SAN FRANCISCO — Google and Facebook are among the leading marketing channels in real estate, perhaps rivaled only by listing portals in popularity.
Here are three pointers for agents that Google and Facebook representatives and Grier Allen of BoomTown shared on stage last week at Inman Connect San Francisco.
1. Use Facebook’s ‘Custom Audience’
Facebook’s Custom Audience feature lets advertisers — including real estate agents — upload contact lists to Facebook and then push ads to those contacts on Facebook.
It’s what “we really think of our secret sauce,” said Keith Watts, the industry lead for financial services and real estate at Facebook.
Facebook can also build “Lookalike Audiences” based on Custom Audiences, so advertisers can target potential customers who closely resemble their past clients or current leads.
2. Test speed and mobile-friendliness
Improving the speed of a website by just a hair can pay off big, said Grier Allen, CEO of marketing and contact management software provider BoomTown.
BoomTown bumped up the share of visitors to its real estate sites that converted into leads by 10 percent by increasing the load time of a landing page by just 300 milliseconds, he said.
Small increases in conversion rates make a “big impact when you’re spending money to drive traffic to your website,” he noted.
He recommends visiting www.testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com to gauge the speed of your website.
The tool will also show you how mobile-friendly your site is — another must, panelists said.
Raluca Monet, strategic partner manager at Google, said that people who land on a non-mobile-friendly site are 50 percent more likely to visit a competitor site.
“If you don’t have a great mobile experience, it’s hurting your brand,” added Facebook’s Watts.
3. Only change websites with measurable goals in mind
Don’t tweak websites haphazardly, said Allen. Only make changes with specific goals in mind, such as drawing more traffic to a part of the website or capturing the contact information of more leads.
Then test the changes on a fraction of your audience to see if they produce the intended results.
“If something doesn’t work out and doesn’t push the metrics in the direction that you need to go, roll it back,” he said.
