How to check if your promotional efforts are relevant to the market? Various business metrics are helpful in this matter. In this article, we’ll talk about the key metrics and how to optimize them.

Can’t you just set up everything in the beginning and sit back to enjoy the results? 

The world we live in continually changes. New technologies are appearing, new challenges needing to be addressed, new buildings being built. As a result, marketing needs to change and adapt as well to remain relevant and effective.

What metrics should you track?

With instruments such as Google Analytics and comprehensive Google Ads data, you can track a lot of useful metrics. Let’s focus on the 6 key metrics:

1. Impressions – how many times your ad was seen by the users? This metric in itself doesn’t give you anything in particular, but it is necessary for calculating the other metrics.
2. CPM (cost per mille/thousand) – how much did 1,000 impressions (or clicks) cost?
3. CTR (click-through-rate) – how many times people clicked on the ad when they saw it? (The number of impressions used here is usually in thousands.) The more relevant your ad wording is to the user’s request, the higher the likelihood of clicking to learn more. This is one of the reasons why you always should pay attention to the wording of your ads.
4. CPC (cost per click) – how much was spent on each click? The price depends on where your ads are shown and the bids for them. Google’s main aim is to [earn more money] to show the ads of those businesses whose landing pages correspond to the user’s requests.
5. Conversions – depending on your ad setup, a conversion means filling out a contact form or setting up a meeting, or whatever else is considered a conversion for your particular business.
6. CPA (cost per acquisition) is calculated by dividing the total budget spent on this particular ad by the total attributed conversions. This metric shows you how much did one lead from a particular advertising campaign cost.

In the table below, you can see an example of the marketing metrics tracking spreadsheet.

How to track campaign metrics using a Google Spreadsheet?

As you can see, you don’t necessarily need to purchase specific tools to monitor all your data and you can start with a Google Spreadsheet document to track the campaigns. Using conditional formatting, you can set up the colored filters for easier comparison between the numbers.

However, for less manual work, you can use Google BigQuery + Google Data Studio, which can connect the advertising channels as data sources and optimize the process of data collection.

Now that we’ve talked about the metrics, let’s move on to their optimization.

The first two weeks: start with tests

No advertising campaign is the same. When you launch the campaign for a new real estate project, its data will differ from the previous campaigns even if the target audience seems to be similar and the area is near the previous property.

Is it good? Is it bad? In reality, it’s neither – when you launch the campaign, you need to always take some time to test out the hypotheses about your target audience and its behavior. Test out different marketing channels, different wordings for the ads, and different creatives.

As a result, you will see that some channels seem to perform better than others and some ads should be removed completely or updated to improve performance. This is an important step to optimize the campaigns’ costs at the very beginning and remove the ads that don’t work at all.

An important note here: let your client or team know that the results of the first two weeks are dedicated to the tests and that there will be changes, so it’s not a surprise for them.

Dealing with bottlenecks

When you have a streamlined process, every little detail should work properly for the entire mechanism to work. If something goes wrong, the entire process can stop or require a lot more resources than was initially planned.

There are two primary issues to look for: 

1. The conversions from a channel or specific ad campaign are too low.
2. The costs are too high.

How to notice that something is going wrong? There are two main ways:

1. If you already had launched real estate marketing projects, you can use data from previous campaigns. It will be different in details, but the overall picture will be a helpful benchmark to understand where you need to pay more attention.
2. If you haven’t launched marketing campaigns for real estate properties, you can crosscheck with industry benchmarks.

Experimenting with new channels

Each channel has its audience and the reasons people use it. For example, people use Google to look for information and Facebook for more leisurely communication with their friends and prefer advertising that is relevant to them, has nice pictures and is not annoying.

Like everything in marketing (and the world in general, as we mentioned before) changes. For example, a few years ago, advertising on Instagram was an innovation. Today, however, that social network became common for real estate marketing since it focuses on the visual component. A new player in the game of social networks is TikTok, which can also be used for promotion. It’s best to allocate about 5% of the overall budget to test out hypotheses about the new channels.

To learn more about multichannel marketing, read the article we wrote specifically targeted at that issue.

It’s an ongoing process that never stops

Like in an old children’s song: “This is a song that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friend,” marketing needs continuous optimization. Thankfully, with the latest technologies, the majority of this process is automated, but you still need to watch those key metrics to make sure there are no bottlenecks in view that can and should be fixed.

Once again, key takeaways: 

1. Allow one-two weeks for testing your marketing hypotheses.
2. Monitor the data for possible bottlenecks.
3. Experiment with new channels.