At the end of the month Real Estate Webmasters PPC department will be making a major change to how we report on pay per click.
This change will help agents (who are buying for themselves) and team leaders/brokers (who are buying for the company) properly measure ROI (return on investment) and gather valuable insights on their lead conversion performance over time.
Here is the change:
Our team will now be using REW CRM’s “Sources” feature for reporting.
To demonstrate from a team leader’s perspective how valuable this change will be (and why) I am going to share my own report for 2025 from our team at https://www.carlycarey.com
Check it out:
Let’s unpack the top numbers:
Spend: The REW PPC team will log your spend for you in the CRM every month. (Or if you manage your own PPC I’ll show you how to do this below)
Leads: This is the number of leads you keep (not the raw number of leads). This is one of the benefits of using the CRM vs adwords. Adwords captures everything (including the garbage leads) whereas you can get a much truer picture of “real leads” by counting only those you keep.
Cost per lead: This goes up (and it should) since we’re not reporting on all leads anymore, just those kept. This is also the metric that most agents and team leaders focus on, which is not the best way to run your business. What you should be focused on (the ONLY thing you should really care about) is ROI. (Ask yourself would you rather pay $100 per lead and convert 10% of them or $10 per lead and convert a half of one percent?) CPL is not the metric folks, it’s ROI.
Cost per deal: This is not the same as CPA (cost per acquisition) and this is another important feature of REW CRM. We do have CPA as well, however, cost per deal is a better metric since it counts multiple deals from the same lead (which, as we know,w happens quite often in real estate). But you can enable CPA as well.
ROI: Return on investment! The holy grail of marketing insights. Holy shniekies 2,963% ROI??? Before you get too excited, I need to explain that number. Right now I have CRM set to leads captured in 2025 from PPC and “deals” (but I have not set the outcome to closed / won). Therefore, it is reporting on ALL deals created from those leads. So think of this as ROI potential.
The reality is, because so many of these leads are brand new that while we are actively working with all fo these deals, most of them have not closed yet. In fact if i open the deals modal (below) I can see that only one is actually closed (subjects / contingencies removed) and another one we’ve landed as a listing.
So let’s be pragmatic about it - while we KNOW several of these other deals will close as well over time - I can simply look at the guaranteed closing to see my “worst case” - And that pays out $13,300
And so “so far” - I’ve spent $6,900 to earn the team $13,300 (a 2/1 return) and we have listing out of it as well.
So as the team leader (the guy writing the cheque) - I can look at that and say - 2/1 return on the “newest” leads so far, with a potential 11 more deals in the pipeline from these leads?
My assessment? GREAT investment!
BTW, if you want to show just closed / won - set it in the filters, it’s super easy:
Now what’s really cool is that you can also look backwards in time (and you should!) - because here’s the thing. Some PPC leads close 6, 9, 12 months (even 3 years later)
So the further you look back, the more accurate your true picture of the value of your PPC is.
Let’s take this agent on our team who is “brand new.” as of Feb 2024 (not just new to the team, she was just licensed in 2024)
“So far,” with the PPC leads she’s been given, she has generated $98,600 for the team. And she’s only getting better! If she stays on the team for another say 3-5 years, she will likely close 10x this much as her skillset improves with CRM and the time needed for all the leads converts passes.
But hey, as the team leader, is this a good investment? 50 PPC leads per month to this team member. $98,000 in GCI so far? Or which we receive over half. I’d say it’s a pretty darned good investment! (BTW I gave her a shoutout with an update on her full progress the other day, feel free to give her some props too! 
Do I care how many clicks it took to generate these leads? Nope.
Do I care about the CPL and that it is higher than our average by quite a bit? Absolutely not! In fact, I’ve had the team intentionally focus on higher value areas, so I expect the CPL to be higher.
Would I be happy with 3-5 agents pulling these same kinds of numbers? You’re damned right!
Do you want to track your ROI the way I do?
Here’s how: (REW PPC customers, please note you don’t need to do any of the source setup or budget tracking we’ll do it for you, you just need to log your deals).
Ok step 1:
Set up your source: In this case, if you’re using adwords you can call it “Google PPC” or “Adwords” whatever you like.
IMPORTANT part of this step: You MUST put “Google PPC” (no quotes) as the referrer. This allows the CRM to automatically tag all net new leads from adwords directly to the source. See screenshot below.
Step 2: Log your spend: It’s super easy, just open the source, choose a timeframe and then add your spend. (Again note, if you are an REW PPC customer, you do not need to do this - we will take care of it for you - that is part of our new service/offering).
Step 3: Add your deals! You should be doing this anyways - but this is how you tie it all together. Go to the deals tab, and start a new deal every time you have booked an apt with a lead (this is on a go forward) and then historically of you want data just go back and add the deals under the closed tab (and make sure you associate them with the right lead). You don’t need to know if they were PPC or not - the system already knows that and will take care of it for you.
^^^ If you want help with this, you can speak to your AM, we can arrange some concierge time for you or if it’s a large file we can likely have a programmer import the deals.
Step 4: This is a very important step - if you have not historically used sources, then your previous Google PPC leads will not be automatically included in your source.
To address this, simply go to the leads tab, and search for referrer is Google PPC and source is NOT Google PPC (or whatever you named your source) - it should look like this:
Then simply select them all - and go to the more dropdown, select source and then apply (Note, give it a minute if there are lots of leads - you want to wait for confirmation that all leads have been added to that source).
And that’s it! Once you have setup the source once, all of your leads will automatically be tagged to your PPC source moving forward (and REW does this for you if you are one of our customers)
Then all it requires is for your agents to properly log their deals (from apt to close is best) and you can get full circle ROI reporting and gain valuable insights into the performance of not only your PPC campaign, but your agents as well
Any questions, let me know below
