Why Online Real Estate Lead Generation Diversification Matters

It is a good time to examine the state of online real estate lead generation and see where you can benefit under new market conditions.

With more brokers and agents hyper-focused on profitable growth, what should you do for 2023?

Dan Lott (VP, Client Marketing, CINC) and Harry Kierbow (Sr. Director, Paid Social Media Marketing, CINC) recently hosted a webinar to discuss:

• Online Real Estate Lead Generation Trends for 2023

• How to Diversify Online Lead Sources to Scale Your Business

• Tactical Tips to Accelerate Pipeline Growth Now

• The evolution of search marketing related to new AI advances with ChatGPT/Bing and Bard/Google

See the full video and transcript below.

Transcript

Jamie Quenzer:I have two experts today, Dan Lott, our Vice President of Client Marketing, and Harry Kierbow, our Senior Director of Paid Social. Both individuals, Dan's been at CINC for 10 plus years, Harry, seven plus years. They are the experts in the business, and have tried multiple products. But today, they're going to be sharing some insight on why you should diversify. We're also going to talk about some social trends and search trends that are happening, chat GPT, and all those other fun things. Throughout the next hour, let's use the chat if you have questions. Harry, Dan, and I will hop in, but we're so glad to have you. Harry, do you want to kick us off?

Harry Kierbow: Yep, thanks. I'm going to kick us off by letting Dan get started here. Dan's the creator of the lead generation team, so there's really no one better to talk about it and to explain our focus than Dan. So yeah, I'll let you let you go. Let you go.

Dan Lott: Well, Said, Harry. All right. So here is, here's our team over there on the right. And we have a large lead generation team. Everybody, every CINC client has a dedicated account manager who is working on their accounts, and there they are at one of our events. And the goal of our department is, I always put this in every presentation, is to generate the most high-quality leads in your preferred areas for the least amount of money. The most important part of that, from our perspective, and from your perspective also, is the preferred areas. If you're getting leads that are not in your area if they are an hour from your house, and you don't want to drive an hour, let us know, and we can turn them off. So there needs to be some feedback between us.

Harry Kierbow: Yeah, and I think that's the benefit of having the dedicated area managers as well. You know, we have a lot of tools that we can actually help to surface sub-markets in your main areas that are doing well based off of previous performance, you know. So if you aren't getting things way outside of where you want to be, you know. One of the biggest things our team does is we go in and look at, you know, a certain city or certain market and can pull almost points of interest from within that city to target and augment your campaign and get more leads in the areas where you want them. I also want to mention, this is probably the creepiest corporate picture of me. There I am right there. This is, that's not my favorite picture. I don't know if I knew you were taking it. But anyway, we can move on.

Dan Lott: All right. Okay. So diversifying the Ad Spend. Just going to give an overview of how things are currently, in terms of cost per lead for the different types of ads we have. Google Buyer, which is the most used ad type, we're at around $6 or $7 a lead, and that has been trending up. It was a couple years ago, we were probably around $4 a lead, and now it is rising. And the next slide will show you why it is rising.

And then on the flip side is Facebook, which is going down the cost per lead is going down, specifically a new ad type that we just launched, which we launched and it's had a very good cost per lead and very good lead quality. So, we're very excited about that one. And the lead value index, which I'm sure you all know what that is. But in case you don't, that is where we.. it's a number that you can tell if you go into the CINC pro website at the blog section, you can read more and more details about it including the LVI for your market. But it takes into consideration the average home price in your area as well as the cost per lead in your area to see what is the best, which markets have the best return. Nationwide in the US it's $12.80 for every dollar of advertising. So, based on the average commission rate, if you invest $1 in CINC advertising, you'll get $12 back. And this was data from the fourth quarter. Fourth quarter typically has the highest cost per lead. So, when we, you know, three months when we run, or two months or next month when I run this data again, they'll probably be around $16 a lead because the fourth quarter has…

Aside: How about Toronto? Toronto has one of the best. We don't do it for Canada. But if we would, Toronto and Vancouver also have very high, good lead value index ratio between the home price and the cost per lead. Cost per lead in Toronto and Vancouver are low, and the home prices in those two cities are real high. So, it's a really good one. It would probably be in around the $30 range would be my estimate. The number one is Honolulu, which has a 50 LVI just because the homes are really expensive there and the cost per lead is pretty cheap.

And says there the cost per lead varies by market and your CINC representative, whether you are a current client or prospective client, will run you through the tool. Maybe not showing you the exact numbers but show you like which are some of the.. we have a lot of custom tools that get the help us generate the cheapest leads and most affordable leads, and they can no help would help you guide you through them on just an information basis. All right.

Here is why the Google cost per lead is going up, and this is this a tool that you can access. It's called Google Trends. You just type in Google Trends, and it comes up. And then we use the phrase ‘homes for sale.’ And that is a common search term. And one of the most common search terms is like we're in Marietta, so do you like ‘homes for sale in Marietta,’ it's a common search term. This shows that how compared to a year ago, the amount of, in Google the amount of people who are searching for the phrase ‘homes for sale’ has gone down. It looks like it's around 20%. So. there's you know, kind of a correlation, I guess a negative correlation between the number of searches and the cost per lead. So the fewer searches, the higher the cost per lead. So that's why the cost per lead is trending higher. And you can see when I was saying that go the fourth quarter is the lowest. That's the big dip there. That's the that's from like Thanksgiving to Christmas is when the number of searches is the lowest, and that's when the cost per lead is the highest, and then the day after Christmas is when it increases or spikes.

Harry Kierbow: So yeah, we've always preached diversification in ad spend. And you know, this was a really good example. The best way to make sure that you guys have a constant flow of leads is by diversifying ad spend, same as you would with the stock market. You know, we've said this for years, but CINC, we are the biggest provider in the country, we have the most data of anyone that's doing this. So, we wanted to actually find some data points on this. On, you know, which lead types should you be investing money in? Which lead types, you know, what are the characteristics of the different lead types.

So, over the past, I don't know, maybe a year or so, we've been surveying millions of leads from CINC sites all across the US and Canada, looking at Pipeline statuses, sources, and things like that. And we found some things that you know, are not too surprising, like Google buyer leads are the most likely lead type of any source to transact within 12 months. You know, that's something that we've always figured would be true. We saw that in the data when we went through and looked at those lead sources. We also saw some interesting things too. So if you guys are, you know, paying attention if you want to drop in the chat, we saw leads from what source are most likely to convert after 24 months in the CRM?

So, we know leads from Google are most likely to convert most quickly. I can't pull up my chat because I'm sharing my screen. Oh. Let's see. SEO, Facebook, Facebook. Facebook tend to take more time. Yeah, so what we saw. CINC. Yes. So, what we saw was you guys are we're on the right path there. It's actually leads from all sources, once they've been within the CRM for two years, tend to convert at a similar rate.

And so that's why when we're making a recommendation is in terms of ad spend setup, we recommend that people diversify. You know, we don't look at your relationship with CINC as something that's going to be a few months, you know, sell a house or two and leave from the leads. We want to work with you long-term, and help generate, you know, an asset that you can pass on to people or something where you're owning your own revenue.

And so when people launch, we do recommend that they launched with a mixture of ads on search and social. And this is showing the cost per lead of social over the last 6, 7, 8 months. And something that's interesting compared to the Google cost per lead is it's actually been trending downward recently. And some of that is from the way that those ads are served. You saw that, on the Google side, we don't see, we aren't seeing as many searches for homes for sale. And so that's driving the lead cost up. On the social side, we're pushing ads to people, so that is helping with that lead costs.

But a really big driver of the lead cost has been our new ad type called Team Listing Ads. And so in in February, we saw the Team Listing Ads cost per lead was 17% better than any of the other ad types across the portfolio. And we've really been kind of pushing this ad type because we've been seeing good results from it. One of the big drivers of the overall drop in cost per lead is the percentage of spend on the social side going into Team Listing Ads has increased over the last six months from about 7% of the portfolio to about 40% of the portfolio. So, we're seeing a lot of adoption here. And this is what the Team Listing Ads are if you guys haven't heard of these by now. It's an automated listing advertisement program that promotes specifically your team's listings. Hence the creative name, Team Listing Ads, to net new leads. So people, some of you guys may think this is similar to List Cast or a, like Facebook real estate ads, they're called now. That's a remarketing product. With this, we're pushing these ads out to people in your market areas. And Meta is using the interest in the activities of the people in the audience to decide which homes from your team’s listings are being shown to those people. So, it's driving a really great cost per click and also a CPM, which is a cost per mille. That's the cost it takes to show the ad to 1000 people. It's really not, like, it all by itself. That's not a tremendously important stat. But the way that Meta works, they want people to be on their network. They want to show people things that are valuable, you know that people are sending good signals back to Meta either by liking it or clicking on it or whatever that might be. So, the cost per mille for these ads is lower than any other ad type that we've been running, and it's much lower than the industry average. So that just shows that these ads are relevant to people. They are resonating, and they're getting good results. And Meta, as the network, is seeing that and showing it to people at a lower cost, which is driving down the lead cost.

So, in March up to this point, we're at $3.26 per lead. And automatically updating ads. They update every 24 hours; I do want to mention that as well. So, if a new listing comes on or leaves the site, that will be updated automatically. And one of the biggest enhancements we just made is, we now allow leads to request a showing on the property in the ad directly from the ad. So, this is what it looks like. That's my son with the big shoes. I always like to try and include someone. Anyway, this would be what a Team Listing Ad would look like. When they click on this ad, they're going to see this form on Facebook. And we asked the question, would you like to tour this property? Or would you like to tour this home? If they say yes, then that creates a showing request in the CRM. And so, what we've seen is leads from Team Listing Ads are actually 20% more likely the leads from just general Facebook buyers to set an appointment within the first 90 days of registering. I think that's twofold. I think part of it is, you know, the ads themselves are very relevant. People are liking them, interacting with them. But we're also asking this additional question, which is now creating a showing request. And that helps our clients to identify, you know, okay, this person said they're ready to go see homes. This person said they're not yet. So that helps in follow-up. And so, we just recently implemented this. And we've already been seeing some really cool results that are very exciting.

This is the lead from just a few days ago. Oh, okay. Sorry. All right. Sorry, I thought I was going off track. I'm on track. This is a lead from just a few days ago. That came into one of our client’s sites in Canada. He came in and said, Yes, he would like to tour the home. And then that came in as an appointment and a showing request. And then I love the conversation between the lead and our client. Hey, this is a $3.5 million listing. And my favorite is his final response there at the end, ‘Thanks. I don't need a mortgage.’ So, this lead has been out looking at houses with our clients, and it came in very recently. So, we're very excited by this progress. And we think we'll see more and more of it. We want to have more people on this ad type.

Jamie Quenzer: Awesome, Harry. As you're going through team listing ads, I think this is a great place to stop. There were a couple of different questions that I wanted to highlight. And maybe you could provide some answers. With Team Listing Ads, are they added to reels?

Harry Kierbow: There are placements on reels Yes.

Jamie Quenzer: Because I would imagine with the meta offerings, you guys are selecting and optimizing what are the best placements? Is that a fair statement?

Harry Kierbow: We do that to an extent. I mean, really, the way that the networks have gone recently is to allow the algorithm to determine what makes the most sense. And that's kind of, you know, like, that's funny like when I first came in, I wanted to narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down. But that actually constricted performance. I remember this was years ago, but there were coaches telling people to, you know, you want to get it down to 100, 200 people. And it's like, that doesn't work. And we've run a lot of tests, trying to switch to like manual bidding and manual placements, that kind of stuff. When we do that, the lead costs usually increases when we limit the algorithm like that. So, our general best practice, you know, unless you have, there are videos or certain things that just makes sense in some places. With something like this, I want to be able to put that in front of as many people as I can for the best price that I can. So, we generally leave that open to the algorithm.

Jamie Quenzer: Awesome. And then with Team Listing Ads, do they need to have so many listings in order to use that product? Or if I have no listings? Can I use it?

Harry Kierbow: Thank you, I knew I forgot something. I don't know if somebody asked that or if you planted that, but it's a minimum of three active listings that we would want to see. More active listings tend to perform better. You're just giving, you know, again, more options. Like the more options that we can give the algorithm to pull pictures to show in the ads to show to people that they think are looking in that area. You know, the bigger the audience, the better it's going to perform, generally. I mean, to an extent, right, but that's a whole other webinar. Now I'm getting off track.

Jamie Quenzer: No. And then the final question when you're using CINC’s Team Listing Ads, if it is my listing, if someone comes in, does that lead get assigned to me?

Harry Kierbow: The way that it is right now, it goes into the normal round-robin. We can direct leads to specific agents. We can also, so by default will do the team's listings. But we can also limit to just pull a certain agent’s listings from a site, for example. And so, we could pull that agent's listings and then we can assign every lead that is generated from that ad to that agent. So, we have options there. But by default, it's going to go to round robin.

Jamie Quenzer: Perfect. And I know that there's, Demetri I see your question, I will get to that. I want to make sure that we stay on Team Listing Ads and we stay on topic. So, I will get to that. Saving that for the end. And Team Listing Ads isn't the only Meta strategy, and so that's another thing that we'll talk about at the end of some other offerings because there are individuals that say, “I don't have any listing ads like this isn't going to work.” There's more for them, right? They need to keep listening.

Harry Kierbow: No, you can check out. You're done….No, that was the tease

Jamie Quenzer: I'm taking notes on some of these questions. Dan, I think it's now time to pass it to you?

Dan Lott: Sure thing. Well, first, before we switch the slides, I just want to emphasize a couple of points about this lead type. Harry said that the cost per lead was in March and something like $3.50, and that is roughly half of what it is on Google. And a year ago, the gap between the best Facebook and Google was much smaller, it's like $1, maybe $1, or $2. So, it just shows that you know, the importance of diversification and just how good these lead types are. And this thing about the ad, adding the, you know, being able to request a property tour, is really compelling. And I'm not sure if Harry really emphasized this, but, like, this ad is going to showcase all your listings. So, like, if you have a client that you are currently trying to sell their house, they're going to be looking at Facebook and seeing their property all over Facebook, and they're going to get excited by that. I know I've sold houses before and, or my house, and sold it, and was like, what is the agent doing? If I would have seen on Facebook, oh, this, they must be doing a good job. So but that's, that's a good thing that's only available with this ad type just because of its Team Listing Ads.

(21.30) Harry Kierbow: And we do have a free trial. If you've never run this ad type before, you can scan that QR code or go to cincteamlistingads.com. The promo code is 23. I forgot to add it to the slide. That's the number 23 and then letters F R E E. But if you're signing up, you know, around now, we'll know. So that's on me. But yeah, definitely give it a try. But I think the big thing here is like, you know, we aren't saying like this, this ad type is great, take all your money and put it here. Like, start, really trying to illustrate the importance of diversifying that spend and having those multiple pillars of lead generation, you know, as you lead generate, I lost steam there at the end. But anyway.

Dan Lott: All right. So I saw somebody was mentioning phone calls and one of the pop-ups. The chat pop-ups. This is a new ad type, which isn't going to generate a lot of leads, but the leads that it will generate are great leads. They are a phone call. That's what you get. It's a phone call lead. And we have gotten, and it's all based on what - let me move my little thing over here so I can actually read what I wrote - Yeah, it's, you know, the cost per lead is more expensive. It's to augment your regular lead generation. Don't get rid of your Google buyer and your Team Listing Ads, this is a good thing. And it's all based on the Google how many Google reviews you have. If you don't have any Google reviews (the minimum is ten on your Google My Business page), your ads aren't going to show it all. And even in some other places that sometimes you have 20, and they don't show either. But sometimes you get really good results. But if you don't spend it, then the money is, you know, you're not out anything if we don't spend the money. Alright, so it is ready now buyers who are searching for phrases like, you know, ‘best real estate agent in Atlanta, Georgia,’ you know, realtors, in you know, Phoenix. Whoever it is, and then that triggers a phone call, which then goes to your phone number. So you get a phone call. It's a low lead flow, but it's good to supplement your main spend. You might not get any leads in a month. But that means you didn't spend anything. But then like we have access the dashboards, we're able to see how many calls we'll get. And some people get, you know, 30. So it just depends on, you know, how competitive your market is and how many Google reviews you have. And one other thing that's good about this is something you could do on your own, but one of the services CINC provides is that we handle the lead dispute. So, if somebody calls up and doesn't want to buy a house or is not interested in real estate, and they're just a spammer, we can dispute that, so you don't have to pay the $30. This is, and unlike all the other ad types, this is by call. It's not like, hey, you're giving us a budget. This is, you know, $30, depending on the market, it's $30. And if you get four phone calls, you're at it's $120 or wherever it is.

Harry Kierbow: Another note on the reviews, I think aside from there being the base level that you have to have for it to function, like if you look at the results that are on the slide. It's also that you're competing with people, you know, that have a lot of reviews. So, think about how you might behave when doing a search. You know if you see two people that have four to five-star reviews and one person has 12 reviews and one person has 800. You know, you're, I think you're going to be more likely to go with that larger reviewed person. So, I think that's another big part of the reviews also.

Jamie Quenzer: Yeah, there's a question. And I know that there are other services that do similar things, like local service ads. When someone is using local service ads at CINC, do they own their business profile?

Dan Lott: You own your Google My Business Profile, yeah. That's always yours. And then one other thing, not having to do with the LSA ads, but somebody I saw posted about Google and whether the leads are shared between clients. We do not do that. We never do that with any of our ads. You get, it's your, you keep your ad, it's your lead. The lead is yours. We don't share. I know some other companies do that. Not us. But it's yours. But I think on the next slide, we have an example of one of these phone calls. If we can, fingers crossed. Let's see how it goes.

Example call: I'm calling from Connecticut. My fiancé and I've been looking for a vacation home in Florida. We've looked all around from West Coast to East Coast. We actually just saw a house became available a couple hours ago in St. Cloud. We looked up some realtors, did a little research. You had a five star and every review, everyone talked very highly of you. So, we chose you for our realtor. We’re very interested in looking at this house. When you get a chance, give us a call back.

Harry Kierbow: Then he goes on to get the phone number, and we cut that out.

Dan Lott: So that's what you can get. It's, you know, it's $30 to $60, depending on the market, but that's, you know, we've looked up that person's they've already arranged I think they've arranged a meeting and things like that. The lead, depending on the lead it gets, it may or may not go into your dashboard, depending on how it's set up. If you use a CINC phone number, it does go into your dashboard. If you don't, then it doesn't, but so we're able to track you know how these go along in the process. So something like that, it's a very, you know, that's a good use of $30 to $60. And this is one of our clients in Phoenix who says “I don't mind paying a little higher for low-hanging fruit. Exactly what I was hoping for when we started running these ads. Very motivated and ready to go.”

And unlike every other type of ad, it's all you know. It's limited by things that are outside of our control, the amount of leads you can get, unfortunately, but you know, get more Google reviews. And we also provide consulting as James on our team, you know, has produced some white papers and things like that on how to optimize your Google My Business page, Google Business profile page to get, you know, more feedback or more positive feedback from people clicking on your ads. If you are a CINC client and you want to try this type of ad, use that QR code.

So the way we run it is we established a benchmark for how much you can spend in an area. And so the first month, first month is free. We like we see like, Oh, they've gotten approximately, you know, $200 for the clicks. So, then the next month, and well pay for the first month, and the next month we'll start charging for it.

Harry Kierbow: I was afraid I'd put the wrong URL on there. But it's not it is cinclsa.com. If you're. I don't like QR codes. I don't do them. I just make them. But it's a good-looking one. Anyway, I felt like I needed to share that. Everything's right on the slide.

Dan Lott: All right. So those were two of the new ad types that we've launched. But in general, we have a lot of different ad types. As Jamie mentioned, like we're not supposed to just focus on those two. It's good to diversify. And so here they are. So, for both Meta and Google, you can do Google Buyer and our buyer and seller and list cast. Do you want to talk about your List Cast and some of the other ones, Harry?

Harry Kierbow: Yeah, sure. So like Dan said, buyer and seller on Meta, which is fancy for Facebook and Instagram. We can also do recruiting ads through there. We do a lot of custom advertising, as well, for different loan programs, and things like that. If you have something like that, that you're interested in, just reach out to your CINC account manager or your specialists that you guys are talking to if you're not a client yet.

List Cast is our dynamic remarketing program. So this takes the properties that people are searching on your site and creates automatically generated ads, which show them properties that are similar to what they're searching for. And it really has two main points of emphasis. One is, you know, about 85% of the people that hit your site the first time don't sign up. That means 15% do, which is really high compared to industry standards, but still, about 85% are not signing up. So List Cast will retarget those people and try to bring them back. And then and, you know, as we've seen, these leads are converting into, you know, all these leads are converting at a similar rate within two years. List Cast is helping to nurture those people over that two-year standpoint that they might be in the CRM, or however long it might take.

Team Listing Ads, we talked about that. That's one of our newer ad types. So, we'd really recommend that you guys do if you have three active listings. Won’t talk much more on that.

The brand advertising, this is the more traditional remarketing service with your logo, your face, and your tagline. But we don't see a lot of leads being generated from this. But it is a good add-on. Because it can help to warm people up to your call after they've registered on your site. You know, they'll go and look at homes, and then they'll see your face, your business everywhere. And then when you call them, that will help to familiarize them with you.

And then Local Services Ads, which I still want to call local service ads, but I guess it makes sense. But Local Services aAs, which we just talked about, as well, unless you want to add anything to that, Dan?

Dan Lott: No. And each of these ad types, we haven't we've created a one-pager for each of them. So if you're interested in one, and you want some more information, just ask your account manager, and they will gladly send a longer packet that has all these different ad types and all that, the pros and cons of everything.

Jamie Quenzer: Before you guys jump into this, I know that there are a couple of people who jumped off or have other conflicts. And I just want to say that we are sending the recording. But one of the other questions was regarding - I'm not able to get a hold of my leads or I'm having trouble connecting with leads. And my recommendation is if you're going to CINCcommunity.com, we have ongoing webinars, we're doing some virtual scripting and power hours, and some more information is coming.

I appreciate one of our clients JD hopped in and said, you’ve got to like, stay the course it's repetition and consistency, it takes 8 to 10 calls on average to reach a lead. Don't give up, and keep calling. Thank you, JD. But we’ll also include details. And so the leads, you still have to do the work to connect. But without further ado, I'll pass it back over to Dan, I just wanted to make sure that we send out that link. Because the leads don't make you money if you don't call them

Dan Lott: So true, Jamie. All right. So we have looked into the past, and now we're going to look into the future. Oh, yeah. How about that?

Okay, so here's just a couple of things, because there's been a lot of stuff in the news about just changes to, you know, the internet and just services that things provide, specifically the AI stuff. And so I just wanted to give an overview of where we are now, and where CINC thinks things are going to go in the future. Specifically, how it relates to real estate lead generation, which is not, it's very important to me, and to you guys, but maybe in the whole realm of things, that probably isn't the most important thing in the world. But this is how we think it goes for us.

Alright, so right now. All right, yeah. So it's 2023 has the potential to be a landmark year and all advertising types across search and social. It's been very, there hasn't been a lot of activity, honestly, in the last couple of years. You know, Google has a monopoly on the search engine industry. And they have around 90% of all online searches. So they pretty much control it all. You know, there's Bing and, you know, DuckDuckGo, and then things like that, but, but really, it's, you're able to get almost all the clicks just by working with Google. And that's why CINC focuses its efforts and spend on Google. And we use things like Bing, but honestly, the results are better with Google, so we, you know, don't force anything on Bing, because, like, why do that when the results aren't going to be as good? So, why might this change? Why might 2023 be a landmark year?

So you've all heard about ChatGPT and soon, this is going to power Bing searches or be included in Bing search. And this, you know, Bing has spent something, I think it was $10 billion on it on Open API, or $20 billion, I've seen different numbers. So, they think it's going to have an impact on their business. And theoretically, it should increase the market share of people who use Bing if it works. You know, we have a lot of proponents in our office. We're like, “Oh, my God, this is the best thing in the world.” And then they'll do all these, write poems and stuff like that. We're using Bing, but is that going to help the search engine results? Is it going to be any different than Google? But Bing is investing heavily. Microsoft is investing heavily in this. And so, it should increase the market share. Will it? Will it be? It's going to increase it somewhat. It's now 10% or 5%? Or whatever we're Bing is. Is it going to be 20% or 30%?

Harry Kierbow: At least a bump at the beginning.

Dan Lott: What?

Harry Kierbow: I said least a bump at the beginning.

Dan Lott: At least a bump? Yeah, people are going to try beginning it's in beta now. I've signed up to use it, and we're still at the beginning. And you know, if you remember back before Google, there were all these companies, you know, Alta Vista, like those and excite all these, like things that are punch lines now ago or whatever, whatever they were. And then so, like I just saw, there's a company called Andi search, I saw on my search engine lands, that was a new search engine just launched that's based on the AI chat capabilities and things like that. So theoretically, Google, like Google, started out just as one of these Excites or like Excites… came out a couple of years later, but maybe any search could be like the big player, and in five years, you don't know. So, you know, we're at the beginning of something that will have, you know, Bing is going to get, as Harry said, Bing’s going to get a bump. Is it going to be prolonged? Is it going to be huge? Will it be enough to trigger an investment in overhauling all of the processes of lead generation? That's, that's what it is. So we're going to, we're looking, we're monitoring it to see, and we've had discussions with our tech team about, like, how long will it, when we do decide to go into, you know, invest heavily into Bing based on you know, it's gotten a lot more search. You know, how long will it take us to do that? And so, it's not as hard as I would have thought, but we have a good tech team. That's why we're going to talk about that a little bit. All right. So that's one thing is that the chatGBT.

Harry Kierbow: There's also there's also too, like, even with a new player that would come in, there's scalability on their side to allow for someone to run, you know, ads at scale. Like, that's a lot of what you've seen, too. And I don't know about you guys, but you know, when we explore new networks, on the social side, a lot of stuff looks great, but just the management of it hasn't been developed from the ad side, right? So, like, if you're going to have someone who's going to be a player, like a Google, they're going to have to develop that infrastructure, as well, that Google has to run ads, and you know, all that different stuff.

Dan Lott: And then the other major, potential major player is Apple. And currently, Google pays Apple to be their search engine provider on their phones. But Apple is in the process of doing something regarding a search engine. Will it be a conventional search engine like Google? Will it be a competitor? Will it be a partner, something like Alexa, that could augment what Google does? And when will it be implemented? Will it be this year? I also saw it could be for years now. So, this isn't an easy thing to create. So even Apple will take years and years to create this. But if it is determined like Apple mobile, I'm going to say. I'm going to guess that approximately two-thirds of our traffic right now is on mobile for Google. And that's pretty, yeah, so that's what it is. And it's probably like 28% on desktop, and then the rest is on tablets. So if and 1% percent of you know mobile is Apple, if it's half, then you're looking at a third of all search traffic going to a new Apple search engine. So, when that happens, if that happens, we're going to have to do something about it. And so, it's just making things a lot more complicated. And so, before when it was just, as it currently is, it's just, you know, it's Google and it's Meta, and that's it. But in the future, it most likely will be a lot more diversified, which I think is a good thing. Just in general, more competition.

Harry Kierbow: Well you can learn. I mean talking about Apple shifting search traffic. I mean, Apple made a huge update a year or two ago for iOS 14.5 that was really, you know, really impacted audience tracking and that kind of stuff. And that, you know, that's a good example. We took a decent-sized hit in being able to track people on Apple devices. But you know, going back to the tech team, we've worked with them to, you know, set things up the way that they need to be set up with Meta to continue to track those people. So, you know, we were able to quickly adapt. But it was, you know, if Apple makes a change like that, it is something that's felt, you know? We felt that change.

Dan Lott: And what it means, all right. All the companies that are coming into it are doing it to make money. And the way all these, you know, tech companies like, oh, Google's this great tech company. They make all their money off of ads. Like, do they do other stuff, but they make all their money off of ads. Facebook is this great company. Oh, they got his metaverse. Oh, it's insane. That makes all the money off of ads.

Harry Kierbow: We gotta pay for the metaverse. The metaverse is expensive, Dan.

Dan Lott: Yeah, so they make it all on ads. So these new tools will incorporate ads, whether it's a search, a Bing search engine that has conventional, that has a cool little paragraph that AI has come up with below is going to be links, and we're going to, you're gonna be paying for clicking on those links. So there's still going to be ads.

And then one thing for real estate is MLS compliance concerns. We spend a lot of our efforts, not me personally, but our company spends a lot of time working with MLSs to make sure that we are compliant with their regulations. If an AI comes out, or chatGBT, or whatever it is, that says, write a story that says that talks about all the different houses that are for sale in Sandy Springs. That's not going to be compliant with an MLS, and they could get in trouble. So, I think that's one of the things that will hamper the growth of AI with real estate in the near term.

So trust in CINC. As we said, Yeah, we're the largest in this industry - largest real estate tech ad spend in North America. We spend around $30 million a year on advertising. Something like the, when we're talking about the number of leads, it's, I believe we are now, the number of leads we’ve generated over the last 10 years, it's bigger than every state than California. So, we have generated a lot of leads. We have lots of data. We have a lot of technology. It's the team of those guys who are on the field in that weird photograph. And then we also have a tech team that is even larger. And we are growing the tech team. Other companies out there are slashing their tech departments, but we are not. We are adding to our tech department so that when the decision is made, we are going to invest heavily in Bing and have invested heavily into Apple because we think we can get a better cost per lead on those and do better leads; we will be able to do it. Other people are going to be forced to do it manually, which is not, you know. When we started, we did most, we did everything manually. And then, now, it's all using these very complex tools and then manually looking at all these really complex tools. It's not like none of it's turned on and forgetting. It's all. It's all there. It's all based on… But it's.. There are complex tools, which allow us to do lots of things, but it's because we have a tech team that's able to build this. And so you know, that's why... Okay. Covered everything. I can't see my little things over the thing. But yeah…. All right. Do I do this slide?

Harry Kierbow: Sure. Yeah. So that's, that's all that we had, you know, for the day today. I'm happy to stick around and do some questions. Yeah, if you guys want to learn more about CINC, you know, please visit our demo page since cincpro.com/request-a-demo. It is very important if you're a CINC client, that you know that you have a dedicated marketing manager for your account who is familiar with your market area, and you can reach out to them if you're having difficulties with leads or any questions like that. If you want recommendations, anything like that, you know, please reach out to us. You can set that up through your account manager and then Jamie mentioned CINC Community earlier. That's a huge resource that, you know, I think is not as known about as it should be. They have great calls, you know, from the CINC live team, John Marrone, and Kristine Dunn. They do weekly live roleplay calls, archived webinars, all kinds of stuff. Definitely check that out. And then yeah, if you have anything else, we're around 9:30 am to 7 pm, Monday through Friday, support at cincpro.com. And 855-246-2717. Feel like, “It's a great day at CCs pizza, Griffin. This is Harry.” That was a past life.

Jamie Quenzer: And if you've never had the pleasure of being here, you and Dan in person, they are even better in person than virtual.

Dan Lott: Stop by the office. We're here sometimes. We'll be glad to see you.

Harry Kierbow: I'm actually an AI.

Jamie Quenzer: I want to thank each of you guys for joining today. If you have any questions, if they are specific or general questions that we can all hop into, feel free to use that chat. There have been some one-off questions, and we'll pass those along to account managers in our team. I love the recommendations. There are a couple ideas on improving our registration and lead capture. So those ideas are one of the many things that makes CINC great. Harry and Dan, we finished in less than an hour. This is also a record.

Harry Kierbow: Yeah.

Dan Lott: I have another third question. I want to answer what somebody had said. I'm going to try to stretch this for another 30 minutes. Somebody has said can you have to request an appointment or request a showing based on the Google for Google lead. So, somebody's registering on Google. And that's something that we are about to roll out this spring. We are testing, something like that. That is a great idea. So, I am very enthusiastic for that. But uh, we'll see. But that was good. Good question because it's something that we're doing.

Harry Kierbow: Patrick asks how much a dedicated marketing manager costs. So the way that our team is set up, we've got 15-16 people that work on the client marketing side, and all day, every day. That's all we do. A smaller group of us is on the social side because it's a smaller portion of the spend. But within the Google side, we've got a new launch team that manages the launch of your site for the first three to four months. They're specialized in managing new campaigns because there's a whole set of issues that are specific to new campaigns that aren't specific to more established campaigns. And then once they've managed that for, is it four months, Dan? Do you know, three to four?

Dan Lott: Yeah.

Harry Kierbow: Yeah. So right around that mark, they'll turn the campaign over to the regional manager, who is one of five or six people that just manage accounts within a certain area of the US and Canada. So that's not an additional cost. You know, you can send emails in, request calls with that person, on certain, you know, on specific topics. There's not an additional cost for that. I mean, we want to make your ad spend as efficient as we can. We make money when you make money just to be you know, to be honest. So, we want to apply our expertise to your campaign, you know, with as few barriers as we can.

Jamie Quenzer: Awesome. We had a couple of lenders, a lot of our clients are real estate agents and team leaders. There are a couple of lenders joining us. Please lenders, you can also access the CINC Community. I'll pass along your contact information as well for some follow up training. But lenders and partners are just as important as our real estate partners as well at CINC.

There was some additional product feedback. Love that rod. I'll make sure to pass it along to our VP of Product and specifically our iOS team. So thank you for sending that.

It looks like we do have coming up later this spring is CINC Rev. And now as I mentioned lenders, there's going to be a few more that start chatting in. What I’ll pass along to the team is we'll need to do some lender training. There's some really neat things. There's a member of our team, his name is Erik, who could help with some of that lender training.

What am I missing? Any other questions, comments? Dan? Or Dan or Harry, do you have any advice on advertising budgets? Or if I need to know how many leads? Or what should my advertising budget look like at CINC?

Dan Lott: All right.Well, that's a great question, Jamie. There are some specific numbers that I have forgotten what they are. And maybe Harry will be able to chime in with them. But in general, you know, the lead value index indicates that like, when we initially ran this, we were stunned by how much money in commissions people get when we factor in the percent of leads that close and all that. So, depending on how many people you have on your team, it's better to spend more on advertising, just because there's a 12 times return. $1 will generate $12 in commission. Harry, what was the number of how many leads a person is, an agent supposed to get?

Harry Kierbow: Per agent? I don't remember specifically. I know, that's something that's on CINC Community. But I don't know if you guys, whoever is on still, you know, saw Alvaro’s webinar the past month. But he did some really interesting analysis of, you know, there are times where someone would cut back on, you know, $500 a month in ad spend. And you know, that’s $6000 In a year, right? Carry the five Yep. Okay. So, they save $6000. But by saving $6000, they missed out on another $80,000 in expected commission or something like that.

So, I mean, my advice would be, in terms of ad spend, definitely diversify it. I hope you knew I would say that at this point. But definitely diversify it. But you know, you should spend what you can what you can handle in terms of lead intake, I think. And, you know, spending more also, everything is on an auction basis. So, spending more also helps you to be more competitive in those auctions.

Jamie Quenzer: Awesome. And if my memory serves me correct, it’s around 50 leads per agent. 40 to 50 leads per agent was the recommendation, which I know is a lot. That is why it's just not the leads CINC, it's the conversion platform in the CRM and the automations. With CINC AI (Alex), and all those things that allow our clients to make money and see an ROI that's healthy for their business.

Harry Kierbow: You get the question, are Google lead sent to our platform sent to another agent as well? Just to make sure, Dan I think covered that earlier, but any.. The campaign budget that you give us is put into your specific campaign. All the links in that campaign drive specifically to your site. So, I mean, you know, we do see, maybe it's possible, you could have someone in a city that signs up on more than one site. But when a lead signs up, they're doing it on your site, from your specific ad spend. We're not taking a lead and sending it to five people or anything like that. That's important. Yeah.

Jamie Quenzer: All right, Dan and Harry, you dropped some knowledge bombs on us. So thank you for diving into Team Listing Ads, Local Service Ads and giving us some perspective on the changing market of search in the years to come with AI and technology. To all of our clients that joined us, I appreciate you spending some time and learning a bit more. Reach out to your account manager if you want to spend some time with a member of Dan and Harry's team. And if you're not currently a CINC client, reach out to cincpro.com/request-a-demo. We'd love to have a further conversation with you. This has been recorded. We'll be sending the recording later this week. Dan, Harry, thank you so much.

Dan and Harry: Thank you. Thanks, all. Thanks for having us.

Jamie Quenzer: Yes. All right. Have a good one.