Reciprocal began working with a real estate brokerage company in September, 2005. The company already had an impressive IT infrastructure which included several websites, lead tracking, and a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The firm's staff, including the owner, is a young, tech savvy group of agents familiar with the tools and capabilities of the Internet.

Despite this "in-house" expertise, the owner of the company was advertising on Craig's List for an employee to direct a search engine optimization campaign. Reciprocal answered the ad by telling him he would never be able to hire anyone who would work based on performance like we would. The owner realized this after a month of interviewing job candidates and he ended up retaining us.

When Reciprocal began, the brokerage already had substantial traffic flow on their web sites. They were generating between 5 and 10 email leads per day. The first thing Reciprocal did was to identify the highest profit margin segment of their market to attract leads from that segment. This turned out to be new condominium sales. After talking with the sales agents, Reciprocal determined that the leads coming in for new condos were low quality. A top agent of the brokerage told us that only one out of 130 leads had converted to a sale. As a result, leads were not being handled quickly and were seen more as a burden than an asset by the agents.

Reciprocal then analyzed the landing page and lead traffic. The site was essentially a listing of condos, and as such, the leads generated were not necessarily buyers. Rather, they were primarily people who wanted information. We then created new landing pages that targeted late stage buyers by featuring the unique capabilities of the agents and the firm to identify the best deals in the market.

We also suggested ways to "lighten" the landing page. The page was "heavy" with unnecessary gif and jpeg image files. This made it slow to download, resulting in people leaving the site. A new Adwords campaign was also developed.

After these improvements and a one month test of the campaign, Reciprocal discontinued the condo campaign due to a lack of leads. The cost of the traffic was high and the lead quality was poor. We determined that real estate shoppers on the web were looking more for information than for brokers with good access to the market.

Reciprocal next set out to test a lower margin segment of the market that had worked for the brokerage in the past but had died off recently. This segment had generated approximately 10 leads per month in the previous year when the owner of the company was focusing on it. We looked at the current campaign and determined that the landing page was confusing and did not accurately describe the benefits to the potential client. When we questioned the owner of the brokerage, he remembered that when leads were flowing well, they had used a different landing page that focused more on the benefits his company provided for customers. We recommended that the owner re-establish this page as the landing page and suggested that links on the page that pointed to articles in the Wall Street Journal be repaired and updated.

The links in question added credibility to the site. Visitors could feel confident that the offer was not "too good to be true." With these improvements, we launched a search campaign that focused on low cost keywords to maximize the ROI and fit within the low revenue parameters of the campaign.

Positive results soon followed. Shortly after launch, the sales manager responsible for lead handling sent this email (unsolicited):

"As a general statement the leads have been getting a lot better. We haven't been getting a ton but most of the one's we get are quality. This is a BIG improvement. Nice work."

Working from this base, we began adding keyword ads to the search campaign and multi- media to the website. The campaign is now profitable for the first time in many months and conversions are being tracked to adjust bid prices on a daily basis to optimize traffic and leads.

This small campaign that started as an afterthought generated 10 to 15 leads per day consistently. The lead flow is so heavy on some days that the sales agent has difficulty handling the flow. The firm is now considering raising prices to a level that would double profits and ROI. They are also invested in a Joomla! Open Source website (suggested by Reciprocal) that will allow the firm to update pages quickly with a "back end" Content Management System.

Reciprocal recommended a strategy for placing banner ads on the Washington Post's Real Estate Section. While banner ads usually have low conversion rates and high conversion costs this strategy was projected to yield excellent results after initial live testing. Because these banner ads are on a highly relevant page, the conversion rates are expected to yield an ROI of over 500% based on tests and projections.

• Pay Per Click Management
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media Optimization
• Web Design
• Video Production
• Competitive Intelligence
• Online Reputation Management

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