What is your CPL?
January 29, 2009 – 8:43 pmIf you are a marketing professional for the multi-family industry, you may know what your ideal Cost Per Lead (CPL) should be in order for your marketing dollars to be successful.
A monthly CPL is calculated by taking the amount of marketing dollars you are spending per month for a community and dividing it by the total amount of leads sent to that property for the month.
What is your ideal CPL?
A CPL can be calculated in aggregate, (across all advertising sources), and it can also be calculated at the source level (the online or print source).
How well are your advertising sources performing?
Some rental publishing companies count both hard and soft leads as a lead generated by them. What is the difference?
Hard Lead - A hard lead is an email or phone lead specific to a property. This is also called an exclusive lead.
Soft Lead - A soft lead is when a user clicks on a link, views the property online, clicks on a property map, or any other action that is not a direct contact to the property.
As you can imagine, there are many more soft leads than hard leads for a specific property. In fact, you could have lots of soft leads and never have a potential resident actually contact the property.
Soft leads dramatically lower your CPL because each lead is considered to be inflated.
If you are basing your marketing decisions on soft leads and hard leads combined, you may want to recalculate your CPL based on the hard leads alone.
3 Responses to “What is your CPL?”
Not only should marketing pros be calculating their cost per lead, but also be sure to calculate your cost per lease. With Hard and Soft leads there is a variable there that can be difficult to track properly. By calculating a cost per lease it’s easy to compare all your different sources as the data those sources provide for you on leads will vary.
By Mark Juleen on Jan 30, 2009
That is true Mark. A Lead is useless if it doesn’t convert. First step is to answer all phone calls and reply to email virtually immediately.
By Dan Daugherty on Jan 30, 2009
We get a lot of folks asking what they should do with their CPL once they know it. It’s not just a way to rank the cost effectiveness of your advertising, it’s also a way to shift your scarce marketing dollars into a mix that allows you to
1) Figure out how many leads or leases you need at a property or portfolio.
2) Buy the lowest cost leads first, and layer on the more expensive ones as needed.
If you were buying beer for a big party, and had to go to 5 stores to get it all, you’d go to the cheap store first, and the expensive beer boutique last. It’s the same for buying leads. Know your CPL so you can buy the cheap leads first.
We have several case studies on marketing tracking and effectiveness at the upcoming Apartment Internet Marketing Conference aimconf.com in Denver April 29 - May 1, 2009. Hope to see you there.
By Steve Lefkovits on Mar 4, 2009