I’ve been watching the new Listing Router roll out across ActiveRain, reading the various explanations and reactions from the community. As a successful real estate blogger and proficient user of AdWords (Google’s Pay-Per-Click system), I feel there are a few aspects that I haven’t seen addressed.
If you’re concerned that you’re buying ‘clicks’ that will never be ‘clients,’ you should address these four issues when you set up and use Listing Router.
#2 – Decide on a Strategy
Granted, Listing Router is such a new feature that actual traffic volumes sent and received on an individual level is completely unknown. However, assuming there is any respectable traffic to your larger market area…
You’ve got a few options. How many cites do you serve? I can think of 7 in my area. Tucson, sure. But also Oro Valley, Marana, Vail, Sahuarita, Picture Rocks and Corona de Tucson.
Most people’s instinct is to throw their money at the cities that they think will have the highest traffic, but high traffic tends to go hand in hand with high competition. In the real pay-per-click world outside of ActiveRain, high traffic, high competition words are also high cost.
If you only go after the big cities, you may blow through your budget fairly quickly, or you may be competing with so many other agents that your turn in the round-robin-o-clicks comes around infrequently. And if pricing per visitor starts to vary based on volume, as has been hinted, then the smaller cities with cheaper traffic might be the way to go.
But that’s going to depend on the amount of traffic to those smaller cities too. Those smaller cities may not produce the same amount of traffic, but maybe there’ll be less competition, or maybe your site can convert visitors from those cities very well.
How will you decide? Well, in its current form, you have to guess – try one or the other and see what works and what doesn’t work. What you *really* need is data about which cities get how much traffic and how much competition you have.
I can't wait to read the next two segments of your post. You seem to know what you are talking about, and I thank you for sharing.
Kelley,
Thanks for the post. Can you make any suggestions as to the source of the data that we need to evaluate? Where can we go to get some quantifiable data that will help with the analysis?
William - you're loking for a keyword analysis tool. There are probably thousands out there. The problem is that they are looking at general search engine traffic, which may or may not be representative of the people searching on those cities at this site. However, they're probably a good indicator. Couple to try:
Google's: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. If you type in the various cities, you'll get an idea of traffic densities there.
SEOBook's: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php
Wordtracker's Free version: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
That's part of how I made a decision of what city I would target locally for me and will probably do the same on Listing Router.
Kelley-These are EXCELLENT articles that everybody should read and consider before investing!
Thank you for the tips Kelley.
Kelley, this is a great series - sorry I missed it when it was published, but actually now I'm more ready to think about this step.