I will be doing in the future.

Also, try to come up with some other high quality methods to lure your visitors into engaging. My guess is the “10 Tips to Selling Your Home Quickly” articles are not going to cut it.

Let’s see what we can learn from a discussion of the following:

• What IDX features do you like or dislike?
• What registration requirements do you employ?
• What other non-IDX methods do you use to capture lead registrations?

Let’s say you’ve been diligent readers of my first two Agent Genius posts, Adwords I and Adwords II, and you actually implemented the strategies. Right on!

What’s going to happen next is you will start pulling in registrations (leads) on your website IDX at the rate of 100-200 per month. In a year, you will have 1200-2400 leads! How you handle these leads will determine if it’s all been worth it.

LET’S TALK LEAD MANAGEMENT

Consider these guidelines regarding internet leads:

• Homebuyers searching real estate web sites are typically 6-9 months away from maybe being serious. You’ve got to stick with them.
• Internet leads convert at roughly the same rate as print leads: 1-3% ….but it’s not so clean…
• The lead may no longer be yours by the time it converts. Especially if you drop the ball somewhere.
• A homebuyer lead is never expired unless it opts out or the email bounces..or you lose it.

What does all this mean?  It means that you are going to need to store these leads and manage varying levels of contact with every one of them for as long as you are in the business.

ENTER THE GOOD CONTACT MANAGER – AND A SYSTEM

I use a CRM system called ACT! for lead management and here’s the system I came up with:

1. The Lead comes in as an email from my site IDX and Outlook routes it into my RE LEADS Folder
2. I enter it into ACT, give it a status of “LEAD” and immediately send a short intro email.
3. I then set an alarm for two Saturdays forward to send a “T2” email, or second touch.
4. After sending the T2, I then change the status to “OLD LEAD.”
5. Once every 3-6 months, I send an email to all the “OLD LEADs” and delete any bouncers.

So, in plain English here’s what happens: The same day the lead arrives, I send an email, or call. Eight to fourteen days later, I send another email. If I don’t hear back from either, I change the status to “OLD LEAD” and I contact this entire old lead group approximately three times a year. Unless they tell me to go away, or their email bounces, they stay in this system indefinitely.

Now hopefully they email or call back at some point, and some of them do! When they do, I change their status to “PROSPECT” and put in notes of our conversations and set appropriate follow-up calls with them in ACT.

Sometimes a new lead initially emails or calls right in with a question or showing request or whatever and they become “PROSPECTs” right from the get go.

The LEAD Management never ends…

After a prospect purchases a home, I change their status to “CUSTOMER” and track them accordingly. I schedule calls about four times per year to just say hello. I can also quickly look up all customers and send them all seasonal things, like Christmas cards, etc.

Work your database to keep busy…

Any time I’m bored, I can look up all customers, or leads, or prospects and initiate contact with someone. Also, after a year or so, you will have daily activities scattered all over your ACT calendar as a result of you setting alarms all year. This makes you very organized and no opportunity ever gets dropped or missed.

Currently, I have about 2500 contacts in my database and this creates some activity nearly every day, seven days a week. When my database is say 10,000, then this becomes a very serious business. At that point, I’ll have to buy a Georgia Realty Group Balloon!

All this sound simple? Who else is actually doing anything like this?

Anyone else have any interesting lead management ideas or tips?

Let’s hear it!

First, let me say that there are definitely lots of ways to obtain leads while going broke! For example, you could pay up for the primary keywords (KWs) in your neck of the woods, like “Atlanta Real Estate,” and “Atlanta Homes,” and other such high volume competitive keywords.

Let’s say you use brute force (cash) and set up a very basic AdWords campaign to put you in the top three positions for these primary KWs, and you passed these clicks to your home page. For the terms above, this will cost you $3 per click through (CT) and will mow through a $200 monthly budget in 66 CTs. This will take about 1-4 hours and get 66 unfocused-curious-tire-kicking-gomers to your home page. This will in effect, net you a $200 donation to Google, thank you very little. By the time you land a client, you could of paid cash and just bought someone a house and given it to them. Still not a sale.

So AdWords is indeed lame then, right? It can be, that’s for sure! But let’s look at how to set up a really effictive AdWord campaign.

Here’s what you do: you set up an AdWords account consisting of many campaigns. Each individual campaign using as many as possible, very specific long-tail KWs. Each group of KWs points to their own matching Ad, and each Ad points to its own matching landing page.

Note: forget the content network, turn it off, people searching for paint are not looking to buy a house. Some may be but this is called untargeted traffic and we’re not interested.

Again, you create a campaign consisting of, lets say 100 long tail KWs, one AD and one landing page. Then you build 50 of these. If you were selling products, this could be 50 products. For real estate, I chose neighborhoods.

By the way, this scenario will also net you an account with a very good Quality Score and will enable you to compete with the brute force advertisers for pennies per CT. Because while AdWords is an auction with Ad placement going to the highest bidder, it’s also graded on a curve called Quality Score.

Design your entire AdWords campaign for Quality Score

According to Google, here’s the definition of Quality Score:
The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC

This means that the higher your Quality Score, the less it costs you to compete to display your Ad. For example, if you have a Quality Score of ten and your competition has a Quality Score of  two, then “Atlanta Real Estate” costs you $0.16 per CT and costs your competition $3 per CT. Pretty cool, eh? For now, we are still ignoring those primary KWs, but this is a nice side effect. Instead, we are after all the traffic generated from the hundreds of long tail KWs. This traffic is Super Targeted.

Let’s take a deeper look using my site as an example, since it’s working and it utilizes all of the above. Take a look at my site: Atlanta Real Estate Info. Look at that column of neighborhoods down the right side. Guess what those are….landing pages. Click one, check its URL, its Title Tag, the Text on the page; they are all matching or closely related.

Now you can’t immediately see this, but there are 50 unique AdWords Ads that point to each of these 50 landing pages. The text on each Ad also matches the respective landing page text. And finally, driving each Ad is a list of 20-100 long tail KWs that also have similar and matching KWs and phrases.

So Google looks at this and says, the KWs match the Ads, which matches the URLs, which matches the Title Tags, which matches the on-page content. Quality Score HIGH.

Besides all this matching content, the other big factor that goes into Quality Score is the predictability of your business to Google. Google wants the performance of Adword campaigns to be predictable for them. So if you have 2000 long tail KWs spread across 50 campaigns, it’s much better than just one KW in one campaign. Think of it like this, as a manufacturer would you rather do business with one reseller carrying just one of your products, or would you rather do business with 50 vendors carrying all your products?

How does this work in the real world?

Let’s analyze one of my specific campaigns.

• Campaign: Chattahoochee River Club
• 37 Keywords used in this campaign: Chattahoochee River Club, Chattahoochee River Club Homes, Chattahoochee River Club Georgia, etc.,etc.
• Keyword match set to broad match, Content Network OFF.
• Google Ad reads: See All Homes in Chattahoochee River Club, (see picture of Ad)
• Landing page Title: Atlanta Real Estate | Chattahoochee River Club
• Landing Page URL: www.AtlantaRealEstateInfo/ChattahoocheeRiverClub.php
• Text on Landing Page: follows the theme, take a look- Chattahoochee River Club.

If a Google searcher makes it all the way to this landing page, there’s a high probability they are wanting to search homes, so they click the big button in the middle.

Now, you repeat this entire scenario for as many neighborhoods, counties, or towns as you want to, the more the better.

Here are some metrics from my account in the last thirty days:

• Average CPC $0.20
• Clicks 541     (541 highly targeted visitors)
• Registered Leads 121
• Impressions 83,377
• Click Through Rate (CTR) 0.65%
• Total Cost $110
• I sometimes get some of the big primary KWs for $0.18 per CT

In the future, I would like to double my Registered Leads and I have some ideas about that. I would also like my CTR to roughly double as well and this comes down to writing more effective/compelling Ads.

In summary, design your next AdWord campaign with the sole purpose of achieving a high Quality Score. This will cause you to do everything right and you will wake your site up and start getting some leads!

Thoughts?

Please welcome Agent Genius’ newest writer, Rob McCance from Atlanta.  Rob is an interesting guy- he wasn’t born with a real estate license, instead he studied electrical engineering at USF and did enterprise level software sales prior to engaging in real estate where he founded the Georgia Realty Group and now balances that career with web development and lead management. Rob will be writing about his passion of lead management and website design and use, so stay tuned.

I know what you are thinking: your site has been out there on “The Internets” for years, doing nothing. Every month you pay to host it, you pay for the IDX search and you pay for the edits. You spend countless hours trying to SEO it and attract people to your killer Blog. And all for what, usually almost nothing tangible.

Your site needs to generate some real leads.

I don’t know about you, but the purpose of my website is to generate leads. That’s it. Sure I offer up a lot of helpful information and I sure hope my visitors find that useful, but I really want them to sign in and become a client! After all, I’m not some public service .org site here, I’ve got two mini-me’s to feed.

Ok then, how do we get-‘er-done? Well, why not just create 10,000 one-way incoming links to your site, each link anchor text optimized for your keywords. And while you’re at it, optimize your home page for the same key word and viola; you might make it to page one of Google for that one key word. Yeah, just go ahead do that.

Alright – forget that for now, that will take forever, and that might not even work.

The solution: AdWords.

Here’s the deal: you should think of AdWords as just another cost of doing business. Temporarily stop hatin’ on AdWords. The key to AdWords is putting in some real work correctly setting it all up; the campaigns, ads and landing pages.

If you get it right, here’s what AdWords can do for you: Every single day, 24/7, it can screen a huge number of internet searchers for you and send them to your site, looking for exactly what you are offering. It can turn a mediocre dead useless web site into a lead machine, and I should know.

Hey Google, screen these 174,464 searchers for me this month.

There are four levels of screening that occur when you have a well designed AdWords campaign along with specific landing pages:

Screen #1 – Searchers go to Google looking for terms related to Real Estate in your market.
Screen #2 – One of your ads displays, if that looks on target, searchers click to your landing page.
Screen #3 – Now on your landing page, searchers ask, “is this really what I am looking for?”
Screen #4 – If so, searchers enter your IDX and hopefully register with real data.

Now, after FOUR screens, you are on your way to having a bona fide lead. If the first two screens fail, you pay nothing. Sweet!

How about 2-10 leads per day from your now dormant web site?

Now you are probably saying, “yeah but, I’ll seriously pay for these leads..” All I can say is wrong. If I can obtain 2-10 leads per day in the ultra-competitive Atlanta Real Estate market and spend less than $200/mo doing it, this can be repeated in your market, probably for less.

In my next post, I’ll show you how this is done. In the mean time, start opening your minds about AdWords because for now, until I get my 10,000 one-way incoming links, that’s the only way my site is going to be producing any leads, as brutal as that is…