Measure Twice. Succeed Always. Part I

My dad is a carpenter. It’s not his career, but it’s his passion. I can remember standing at his workbench as a little girl hearing him say, “Molly, every good carpenter knows: Measure twice. Cut once.”

It’s sage advice – and it goes for marketers as well as carpenters.

A good carpenter wants to make sure that when he cuts, the piece of wood will fit perfectly into whatever he’s building. If it doesn’t, that piece of wood is wasted. When you’re marketing yourself, you need to make sure that when you spend money on a direct mail postcard, and e-mail blast, a new web page – whatever – that it’s actually getting you results. Otherwise, you’re wasting your money – and you’re not achieving the kind of results you could be, which is probably worse.

How to measure your marketing results

How you measure your marketing results depends on what media you’re looking at. If you’re trying to measure results of an e-mail blast, for example, your measurements will be different than for the web, or a direct mail postcard. Here are some guidelines:

Measuring website results

An effective website is a must for all real estate agents. Done right, your website can generate leads (which you can then market to by e-mail and direct mail), provide your prospects and clients with valuable information (positioning you as the expert), and act as a modern-day Yellow Pages where prospects searching for agents can find and learn about you.

But how do you know if your website is effective?

Google Analytics is the best website measurement tool I know of, in part because it’s free and in part because it was created by the guys who built the most powerful (and most used) search engine around. You can (and should) measure:

• Visitors

  • Visits

  • Absolute Unique Visitors

  • Pageviews

  • Average Pageviews

  • Time on Site

  • Bounce Rate

  • New Visits

• Visitor loyalty

  • Recency

  • Length of visit

  • Depth of visit

• Browser capabilities

  • Browsers

  • Operating systems

  • Screen colors

  • Screen resolutions

  • Flash versions

  • Java support

• Traffic sources

  • Direct traffic

  • Referring sites

  • Search engines

  • Keywords

• Content

  • Top content

  • Content by title

  • Top landing pages

  • Top exit pages

  • Links clicked (site overlay)

• Goals

John Wanamaker, a 19th century entrepreneur, once famously made the statement, “I know that half of my advertising is wasted, I just don t know which half.” Measurement allows you to know which half is wasted – and which half is generating results.

To be continued. . .

Stay tuned for measuring e-mail and direct mail results in Part II tomorrow (or visit www.cmrealestatemarketing.com and sign in to read the full article, free).