Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.
- John Wanamaker, 1886
How many people have viewed your home online? How many website visitors have taken the virtual tour? How many phone calls has your home generated? What websites and Google AdWords produce results?
We know that consumers spent a total of over 4,300,000 minutes on FloridaMoves.com in December of 2010 (see details), but what about all the other sites and channels?
Team Bohannon uses a combination of internal systems and commercial tools to monitor how many people call or click on your home. Have any of the other agents you interviewed explained how they measure the effectiveness of their advertising?
#Measure
A few years ago we decided to find a better way to track the effectiveness of our online strategies, e-campaigns, pay-per-click, visitor activity and search engine optimization. We wanted to use the data generated by our web traffic to better understand what matters to our customers, and what works from a business perspective. We needed simple, powerful and actionable information in real-time. Our search ended when we found Visistat. This decision follows our normal pattern of opting for a premium solution rather than an inexpensive (Webtrends) or free (Google Analytics) option.
We liked the program so much that we invested in the company. We also measure the effectiveness of campaigns and the ROI of channels such as: brochures, postcards, newspapers, magazines, emails, yard signs, blogs, etc.
Showings & Offers
We track the number of showings and buyer feedback. How many people have been inside your home over the past three weeks? How many second showings have there been? How many offers? Over the course of listing and selling thousands of homes, we have noticed patterns in showings data. The showings-per-week ratio, showings-to-offers ratio, and second-showings ratio are vital indicators.
In today’s climate, this real-time information provided by showings, clicks and calls allows us to adjust pricing and marketing on the fly. If we change pricing or marketing at 9:00 am, notify the world by 10:00 am, then we can watch the buyer click-through rate, number of phone calls and showing requests spike by lunchtime. By the next day, we should know if the spike was an anomaly or a harbinger.
Measure the Right Thing
In addition to metrics for advertising and showings, we track organizational performance. We realize that what you measure reflects your values and priorities. While the average person buys a home once every seven years, the average person knows four people who buy and sell each year.
The key question for any organization, as laid out by Fred Reichheld in The Ultimate Question is: How likely is a client to recommend you to friends, family or colleagues? 
A Bain & Company analysis shows the answer to that single question is the clearest measure of an organization’s performance. A focus on organization’s performance through its customers’ eyes and the Net Promoter Score changes how a business is run.
Annette, Doug and Dale Bohannon are constantly seeking out new ideas and new methods to improve our service and your experience. We strive to be your trusted Real Estate Consultants in Tampa, Florida.
