Yea, right!!! – If that was your first reaction when you saw the headline for this article, do not worry you are not the first one. In fact when I recommended Hittail as must to have tool for every real estate website, I have received somewhat similar reaction by some one from SEO Web Design:

Erm… still requires money? The features work exactly the same as Google Analytics and Webmasters Tools. However, i think Google is far better because it allows us to set goals to track our landing page conversions, shows the query terms that your website appears in, search terms that get you visitors and much more. It is free and has no limits on the number of visitors. Isn’t it better? I don’t know, it is up to our friends here and i am just sharing. Cheerz

I am not going to argue that Hittail is better that Google analytics. However, it was Hittail and not Google who brought me through their “suggestions” to a point when I can say without slightest exaggeration that with Hittail I am better off by about $1,725 each month.

As they say pictures are worth more than words, so I have taken some snapshots from my Hittail Account to demonstrate to you how much Hittail really helped me. The images below are the snapshots from the “Keywords” tab. If you are using Hittail you can find that info just above the list of keywords under the “Keywords” tab. That info changes from day to day depending on the search hits to your website. As you will see from the snapshots below I am currently tracking 5 websites with Hittail. All of them are listed under the “free account”. All of the websites below, had virtually no natural traffic from the search engines wen I started to use Hittail.

It is true, the figures in the above images are calculated on $0.50 per click basis. It is also true that if you optimize your lading pages well you can maintain $0.10 per click. However there are niches, including real estate, where even well optimized PPC campaigns can cost you a $1 or $2 per click. Sometimes even more. So at the end of the day Hittail’s calculation is not that much off after all.

One very important part that Hittail users may miss is that by using Hittail suggestions it is much easier to maintain those coveted $0.10 per click campaigns. Hittail has helped me not only to increase natural search traffic. It also helped me to keep my PPC nice and clean with hundreds of keywords at $0.10 per click.

Am I saying you should abandon Google Analytics? Absolutely not! Hittail and Google Analytics can work with different data providing different analytics and you can benefit greatly from both.

In my next article I getting down and dirty with showing you how to make use of Hittail Suggestions. So please, stay tuned and subscribe to my blog.

If you are a real estate agent or a webmaster working for on a real estate website, you are probably concerned with the traffic generating strategies. You maybe working hard on optimizing your pay per click campaigns as well as trying to bring visitors through natural search results from across search engines. You know how expensive pay per click campaign can become on Google if your landing pages are not optimized well. But you also may know that the traffic resulting from neutral results in the search engines is the best, not only because it’s free but because internet users seem to trust natural results more. You have probably used countless tools to analyze your traffic and its sources. But if you have not tried Hittail yet, it is probably time to give this service another look.

Hittail, developed by a team at Connors Communications, is a peace of software that analyzes the source of the traffic to your website as well as keywords used by the internet users to find your website. In the process Hittial filters out the keywords and offers your suggestions (keywords or key phrases) that if acted upon can bring your website to the top of the natural search results. You can also use the information provided by Hittail to improve your existing pay per click campaigns.

At this time Hittail offers two different membership levels: Basic and Plus. If you are not sure which plan suits you the best, I would recommend to subscribe to Free Basic plan first. This plan will allow you to track and analyze up to 100,000 visits per month. If you think your website receives more than 100,000 visitors a month or you would like to use other advanced feature available with paid plans, you can always update your account at the later time.

Hittail is probably one of the easiest to use solution out there. All you need to do after registering your website is to place one piece of javscript code on each page of your website or in the common file (preferably footer) of your website if the pages your website generated dynamically but every page uses this common file. This will save you time if you have a website with hundreds of pages. After you install the code your job is done (well almost- stay tuned to learn more) and the rest is done by Hittail.

I will be writing more article in the future to show you have you can use Hittail and other marketing tools such as PRWeb, to maximize your results. So please subscribe to this blog. For now I leave you with the following YouTube presentation by Mike Levin:

Pay per click advertising for real estate website may be the quickest way to bring visitors. It also maybe the quickest way to loose money. Bidding on keywords in real estate can be very competitive and may cost you $20 or more . If you think you are spending way to much money on the pay per click campaigns, this article may just give you some useful tips.

One of the major reason why the prices for particular keywords are so high has nothing to do with the actual “demand” for that keyword. Rather it has to do with website design itself. If we were to look what kind of websites occupying top positions for some of the most desirable keywords in the Google sponsored search results, you may notice that many of those websites are designed in flash. It is hard to imagine that such a website can pass Google’s scrutiny when it comes to the “landing page” quality.

Whenever you start a pay per click campaign, Google releases a bot that checks your page. As part of of that check up Google looks whether or not your lading page contains the keywords on which you are about to bid.

If you are a real estate agent or broker and have outsourced the maintenance of your website to some one, ask them if your website is created in flash or if there is extensive use of java-scripts in your website. If the answer is yes, you probably need to look for some one else to manage your website.

Another obstacle that you as advertiser can face is that in real estate transaction do not take place right on your website. Therefore there is no simple way to calculate your ROI (return on investment). If you have to way to capture your visitors by offering the a sign up for your newsletter.

Well, you might say, I am not sending any newsletters via e-mail. If it is true you maybe giving away leads to some one else. Most Realtors get into a habit of sending out quarterly or monthly newsletters. It is not so difficult these days to turn those newsletters into a format deliverable via e-mail. If you think that is a good idea, then you should incorporate some sort of sign up form on your website, and even place that form on every single landing page that you are driving traffic to via pay per click campaigns.

However managing big e-mail lists can be a task on its own, but that is a subject for another post.

Some times paying a higher price for the keywords is a “necessary evil” and there may not be a way around it. However if you pay the price without attempting to capture your visitors, you indeed maybe spending your money foolishly.