15 Jan
This is the third of the three posts concerning Google, Bing and the rest of the advertising world. It is fair to say that Google has made advertising much more effective and increased the ROI over previous online advertising models such as Yahoo and Alta Vista. But the fact remains that the issue of not being able to see who it is that is clicking on an advertisement is an issue that creates waste. As a demonstration of this issue a recent study has shown that the majority of local businesses that pay for clicks on Google (not to be confused with Google local) do it very sparingly. In fact not one local loan officer or real estate agent when searching by City name in conjunction with real estate was found more than one day in any given week. This is illustrative of the fact that it is cost prohibitive for the average real estate agent to advertise on the largest advertising platform since the invention of paper.
Again it is not the fault of Google or Bing or any other passive advertising platform. It is because the advertising platform is only part of the equation and the other part of the equation is much more complicated to figure out. The website that the user lands on (Landing Page) is more important than any other single factor has got to be recognized and understood.
“The internet doesn’t work for real estate”
“I tried the internet, it doesn’t work for me”
“Internet leads are not very good”
These are comments that have been swapped since the 90’s yet most real estate agents and loan officers have neglected to take a moment and figure out why? Instead of giving up. The easy answer is also hard to solve. The answer is that the internet provides too many alternatives to the users. In the days when we only had print media and we had no choice. The blame was assigned to the adverts if they didn’t produce results. Today the blame falls on the platform when it would be more productive to look at what our site was built to do. If a site is built to brochure, don’t expect it to create leads. If it is built to create leads don’t expect them all to be ready and willing buyers.
Passive advertising is similar to passive shopping. Would you go to the mall and give someone your credit card while you waited outside waiting to find out what they bought for you? This is exactly what we do when we start a passive advertising campaign.
Matt Steinmuller is an experienced copywriter with a passion for great content, real estate, and fantasy football. He is a Towson University graduate with a degree in Marketing.
4 Comments
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Vince
February 4, 2014People take risk when they advertise no matter the format. I think the key is to find the source that has minimal monetary risk with maximum returns.
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Michael
February 4, 2014I agree completely with the statement but have you ever heard of an advertising platform that didn’t present itself as the best answer to the question? That experimentation is what costs so much time and money.
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Reese
February 7, 2014I just stumbled across your blog due to a friend in real estate, I work for a marketing company and agree 100%.
That is what makes advertising hard, its always a risk, any company that guarantees you results is full of it. Especially in real estate, unless you go to everyone in your community and put a gun to their head and say give me all your information how are you going to guarantee accurate information for 50 homebuyers in X location. Its all a game, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
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Michael Urbanski
February 25, 2014Reese,
I thought that I responded to your post on my iPhone but apparently even Apple can screw up every now and then. Qazzoo guarantees the leads on the site to be 100% accurate regarding contact information. We back that up by providing a new lead to replace the one that was unlocked and found to have inaccurate information. I believe we are the only online example of such as guarantee and we do this because we have always aimed at reducing the cost and waste of online advertising. Fake clicks and phantom leads are painful and expensive.
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Matt Steinmuller