I have a client I’ve been working with periodically over the last few years helping him with his real estate lead generation. Recently since January, we’ve been doing a big marketing push. We’ve been launching new websites, testing new offers and growing a bigger audience with new content.
A full ten-point restoration!
In the last 6 months we’ve put together a pretty good real estate lead generation system by leveraging marketing automation strategies and the client’s CRM to build out and improve upon his email list.
I called on my friends Thomas and David at Reverb Consulting to help me guarantee stellar results.
But instead of rambling on about all that I wanted to share with you what we’ve doing with Google Adwords specifically.
Here’s What You Need to Know
My client is a well respected real estate investment advisor who operates in the Greater Hamilton and Niagara areas of the GTA. He has spoken at numerous events, he’s writing a book, runs a podcast and owns a charity.
The Quest for Qualified Leads
Due to the overheated real estate market within the Toronto area, the client was looking for a specific prospect. Someone who fit the profile of an above-average income earner who has previous exposure to real estate investing. They must show an intention to purchase an investment property outside of the Toronto area. They would be of a novice level and would be affiliated with other local real estate networks and groups.
The client is a real estate agent who sells investment properties in specific cities towards the outside of the Golden Hourseshoe Area. The client needed a means to not only create a system for producing steady leads, but also needed to qualify leads who had above average real estate investment knowledge and who were actively seeking investments in specific geographic locations.
Our Real Estate Lead Generation Solution
A 3-step paid traffic lead funnel was created to target people using specific keywords that included the geographic locations the client was selling investment properties. Paid traffic was sent to a landing page that offered a lead magnet that addressed the specific investment concerns that potential leads were looking to solve.
To qualify leads further, a follow-up offer was made on the Thank You page, which allowed users to register for an in-person real estate investment training class.
Various email sequences were created to track who registered for the event, who attended and who was a no-show. Based on the data collection and tracking, leads could be segmented into groups based on their quality and likelihood to purchase an investment property.
The Results
The following is a breakdown of the results that were achieved in the first 3 months of advertising. We still continue to run and optimize this campaign today. We’ve even done some A/B split testing, but I’ll save that for another case study.
Over the course of the first 3 months of advertising we saw a wicked increase in total site sessions. This is a great example of not only just the number of leads that can in, but also indicates all the people who were interested in the business who would have never heard about it before. Since this is real estate investment, it might be more than 1.5 years before someone comes forward to make the purchase. We are now apart of those consumers decision set.Total Site Sessions
Total Site Sessions: up 673.26% (2,227 vs 288)
Some people have the opinion that paid traffic is usually worse traffic than organic traffic. It almost always performs worse as it brings in both qualified and unqualified traffic. However, we didn’t experience this, in fact we increased the number of pages views. This means that the people who are visiting the site are actually taking some time to move through and look at the site after conversions.Pages Per Session
Pages Per Session is up 3.39%
Ads are usually accompanied by a high bounce rate, yet the bounce rate went down. This will be tied to many things, but the fact that we are running ads and the bounce rate stayed quite low, is a good sign. Just means that the traffic we are sending is qualified. The client’s website already received decent organic traffic and was getting some conversions. But by coming in and getting focused on the quality of traffic, we were able to show a clear performance boost in campaign goals, like signing up for the real estate training class. This is a comparison of our KPIs between organic traffic and paid traffic over the same time period we were running ads.Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is down 59.55%
Over 147 Goal Completions
Paid – 102
Direct – 24
Organic – 5
Referral – 16
What this means is that without running paid ads the client would have only seen 21 goal completions vs 126.
The following table shows our results in the first month of advertising in contrast to and how they improved over time by the 3rd month.
1st Month | 3rd Month | Campaign Total |
---|---|---|
Total Clicks: 124 | Total Clicks: 209 | Total Clicks: 783 |
Total Cost: $331.02 | Total Cost: $306.02 | Total Cost: $1340.16 |
CPC: $2.67 | CPC: $1.47 | CPC: $1.71 |
Bounce Rate From Ads: 75% | Bounce Rate From Ads: 40% | Bounce Rate From Ads: 25% |
The client is still running this real estate lead generation funnel. However, of recently we’ve been able to optimize by split testing different headlines and copywriting. When I’ve collected more data I’ll be sure to share it here with you.
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