cost of click thru's ?

[over40]

What is a reasonable cost to pay for a PPC thru for either a buyer or seller lead? Is one more valuable then the other?

[Mitch]

It really depends on the market. I only use PPC through Homegain's BuyLink program as I get a good click price, but a great (12-16%) click to lead conversion. That's about double what I get from Google and Yahoo and for about half the cost.

PPC can be tricky and very costly. The biggest reason is that most Agents and Brokers don't know what they are doing and they drive up the costs. Google and Yahoo love this of course and in the end Agents pay top dollar. When I do use Google and Yahoo, I use words that might get less traffic for two reasons. Firstly, the price is always around .25 per click or so. Secondly the conversion is higher because people searching those terms are really interested in real estate and not just playing around to see what their home is worth etc.

As far as buyer or seller leads, I always go for buyer leads because half our buyer leads have homes to sell. All of our listings in 2008, well almost all, came from our buyer leads. We are not big on listings right now so we only had about 70 or so over the year and sold 25 out of our 250 sales. Just be careful how you do your campaign. I have seen many people who don't know what they are doing spend thousands of dollars by mistake.

[over40]

tks.

what does Homegain charge if you don't mind me asking...

[Mitch]

It depends on the market you are in and if any are available. For instance, I bought my entire county at between $8k and $15k per month between my two offices and have locked out any competition. Our cost is between .79 and .99 per click. Google costs me, if I bought mainstream keywords, $2 per click. The other great feature of BuyerLink is that I don't have to deal with managing keywords. At one point I had over 500 keywords and spent an hour to two hours per day managing them. Since I went to Homegain I don't spend one minute of my day thinking about it. It's a great program. With that said, if you don't have a lead capture program that is strong and you don't have a very strong lead conversion program, you won't find PPC very exciting. You can spend a lot of money per sale if you don't have the proper tools in place to convert them to customers.

[JoeFrow]

This is a great question, however is really can't be answered easily because PPC Costs are driven by your location and the amount of competition for those keywords. I have managed PPC campaigns in several markets and in one $1.00 was considered high and in another $5.00 was not a bad cost per click.

I have used Buyer Link as well and my experience is that it generates a consistent level of traffic and leads, however there is a dramatically higher rate of "Fake Leads" than that of Google and Yahoo. When I took that into consideration my cost per lead and conversion was much better with Google/Yahoo than HomeGain.

As with anything, results will vary and you will be able to control your costs by testing various campaigns, keywords and landing pages.

[Mitch]

I guess it's all about a matter of experiences. For us, we have been much more successful with Homegain than Yahoo and Google. Our leads with Yahoo and Google had a ton more "fake" leads.

In the end, as Joe says, you need to test which way works best for you. Maybe our system works better with Homegain leads and Joe's system works better with Google and Yahoo leads. I can't say which is better for anyone but for what I have experienced.

[RonnieG]

The market variation from under $1 to over $5 per click is pretty accurate, if you are comparing a small city/town to a large metro area. Large metro areas generally have much more competition bidding for the same keywords. That's why I push my PPC clients in large, highly competitive markets to avoid the main metro area and target the smaller towns in and around the major metro area. The "casual" PPC using real estate agent generally goes for the large market and gets frustrated (and broke) trying to compete with everyone else. The "smart" PPC campaigns, targeting smaller areas within the metro area, with long tail keyword phrases and good, city/town specific landing pages, tend to be much more affordable, and produce more valid leads.

As far as managing PPC campaigns, once you get through the first 3-4 weeks of a new campaign, if it is set up properly, management should not take more than a couple of hours a week, mostly monitoring and "culling" non-productive ads and keywords. I find that constant fussing and micro-managing PPC campaigns is mostly futile. Reasonable long term average cost per click and average cost per lead are the main goals. If most keywords are costing around and under $1.00, and you have a few that cost $2.50-$3.00, but all of them convert relatively well, it's usually worth keeping the higher cost keywords active.

In general, a good average cost per PPC generated lead is $10 to $20 each, and can go to $40 per lead. I have clients in the same market at each end of that range, primarily because of wide variations in their keyword and landing page AdWords Quality Scores (Poor to Great), which affects per click costs, but also partly due to differences in their lead capture / forced registration forms and policies.