Realtors are you looking for a way to track visitors to your website. Advertising has always been the life blood of the real estate industry, but it has always been difficult to judge what advertising was working. In mid November Google announced a new free service called “Google Analytics”. Google had previously offered this service under the name “Urchin”. Urchin was a wonderful way to track traffic through your website. However, Urchin cost around $299 per month, and was out of the reach of most small businesses. Well get ready for some good news. Google Analytics can help Realtors use performance data to improve their online marketing campaigns and websites. With Google Analytics, realtors can determine what keywords attract the most visitors, which email campaigns create more customers, and how to design web pages that hold people’s attention. Best of all, it is completely free if you have an active Google “AdWords” pay per click advertising account.

“We want to give all online marketers and publishers access to powerful web analytics to help them better understand what their customers want. With this knowledge, businesses can create more accurate advertising and build better websites,” said Paul Muret, Google engineering director, and one of the founders of Urchin. “By making this powerful service free, we aim to give all websites, large and small, the tools they need to better serve their customers, make more money, and improve the web experience for everyone”.

Google Analytics tracks all of your online marketing. Be it email, newsletters, pay per click, natural search results, or any other online advertising you can think of. Get visual summaries of traffic in the form of graphs and pie charts. Track conversions on your real estate website without hunting through complicated reports. You will quickly see any problem areas. Get real time feed back on your Google pay per click, or Yahoo advertising campaigns. See what keywords your customers are using to find your real estate website. The Google analytics dashboard gives you a clear visual format that is fast and easy to digest.

If you have an AdWords account, you can access Google Analytics directly from your AdWords control panel. Google Analytics also saves you time by automatically importing all your keyword data from AdWords. So you see return on investment and other key metrics for every keyword you have in your AdWords pay per click advertising campaign with no extra effort on your part, just by using Google Analytics.

If your a professional realtor with a website, you should be using a Google pay per click advertising campaign to promote your real estate website. You can list the keywords that you want to use. You can customize your ads within minutes. You can change your ads on the fly and see the results live on Google in ten minutes. Setting up a Google advertising account only takes about ten minutes and the start up cost is five dollars. Once your real estate advertising campaign is in place Google analytics will show you what is working and just as importantly, what’s not working. Just setting up an account is easy enough, however it is a good idea to seek the help of a full time Google AdWords professional. A professionally created AdWords advertising campaign can save you from some expensive mistakes and can help you get the positive results you are looking for in a very short time.

Mike Alves is the Owner of http://www.Marketing4Leads.com
My only business is marketing realtor websites.
I create, publish and manage pay per click campaigns on Google full time, for real estate agents all over the U.S.
I can start sending new real estate customers to your website in 48 hours.

Congratulations! You have the professional Real Estate web presence you have always wanted. Now that your business is online, Pay Per Click Advertising is the best possible online tool to let the world and your real estate clients know about your new real estate website.

If you’re not familiar with Pay Per Click marketing, you’re in for a treat. When people search for products or services online, they search by using keywords or keyword phrases. If you were to do a search on Google for “real estate” or “homes for sale”, you will see that the top spots in the search results are occupied by large nationwide real estate companies or companies that provide real estate services of some sort. These companies spend tens of thousands of dollars every month to maintain their high page rank in the search results. At first glance, you might be saying to yourself, yikes, how can my real estate website compete with that? Here’s the good news. You don’t have to! Pay Per Click Advertising can put your ad right along side the big boys. The answer is simple. You don’t want your ad for your real estate website to come up in the search results for “real estate”. That’s too broad. You need to be more specific. For example, you want your ad to be shown when someone searches “real estate in Glens Falls” or “homes for sale in Glens Falls” or “real estate listings in Glens Falls”. If you’re a Realtor in Glens Falls, that’s where you’re potential customers are looking. Your customers won’t type in “real estate” when they do their search. They will type in “real estate in Glens Falls”. The “natural” search results listings will most likely be dominated by the big companies, but guess what? Glance over to the right and you can see your ad for your real estate website right along side the big boys.

Why is Pay Per Click Advertising Important for My Real Estate Website? If you’re a Realtor, having a professional Real Estate web presence will be an essential part of your business. However, just having a website will not guarantee success. You need to market your website. If your clients don’t know you’re there, you may as well have a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert. You might have the best lemonade in the world, but, if no one can find you, you’re not going to sell much lemonade.

Pay Per Click Advertising is the fastest, most cost effective way for you to start marketing your website. In real estate, one good listing, or, buyer can turn into thousands in commissions. Your website being seen is important, but being seen by the right people is even more important. Grab a piece of paper and jot down some of the keyword search terms a client in your area might use to search online for your real estate services. You might find putting together a list of fifteen or twenty keywords takes no time at all. If just five people in your area search each of your ten to fifteen keywords every day, that’s fifty to seventy five potential clients that won’t see your website. That’s every day! Type one of your keyword search terms into Google, chances are, you will see some of your competitors websites listed.

Would you like to see your Pay Per Click ad, for your real estate website right next to the results for your competitor’s websites? Real Estate is a competitive business. You should be competing for those leads. That’s why Pay Per Click advertising is important for your real estate website.

Mike Alves is the owner of http://www.Marketing4Leads.com
My business is unique, I market Realtors websites on Google. If you would like to get the edge on you’re competition, I can help. Let Mike create a custom advertising campaign on Google for your Real Estate website.

“If you build it they will come”, does not apply to websites.
Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO, is the process of optimizing a website to increase its popularity and ranking in the search engine listings. Now that you have a new website, you will have to consider how to attract the customers that are looking for your services, to your new site.

Get your site submitted to the search engines. Make sure your website is submitted to the Google index. If you’re not sure if it is, you can use this link to go to Google’s site submission page. Remember to use the “http://www.” when you submit your website. http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl. Or a great way to do this is to use Google’s new XML site maps to feed your website content right into the servers at Google. To do this you don’t have to know XML coding, just go to this Google website and follow the directions. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/overview.html The really great news is that it is free to use either of these methods.

We have all herd the expression “Content is king”.This is a phrase that you hear over and over again when optimizing a website. Having fresh content on your website each time the spider indexes your site, is an excellent way to increase your page rank. You will notice that many of the websites that you will be competing with are “static”, other than new listings; the content on their site remains the same. Don’t make this mistake! Spiders hate stale websites! You can set up an RSS Feed for your website that will deliver content relevant articles for your site visitors to read. These articles will be rotated daily or weekly to give your website the fresh content that spiders love. Feed the spider and he will reward you with a higher page rank. A good place to start looking for content relevant RSS feeds for your visitors would be the National Association of Realtors website, http://www.realtor.org or you might try http://www.inman.com.

Finally, you don’t have to wait to be on the first page of Google to start making real estate commissions. A professionally created and managed pay per click advertising program can start sending potential customers to your website within 48 hours.Google’s pay per click advertising program is called “Google AdWwords”. When someone types into a search a keyword phrase that matches the keyword phrases in your AdWords campaign, your ad will show. You can have your ad say anything you want, pay per click advertising is very flexible, and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website. If you’re not ranked on the first page of Google, this is how you get customers to come to your website instead of your competitors website. Get your pay per click campaign under way today.

Mike Alves is the owner of http://www.Marketing4Leads.com
My business is unique, I market Realtors websites on Google. If you would like to get the edge on you’re competition, I can help. Let Mike create a custom advertising campaign on Google for your Real Estate website.

These days it seems like anyone on the periphery of Internet marketing claims to offer search engine marketing services. Web site designers, ad agencies, programmers – they all claim to do it. Intuitively, it makes sense. The company that designed your web site should know how to promote it. The company that creates your advertising should know how to do online advertising.

But it just doesn’t work that way.

Anyone can set up a paid search account. Therefore, anyone could technically claim they know how to manage a pay per click campaign. But there is a big difference between knowing how to set up an account and knowing how to maximize the profitability of that account. Before you hire a company to manage your pay per click account, ask the following questions:

1. Are you certified by the major search engines?
2. Do you do only search engine marketing or other things as well?
3. How many accounts have you managed?
4. Do you have some documentation showing success with other accounts?
5. How long have you been managing pay per click accounts?
6. Do you have any references?

Basically, just make sure to ask enough questions that you feel confident that the company is experienced and reliable. What you don’t want is for your account to be managed by the guy who was passed the duty of doing it just because there was no one else available. You want your account to be managed by someone with a lot of experience who understands the mathematics behind maximizing paid search account performance. By the way, the certification question above is not really a good measure of a search engine marketer’s worthiness. A search engine marketer can be uncertified and still be outstanding. But wouldn’t you want the person managing your account to have taken the time to study the search engines’ training material and passed their exams?

In the area of search engine optimization, many, many web site designers claim to optimize their clients’ sites. Usually, this consists of adding meta tags. Anyone who knows anything about search engine optimization knows that meta tags are basically useless. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use them. You should, but placing meta tags in your site code is just the beginning of a very long process. Don’t be one of the ones disappointed because your expensive new web site doesn’t rank well in search engines. Ask your designer about his experience with SEO. If you are not convinced that he really knows how to optimize a web site, then you should hire an SEO professional to help with the design and coding process.

Another thing that bothers me considerably is a search engine marketing company claiming to be able to get your site ranked on the front page of Google in a week’s time. I have a feeling a lot of people have fallen for this scam. Look, any web site can rank at the top of Google for a keyword for which there is no competition. But you have to remember that the whole point of a search engine optimization campaign is NOT to get a high ranking – it is to drive targeted traffic. Even if you are number one, if no one is using that keyword to search for your services, you’re not going to get any traffic. No respectable search engine optimization firm would make such an outlandish claim because they will realize that the goal is to generate rankings for keywords that actually deliver targeted traffic. Those keywords are usually going to have some competition.

My advice is to hire a firm that ONLY does search engine marketing. If you hire a firm that does other things as well, as some tough questions to make sure they really know what they are doing. You’d be surprised at how many don’t.

Jerry Work is president of Work Media, LLC, http://workmedia.net, a search engine optimization and pay per click firm based in Nashville.

The internet has seen an explosion of PPC Service Providers and most of them will assure you that your new products or services are safe in their hands. Should you believe them? Will they take care of your products and services in the same way that you would? This article outlines the main benefits and potential pitfalls of outsourcing your PPC campaign to an agency so that you can decide if it is right for your company.

The main benefits of outsourcing your PPC Campaigns are that: * you don’t need to become an expert in PPC methods and tools * you can benefit from the experience of the agency * you can focus on your business

The main idea is that you save time and money and can focus on your business and this is great if you are getting the return on marketing investment that you need. There are many reputable companies who will make a real effort to understand your business needs and produce a PPC marketing plan that meets your goals and objectives. On the other hand there are many companies out there who may not really understand your goals and objectives and because of this you won’t see the ROI that you expected.

The main pitfalls of outsourcing your PPC campaigns are: * your PPC campaign is your top priority but may not be the agencies top priority * the agency may not really understand the needs of your market * you never get to understand what PPC can really do for you * you might sign up with an agency that does not deliver on its promises

Two key points you need to cover in order to avoid these potential pitfalls are: * make sure that the agency has a track record in your market, and * put in place a service level agreement that ensures you get the service you expect

If you can agree a performance based fee or bonus with the agency then this will also help. In summary PPC is a great way to get more business and it is an almost essential component of any companies marketing strategy. So when you meet with an agency to discuss outsourcing your PPC Campaigns it is important to work out a clear set of goals and objectives so that you can measure the success of your campaigns. Its also important to agree a clear service level agreement with the agency so that you get the service that you are paying for.

To find out more about the different types of PPC Managed Service visit PPC Services Review where you will find details on how to choose the PPC Services that are right for your company.

When bidding for keywords on Adwords most people will tend to set a maximum bid price that they are prepared to pay for their clicks.

What they don’t know is that there are three other ways to bid and one of those might be much better for them.

Adwords is getting more and more competitive these days so we all need any advantage we can get. Changing your bidding style might just be that silver bullet that puts your Adwords campaigns in the driving seat.

So, let me explain all four bidding options to you and tell you how to set them.

Manual Bidding:

This is the normal bidding style that people use. It’s the default setting when you start a campaign and it’s basically telling Google the maximum you are prepared to pay for a click.

Preferred Cost Bidding:

In this case you set an average price you are prepared to pay for your clicks and Google manages your account for you to even out the amount you pay for clicks so that you are charged this average amount over time.

Budget Optimizer:

Here you don’t set a bid price at all. You simply set a 30 day budget for your campaign and Google will manage the bid prices for you within that budget. You cannot use this for content bidding campaigns and if you have any content bids mixed into your search network campaigns (shame on you!) they will be turned off if you select this bidding option.

Conversion Optimiser:

This is their latest bidding option. It’s also called cost per acquisition bids. With this option, you set a price that you are willing to pay for a conversion and Google will manage your click bidding in order to deliver conversions at that price.

Clearly for this option you will need to have conversion tracking on your campaign. Another limitation is that your campaign must have over 200 conversions in the last 30 days. This is because Google uses conversion history to determine the bid prices it will set on your behalf to get conversions at your requested price.

So how do you set these options?

Simply go to your Campaign Settings and look under the section Advanced Options. The first option is Keyword Bidding. Just click on the View and Edit options link and you can select one of the four bidding options for your campaign.

One question I have been asked is which of these options is best. Well as I always say, you need to test to see which works best for you because all businesses are different and what works for one may not necessarily work for another.

Vernon Riley is a founder of KKSmarts. Their site contains many free guides covering all aspects of Website Promotion including free SEO Training.

Pay Per Click campaigns are not set it and forget projects. Without advanced planning and continued monitoring, they can become extremely unprofitable. Use these proven techniques to squeeze the most ROI out of your PPC:

1. Organize your campaign on paper before you set it up. Once the structure of a campaign gets out of hand, it’s really hard to fix it. One day, you log into your PPC dashboard, and you’re totally overwhelmed. (If you already have a large PPC campaign, I’m sure you know exactly what I mean! If you haven’t started your campaign yet, take my word for it.) Start with a good outline before you even begin the setup phase. You’ll thank yourself a few months from now.

2. Do your keyword research. Your prospects do not use the same words you do! If you’re targeting end users, avoid industry jargon and insider phrases. Use the words your customers use.

3. Go fat instead of tall. Forget those New Year’s resolutions. When it comes to PPC, fat is a good thing. Don’t worry about getting the #1 spot for a very popular (and expensive) keyword. Instead, focus on getting the #2 or #3 spot for lots of inexpensive, but still relevant, keywords. It’s true that this technique requires a bit more work, but it’s much more economical. And it often results in more conversions.

4. Use longtail keywords. I recently came across a study showing that the largest demographic of web users (16 – 30 year olds) favor longtail keywords over category specific searches. If you want to grab these important users, use longtail words and phrases. Optimizing for longtail is quickly becoming the norm.

5. Take advantage of negative keywords, but be careful. Many webmasters automatically enter the word “free” as a negative keyword believing that visitors specifically looking for freebies never become buyers. You might want to do some testing and tracking on this philosophy before creating a blanket policy. Especially if you’re able to find some really inexpensive keywords, and you’re using a two-part conversion process, it might be worth the few pennies to add those freebie-seeking names to your mailing list.

6. Set your campaign for phrase matches and exact matches. This is usually much more economical and results in higher quality traffic.

7. Test your ad copy. There are different rules for different engines, but one thing remains constant: it’s hard to write compelling text with such a small number of words! It takes practice and it takes a good understanding of your target market. Pay attention to the rules for the particular engine – for instance, are you allowed to use a dollar sign? How about an exclamation point? Don’t forget to use your keyword in your ad’s headline and in the text, and use the slang your customers would use. (Yes, I know, that’s a lot to squeeze into only 95 characters!)

8. Use a customized landing page. This mistake is extremely common – even the big companies do it… Do not use your home page as your landing page. Sending visitors to your home page is expensive (due to the weak quality score) and results in poor conversions. Create individual pages for each keyword.

9. Use an exit pop to grab newsletter subscribers. If your PPC visitors don’t convert on your landing page, try to grab them as they navigate away from your site. Encourage them to sign up for your newsletter with an enticing offer.

10. Start small and test all along the way. Just because your PPC budget will eventually be $500 a month, that doesn’t mean you need to start there. Start small, get some practice and experience under your belt and increase your monthly spend accordingly.

11. Don’t be afraid to delete an unproductive campaign. Generally, bad campaigns don’t get better over time, they only get worse. As your CTR decreases, your quality score decrease and your PPC increases. It becomes a vicious cycle. If a campaign looks like it hasn’t gotten off to a good start, pull the plug.

12. Test, track, monitor. Test, track, monitor. Test, track, monitor. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Karen Scharf is an Indianapolis marketing consultant who works with small business owners and entrepreneurs. She offers several whitepapers, free reports and checklists, including her FREE Can-Spam checklist and FREE email pre-flight checklist to ensure your emails get delivered, get opened and get read. Download your copies at http://www.ModernImage.com.

Traditionally, bidding on clicks in a search engine has been a hit-or-miss proposition. You set the MAXIMUM you are willing to pay for a click, and then your actual click cost usually ends up well below that. To play the game, you often have to be willing to bid high to get your actual cost about where you want it. But you also run the risk of getting burned by being forced to pay what you bid.

Google has an ad pricing method that reduces your risk – preferred cost bidding. In this new method, you don’t specify a maximum bid – you specify an AVERAGE price you are willing to pay for clicks to your site.

For example, if you know that, based on your historical conversion rate, you can afford to pay a maximum of $.50 per click to achieve your desired return on investment, then you can set a preferred cost per click of $.50. Google will then adjust your ad rankings on the fly to get your average cost per click as close to $.50 as possible. You are freed from worrying about getting burned by bidding more than you really want to pay.

To make this technique work, obviously, you have to understand your numbers. You need to know how many people who click through to your web site become customers and how much profit you earn on them. If you know the lifetime value of your customers, that’s even better. But as long as you know how much you can afford to pay to generate a sale and what your conversion rate is, you can figure out how much you can afford to pay for a click, and use that as your preferred cost.

Setting up preferred cost bidding in your AdWords account is easy. First log into your account and click on the campaign for which you would like to use preferred cost bidding. Then go to the Campaign Settings screen for that campaign by clicking the “Edit campaign settings” link. Then, in the Advanced Options section, click the “View and edit bidding options” link. Then click the radio button next to the Preferred cost bidding option and click Save and Continue. This turns on preferred cost bidding for the campaign, but you still have to specify your preferred bids. You can specify a default bid for all of the keywords in your account as well as bids for individual keywords, just like with standard bidding.

I caution you against setting a preferred bid and then walking away. Pay attention to your campaign data. If you have set your preferred bid too low, you may end up getting far less traffic than you want, or your traffic may become less profitable. For instance, it may be the case that to meet your preferred bid Google only shows your ads late at night, which may or may not be a good time to display your marketing message.

Preferred cost bidding could save you a lot of time and frustration, but you should be realistic in setting your preferred cost, and diligent in watching what happens with your account.

Jerry Work, president of Work Media, LLC, is an expert in pay per click management and search engine optimization.

Pay-per-click, or PPC advertising with Google Adwords is a hightly effective way of marketing your website, if you know how to use it. Unfortunately, many people simply bid the highest amount they can afford and hope for the best. In order to make Adwords work for you, you need to have a strategy. You also need to do a lot of homework and testing to create a campaign that will bring visitors to your website, and keep them coming back.

The first mistake many people make with Google Adwords is not having a bidding strategy. The highest bid is not necessarily going to be what brings you the most traffic from a PPC advertising campaign. You need to decide if you’re willing to accept a lower position on the search page. Remember, not every click is going to result in a sale, so if you’re paying too much per click, you’re wasting your money.

Another pitfall of bidding high is that competitors may fraudulently repeatedly click your ad in order to drain your advertising budget. A lower cost per click helps to keep this problem under control. A well-crafted ad with a lower position may suit your purposes as well or better than one higher up on the page.

Another reason people fail with PPC is failure to do their homework. You need to do research. Find out what the market is for your product or service. Learn keyword popularity. Track the effectiveness of your ad. If a campaign isn’t working, pull it or rework it, perhaps targeting a different audience.

There are a lot of software programs on the market that can help test the effectiveness of a campaign. Buy them and use them. By making sure you have the most effective Google Adwords campaign possible, you greatly increase your chances of success.

People who don’t have great success with Google Adwords don’t give their prospects value for their time. They simply bring the potential customer to their website’s home page and drop them off. Very few people click on an affiliate ad or make a purchase the first time they visit a website. You want to keep visitors coming back to your website. An easy way to do this is to link your PPC ad to a specific page on your website, called a landing page, that is tailored to the specific keywords used in the ad.

Have interesting and informative content on each page of your site. You may offer a free e-book, newsletter, or e-zine related to your particular product or service. You don’t want to use PPC advertising to your site only to have it pass through. You want people to stop and stay a while, and then come back and visit again.

Many people have not succeeded using PPC advertising, but many others have. Those who do succeed using programs such as Google Adwords have developed winning strategies for success.

By using the right bidding strategy, researching keywords, and tracking their advertising, they have learned how to bring traffic to their website. By creating content that visitors find interesting and helpful, they keep them coming back. Develop the right marketing strategy, and Google Adwords can help you to succeed with your online business.

David Ogden is an established online marketer who specializes in practical website resources and advice that have helped many people like you start their very own home based business. He can help you launch your very own money making website today, ready to take orders and pull in massive profits for you right now, guaranteed!

Want to make money online now?
www.Affiliate-Profit-Masters.com
Copyright – David Ogden

There is a trend in the search engine marketing industry toward account automation achieved via automated bid management tools supplied by the search engines. Yahoo! has some interesting automatic management options that we have found to work fairly well.

The first option is its Tune Up Campaign feature. With this option, Yahoo! will perform an analysis on your account that takes into consideration several factors, such as performance history, your budget, and a chosen metric (either impressions or clicks). You will be presented with a list of suggested changes to your campaign, which you can either accept or deny. To initiate a campaign tune up, click the button on the campaign detail screen labeled “Tune Up Campaign”.

Yahoo! also has a campaign optimization feature which automates ongoing bid management. The difference between campaign optimization and campaign tune up is that optimization is an automated ongoing process, whereas a campaign tune up is a one-time event. With optimization, you specify your monthly budget and Yahoo! will modify your campaign based on either a “conversion funnel” or a “business objective”.

The conversion funnel option spends your campaign budget based on a set of priorities that you set. These priorities include customers seeing your ad, customers clicking your ad, and conversions. Yahoo! provides a scale that runs from “Not important” to “High”. Specifying an importance level for each priority will cause Yahoo! to adjust bids differently.

For example, if your main goal is visibility by displaying your ads to as many people as possible, you would set the “Customer seeing your ad” option to a high priority. If generating conversions at a target cost is your top priority, you would set the campaign conversion priority to high and specify your target conversion cost. You can also set a target return on ad spend as your high priority event.

The business objective optimization option lets you specify the value for a parameter: your target cost per click, cost per conversion, or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). It is very similar to the conversion funnel option but is more straightforward. There is no setting of priorities – just a dollar amount for the most important parameter.

If you have conversion tracking in place and know exactly how much you can afford to pay per conversion, or what you can pay to generate the most total conversions at maximum profitability, then you should use the cost per conversion option. Ultimately, that is the most important parameter – what it costs to get a new customer or qualified prospect.

We have found Yahoo!’s campaign optimization feature to work reasonably well once it has run long enough to make the necessary changes. They are definitely worth a try. However, it would be a serious mistake for you to just set it and forget about it. It may be the case that Yahoo! technically does what you told it to do, but it could end up producing the wrong results. For instance, you might specify a target cost per click, which Yahoo! achieves, but it could shrink your total traffic so much that it becomes pointless. So keep an eye on things to make sure that Yahoo! is making adjustments that are going to help you reach your goals.

Jerry Work is president of pay per click management and SEO firm Work Media, LLC, based in Nashville.