A few weeks ago, we looked into Facebook Ads and found out exactly how to create one from the ground up. Now, Facebook has released its own guide to help people get the most out of its targeted ads.

Guide to Facebook Ads goes over every aspect of the process, from how to make your ads stand out, to budgeting, ad delivery, and best practices. Those who want to get really familiar with the process can even sign up for a webinar here.

For those still considering whether Facebook Ads are a worthwhile investment, the best practices section of the guide is a good place to start. This covers gaining more fans, acquiring leads, and driving awareness, providing a good overview of what Facebook can achieve in these three key areas.

For the record, the above ad for All Nippon Airways was featured as one of Facebook Ads’ success stories after it earned the company a 25 percent click-through rate – a marked improvement from its usual eight to 12 percent.

With Facebook now closing in on a total of 500 million users worldwide, the topic of Facebook ads is worth looking into. Here, we’ll outline how to create one of these pay-per-click/pay-per-impression ads, along with the arguments for and against using them for real estate.

To begin with, you’ll need to decide what to include in your ad. Facebook ads are based primarily on text, so strong copy is essential. Because your ads are going to be displayed down the right-hand side of the screen, a snappy, attention-grabbing headline is also important. In the body of the ad, you’re limited to 135 characters, so spend some time refining your copy to get as much information in as possible.

An enticing picture of the area you represent is also worth considering before you upload a picture of yourself. Remember: home hunters are primarily focused on where they’re going to live rather than who’s going to help them find their new home.

Now that you have a catchy headline, engaging body text, and a great picture, it’s time to choose who’s going to see your ad. Facebook lets you refine viewers by country, state, city, age, gender, keywords, education level, and even whether it’s the user’s birthday or not when they see the ad.

If those options weren’t enough, you can go on to limit viewers by the name of their workplace, relationship status, whether they’re interested in men or women, their languages, connections (pages, events, groups or applications), and friends of connections.

After all that, Facebook gives you an estimate of how many users are going to see your ad. The final step is to set your daily budget, and choose whether you want to pay for impressions or clicks. Once you’ve entered the amount you’re willing to pay per-click or per-impression, Facebook will give you an estimate of the number of clicks or impressions you can expect to receive.

The question is, do these ads actually work for real estate agents? Making the case for Facebook ads is business2.com.au contributor Charlie Gunningham, who paid just over US$3,500 over 11 months to get his ad seen 22 million times.

For the negative, we have 4realz.net, which argues that Facebook is too quick to take down non-performing ads and says the ads would only be useful if Facebook could allow agents to target people who are likely to move to a particular area.

But just because the jury is still out on whether Facebook ads are a worthwhile investment doesn’t mean you can’t give them a try. If you do decide to use them, remember to track your results, and adjust your ads according. And if you’ve had success – or lack thereof – with Facebook ads, do let us know in our comments.

If you are a busy agent with lots of clients, the thought of gathering statistics for all of your properties might seem daunting. You’d need to find out how many people visited each property and what number of enquiry emails you had, then look at comparable properties and combine it all to make a meaningful report.

This could take some time and may seem tedious, however each of your clients deserves the individual attention and feedback, particularly if they are paying for the advertising. But for the sake of your sanity, it’s best to look to an automated system to do the work for you.

One easy way to gather this information is through your advertising portal. Most of the large players will provide you with the raw statistics on each of the properties you have listed. Some of the more advanced portals will even package this information in a useful report that you can then forward on to your vendors.

If your portal does not provide such a service, you may need to do the grunt work yourself. No doubt you receive reports of some sort from all the different portals you advertise on as well as your own website. You should collate as much of this information as possible so you can provide your customers with a well-rounded picture of how their marketing is tracking.

Vendor reports are also a fantastic tool for you to compare properties and see which portals are producing better results than others, along with which properties are performing better and why. This knowledge is great for advising customers on how to achieve better results from their advertising.

Above all, remember to keep your vendor reports simple and only include the facts. Ultimately, vendor reports should provide a springboard for considered conversation between you and your vendor about what’s best for their listing.

Tune in to any technology blog this week and you’ll see one word popping up again and again: Facebook. At f8, Facebook’s conference for developers and entrepreneurs held yesterday, founder Mark Zuckerberg had plenty to reveal about the future of his social network, which is about to hit 500 million visitors per month.

Facebook’s developer blog outlines the biggest changes, the first of which is the ability to add “Like” buttons and other social plugins to any website. timesonline.co.uk describes this as Facebook’s “plan to control how you see the web”. Zuckerberg puts a different spin on it, writing “we are making it so all websites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone.”

Along with social plugins, Facebook is introducing something called the “Open Graph Protocol”, which turns websites into objects people can add to their Facebook profiles. “When a user establishes this connection by clicking Like on one of your Open Graph-enabled pages, you gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook Pages: a link from the user’s profile, ability to publish to the user’s News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics through our revamped Insights product,” Facebook’s developer blog explains.

According to mashable.com, the launch of the Open Graph will mean the end of the now-familiar Facebook Connect, which is used across multiple real estate websites.

Facebook’s latest changes are mainly aimed at developers, but what does it all mean for users? Will the changes have an effect on privacy? Zuckerberg addresses these questions in the following video:

Of course, no change to one of the world’s biggest online social networks is going to please every single user. But if Zuckerberg is worried about the naysayers, he isn’t letting on, finishing his blog post with these words:

“We look forward to a future where all experiences are this easy and personalised, and we’re happy today to take the next important step to get there.”

When it comes to website analytics, there’s a mess of information out there. We all know a good understanding of analytics is an important ingredient in website success. But if you’re short on time, it can help to zero in on a few key items. Today, we’ll look at the top five measures to focus on when sifting through your analytics data.

1. Unique visitors. In measuring your website’s success, it’s hard to go past the number of people visiting it. Increasing your unique visitor numbers could simply be a matter of promotion, or you may need to spend some time adding more quality content.

2. Popular content. Look at the pages that are attracting the most attention, then focus your energies on creating more of what your audience wants.

3. Bounce rate. We’ve looked at bounce rate in detail here. Put simply, a high bounce rate is a key indication that something about your website needs to change.

4. Referring keywords. Along with popular content, the keywords people use to get to your website are another way to discover what they are actually hoping to find when they get there.

5. Click stream. As we said in our discussion of online engagement, the way people move around your website shows what they are drawn to and what they ignore. This is just one more way you can find out what pleases your audience.

So, do you agree with our top five, or do you focus on different analytics areas? We’d love to hear your analytics tips and tricks in our comments.

[Image: analytics.info]

No matter what your online marketing strategy involves, there’s one goal you should always have in mind: audience engagement.

It might sound like a high-flown concept, but all engagement really refers to is people spending time with your brand. Obviously, the longer your potential clients are engaged, the better. After all, online advertising can keep people engaged far longer than the time they spend looking at a television commercial, and it offers many more ways to keep people interested than newspaper ad copy.

An engaged website user, for example, might land on an agent’s homepage after a Google search, only to be enticed by a widget that shows home value fluctuations in their area. Once they’ve done that, they might start looking for contact details, and then come across a blog post on a topic that interests them. By this stage, they will have been engaged with the agent’s brand for a good few minutes – a relatively big investment for someone online.

The goal of audience engagement is the reason good content matters so much. As we recently discussed, everything from your website’s tagline to your Twitter updates is an opportunity to draw a potential client in.

So how do you get an idea of how engaged your audience is? A good place to start is your website’s bounce rate, which we’ve looked at in detail here. If visitors to your website are not engaged, they will simply “bounce” away again after just a few seconds.

Your website’s click stream – the series of links a person clicks on while moving around your website – can also give you an idea of what’s engaging users. Is there something most users are drawn to? Is there a section they routinely ignore?

Bounce rate and click stream are just two aspects of web analytics that it pays to become familiar with. Understand what your audience is doing, and you’ll be able to tweak things to maximise their engagement.

Creating valuable engagement with your potential customers isn’t just a matter of being the loudest or most visible online – it’s a matter of quality over quantity. It’s getting your audience in the door, and getting them to stick around long enough to remember you.

The findings of a UK-based study by .Fox Networks and comScore suggest the number of clicks video and display advertisements receive doesn’t actually matter.

The study evaluated results from four campaigns across four industry sectors and found that video and display advertising both successfully increased brand engagement in each.

After exposure to a display or video ad, the study found consumers were three times more likely to conduct search queries using brand or relevant generic terms during the next four weeks. Website visitation also increased by more than a factor of seven.

Comparing the two types of advertising, the study found consumers exposed to video advertising were 28 percent more likely to visit the brand website and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search than if they saw display ads. However, the response from those exposed to display ads did climb as the number of ad impressions increased.

.Fox Networks is a global online advertising network, so it has an obvious investment in the idea that online display and video advertising is effective. But the results do echo the findings of a US-based comScore study from last year.

“Today, marketers who attempt to optimise their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad,” comScore vice president of marketing solutions Linda Anderson said about the US study. “That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact.”

The results of a recent survey by globaledge.co.uk reveal some interesting disparities between the marketing channels agents see as effective and the channels they actually use.

The survey looked at the marketing habits of over 200 agents and developers, asking them to rate the effectiveness of strategies like search engine optimisation, email marketing, and banner advertising, and to detail the strategies they use.

The top five most effective marketing strategies were seen to be the following:

1. Customer referral programs
2. Search engine optimisation
3. Listing properties with portals
4. Agent and IFA networks
5. Email marketing

The top five marketing strategies the respondents actually used were slightly different:

1. Listing properties with portals
2. Email marketing
3. Search engine optimisation
4. Agent and IFA networks
5. Magazine advertising

Like the recent HomeGain survey of US agents, these results suggest certain habits, like the use of print media, are difficult to break even when agents know they aren’t as effective as other marketing strategies.

If you’re trying to make the shift towards some of those top five most effective marketing strategies, make sure you check out our guest series and Top 10 Tips on SEO, our series on making the most of your portal listings, and our email marketing tips.

If your daily routine involves checking at least one social network, chances are you’re logging on to Facebook. In fact, new Hitwise figures are showing Facebook is now the most visited website in the US, surpassing even Google’s market share.

Before we proclaim the fall of the Internet’s Goliath, let’s take a closer look at these figures. According to Hitwise, visits to Google made up 7.03 percent of all website visits for the week ending 13 March, but Facebook just edged into first place with 7.07 percent. This is the first time Google has been overtaken since September 2007, when MySpace topped the list.

Matt Tatham, director of media relations at Hitwise, told The Wall Street Journal that the two websites could go back and fourth between top and second place. But while the totals are close, the amounts each website has grown are far from similar: Google share of total visits was up 9 percent over the same week last year, while Facebook’s was up 185 percent.

So it seems at least one of our predictions for agents in 2010 – that social media fatigue would set in – could turn out to be wrong after all. Of course, we always love to hear from agents about what’s working for them on the social web. And if you’re wondering how to make the most of it yourself, check out our golden result for social media ROI.

After surveying 1,300 agents and brokers, US real estate marketing company HomeGain has found that referrals are seen to be the most effective marketing strategy to acquire new clients.

According to the results, referrals scored 8.7 out of a possible 10 points for effectiveness. Featured listings were the second most effective strategy with 4.8 points, followed by email campaigns with 4.7. The top 10 strategies list reveals an interesting mix of traditional and newer marketing options:

1. Referrals (8.7)
2. Featured Listings (4.8)
3. Email Campaigns (4.7)
4. Postcards/Mailers (4.6)
5. Blogging (4.1)
6. Online Lead Generation Services (4.0)
7. Facebook (4.0)
8. LinkedIn (3.6)
9. Outdoor Ads (3.6)
10. Print Ads (3.6)

The top 10 marketing objectives for respondents in 2010 show another contrasting mix of old and new:

1. Referrals (8.9)
2. Email Campaigns (5.7)
3. Postcards/Mailers (5.4)
4. Featured Listings (5.2)
5. Facebook (4.9)
6. Print Ads (4.3)
7. Blogging (4.2)
8. LinkedIn (4.1)
9. Online Lead Generation Services (4.0)
10. YouTube (3.5)

What’s interesting is that the strategies agents and brokers found to be most effective in 2009 aren’t necessarily the ones they plan to focus on in 2010. The respondents are clearly aware of the fact that Facebook is growing in importance, for example, and that 2010 might be the year to consider adding YouTube to their marketing mix.

HomeGain says respondents are less likely to invest their marketing dollars and time on banner ads, pay per click advertising, outdoor advertising, and MySpace this year. Twitter was also included on the list of strategies losing popularity, despite its continued growth.

Do you think the respondents have basically the right idea when it comes to their marketing priorities for 2010? What would you do differently?