In today’s competitive marketplace it’s more critical than ever to be tracking your marketing campaigns. You need to know where you are placing your dollars, as well as your call or prospect acquisition costs. In all the years we have been providing consulting to the Real Estate industry, we are still surprised at the lack of tracking and monitoring. As a result, here are some best practices that we recommend. The web has made it easy to track campaigns, but the key is having the right tracking infrastructure in place first. Let’s look at a scenario.

Say you have listed a $1,000,000 dollar home and you need to market this property. Here is an example of how we would manage the tracking component for this listing:

1. Individual Property Website (IPW): Give the property its own online identity and separate it from the pack. Using the Active Campaign Manager, select a unique local or 800# that you can place on the IPW. This phone number can be directed to a call center or an individual cell phone. Once this is in place, you can login to your account and see exactly how many calls you are getting from the website. The report will tell you where the calls are from, the length of the call, and in the future, will offer the option to listen to a recording of the call.
2. Sign Rider: Establish a second phone number and place this number on the sign rider so you can track how many calls you are getting from your signs.
3. Print advertisements: If you are doing a print campaign for this listing, establish another separate phone number to include on all of your print ads or just for specific ads. You can also direct people to the IPW. Just make sure that the phone number is a campaign tracking number so you can at least get an idea of how many calls you are getting.

These suggestions offer an easy way to start knowing where your calls are coming from as well as your call acquisition costs. Once you have spent some time tracking, you will have an understanding of some patterns that you can relate back to your sellers. You will be able to tell them what’s working and what is not. You can move your sellers away from expensive campaigns that have limited response rates. This knowledge is critical in today’s competitive market and will position the brokerage and the agent as experts in the industry.