Effective Web Sites

PPC, CPC, CPI, CPM, CPA.... Ahhhhhhhhh!!!

It can be daunting to figure out how to use these new online marketing concepts, let alone use them well that includes a manner that provides a trackable return on investment. The difficulty continues to rise exponentially with each variable involved such as proper keyword analysis on which terms will yeild you the most traffic for the least amount of money. But wait it's not just quantity we want it's quality!

The truth is simple in this economy with advertising budgets stripped down as bare as they can get, online marketing is essential but don't be fooled it's easy to throw hundreds or thousands away each month without realizing it.

Wasting financial resources with online marketing is just as easy as it is with poorly planned print advertisements. The difference with the online advertising world is that it is completely inexcusable! For starters Online ads can be tracked, we now how many times they've been seen, we know how many times they've been clicked on and it we track it deep enough we can identify how long they spent on our site, how many and which pages are being visited etc. Equally as important as tracking each of the various advetising platforms have the ability to narrow your focus and target your audience, leaving no excuses for ineffective advertisements.

The whole idea of advertising is still so daunting that most Realtors we've talked to have not ventured into it yet, the few who have talk about setting budgets but not really knowing what they are getting in return, some even wondering if the click throughs are even real people clicking their ads due to there being no visible result in the number of leads generated for their business.

Ok so let us start with what the acronyms stand for and then what they mean, PPC - Pay per Click, CPC - Charge per Click, CPI - Cost per Impression, CPM - Cost per Thousand Impressions, CPA - Cost per Action.

When you break the acronyms down they become pretty straight forward, we'll quickly break them down for you and discuss their relation to the online marketing of real estate websites.

PPC and CPC cover advertising in which you are charged everytime someone clicks on the add taking them to your site, this is the scenario used when purchasing Google Adwords typically the rates are higher for more commonly searched and more desireable terms these terms are usually a more general term that yeilds a lot of traffic (quantity vs. quality), with less frequently used but more specific terms costing less and often resulting in a better qualified prospect clicking through to your site (quality vs. quantity), identifying which terms are which using keyword analysis is a service and science unto itself and quite difficult for the layperson to master.

CPI and CPM cover advertising in which you are charged everytime someone is exposed to your ad, these are typical of banner style ads on many websites such as online phone directories, regional tourism portal sites, etc. This style of ad purchase can be thought of as the shotgun method, trying to hit everyone in hopes of nailing the one you want, it can again be extremely effective with the right ad on the right site or it can be completely fruitless and simply a waste of money.

Cost Per Action or CPA (sometimes known as Pay Per Action or PPA) is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement. This model is not really applicable to the following discussion so we're going to ignore this one right now, but for the curious this is the typical model used with affiliate marketing operations.

So the Point of this article was to discuss Facebook Ads and their value to the Real Estate professional, so lets get into it, and let you know why in our expert opinion we recommend Facebook ads as the first place to step into online marketing.

Facebook Ads offer both CPC and CPM payment options, and remove the need for keyword analysis (somewhat), while at the same time providing mechanisms to narrow the target audience with a number of criteria pertinent to identifying and targeting a relatively high quality pool of real estate prospects.

It gets better yet, not only can you pre-screen your ad audience, and choose your payment model, you can also utilize an image in your ad, which if used correctly will draw the audiences eye to your ad copy.

On top of that, with the lower adoption rate, the pricing is far more affordable than adwords.

So what is the downside? Well simply not everyone is on Facebook, and you need to spend some time figuring out what works well and what fails (as with other ad platforms), but as we stated we recommend Facebook as the place to start, not finish. Facebook Ads provide a great return on investment by providing techniques to target specific audiences, providing great clickthrough rates, and an lower priced platform to test out various ad copy scripts to measure effectiveness prior to venturing into deeper waters with Adwords.

Here at Effective Realty Sites we have a couple very different paradigms we've developed for Facebook Ads for the Real Estate professional, targeting different results. Including localized Brand building techniques, Regionally targeted campaigns for Click Through and Lead Capture, Industry specific targeting for those specializing in niche markets such as Military Homes etc.

We offer services for Development, Testing, Monitoring, Budget Management and any other aspect of your Facebook Advertisements, feel free to contact us with any questions or to straight away purchase our 12 month facebook ad management service for $995 through our site and we will contact you to begin the process of identifying your goals, target audience and online marketing needs. At the time of writing this article you can expect rates of approx $192 per million impressions, should you prefer a CPC based model we will be happy to discuss this with you and inform you of our findings through experience and testing with the Facebook Ads Platform.

Ad based marketing whether it be Facebook Ads, Google Adwords etc is an important part of marketing your online site, and for relatively new sites that have not yet acheived high natural or organic search engine positioning it is invaluable in bringing in those valuable prospects, and raising your sites traffic levels substantially (one of many criteria believed to influence organic search ranking).