In the field of online marketing, there is one major misunderstanding that comes up again and again, and that’s the importance of website traffic.  Exactly how important is web traffic anyway?  On a scale of 1 – 10 traffic is a 7.  Design, colors, and fonts are a 3.  Content is a 5.  Lead capture is a 10.

Traffic, design, and content are all important, but only to the degree that you can capture leads.   Efficiency of online lead capture is much more important than all the others.  You can have lots of traffic and yet no benefit if your website leaks like a sieve.   On the other hand, you can have very limited website traffic and generate lots of business if you have efficient lead capture.

You can have the very best looking website in the world, but without efficient lead capture, never generate any business from your site.  You can have world-class content and be a virtual “Wikipedia” of real estate information, but without efficient lead capture never realize any benefit from your website.

On the other hand, you can have a very poor website, with very little content, and very little traffic, and generate online business simply because you have efficient lead capture.  It may not be fair, but it’s real.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is absolute fact.  It’s just the nature of online marketing.

Lead capture doesn’t happen automatically.   Many agents and even some well-known trainers continue to propagate the myth that if you can just provide good enough content for customers to hang around on your website, that over time they will eventually feel indebted to you and proactively contact you as their benevolent content provider.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.  Customers don’t feel any loyalty to a website, but rather they feel loyalty to a person with whom they have developed a relationship.  The only way to begin that relationship is if you are able to capture their contact information and then speak to them directly.  And without efficient lead capture, you will never have the opportunity to speak to them directly. Let me explain it this way.

Think of two different baseball players and their batting averages.   Player one get to bat 100 times and manages to get 25 hits.  His batting average is 250.  Player two only gets to bat 10 times but gets 4 hits.  Batting average 400.  Which is the better batter?  Clearly player two is better.  Now imagine what would happen if he got to bat 100 times?  He’d have 40 hits as opposed to the 25 hits of player 1.

Websites are much the same.  You could have a typical real estate website that captures 1-2% of your site visitors and generate 1-2 leads for every 100 visitors to your site.  On the other hand you could have the same website only install a lead capture module and see 25-30 leads from the very same level of traffic.  “Why does that matter?” you ask.  Because traffic costs money.

Some agents hire companies to do search engine optimization or SEO.  Some use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.  Some spend hours and hours linking their sites to high traffic websites, online directories, and classified listing websites.  However you slice it, that costs money.  Either cash up front like SEO, cash as you go as in PPC, or a commitment of your time which has a monetary value.

The more efficient your lead capture, the lower the cost of each lead produced.  For example, if your website traffic costs you an average of $1 per visitor, and you capture 2% of that traffic, then your cost per lead is $50.  Here’s the math:  100 visitors X $1 per visitor = $100.  Now divide your $100 cost by 2 leads and your cost per lead is $50.

Now compare a website with LCM technology.  Let’s assume the same cost for traffic of $1 per visitor.  Given the same 100 visitors or $100, you capture 25% or 25 leads.   Here’s the math:  100 visitors X $1 per visitor = $100.  Now divide your $100 cost by 25 leads and your cost per lead is $4.

In other words, by using efficient lead capture you can spend the same marketing budget as your competitor and generate over 12 times as much business!  Would that give you a competitive advantage?  Of course it would.  That’s why efficient lead capture is the most important aspect of online marketing.

Good lead capture can overcome many other weaknesses of your online marketing.  It can overcome poor website design.  It can overcome low website traffic.  It can even overcome a low marketing budget, giving you the ability to market for a fraction of the cost of other competing agents.  And that means thriving while your peers are struggling.

Isn’t it amazing that something as seemingly unimportant as lead capture efficiency could make such a huge difference?  But it does.  Now imagine what your online business could be like if you had great content, a great website design, great traffic, and efficient lead capture.  And with 94% of today’s real estate customers starting online, you can see why having very efficient online lead capture is the single most important thing you can do, marketing-wise.  Nothing else comes close.

So how efficient is your website at capturing visitors?  Don’t know?  It’s easy to check.  See how many unique visitors you had to your website last month.  Then make a simple calculation:  Divide your total number of leads from your website by the total number of unique visitors for the same period of time, and you have your efficiency or CR (capture rate).  If it is under 10% you are losing a lot of money.

To learn about our company’s LCM solution, check out this website.  Obviously, I would prefer you chose us, but whether you choose us or a competitor, improving the efficiency of your website is the single most important thing you can do to generate more business in what is clearly a very tough time in the real estate business.

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Matt Jones is the founder and CEO of FavoriteAgent.com, nationally syndicated columnist, broker, and best selling author of LCM: The Secret to Success in the New Age of Real Estate, The Ultimate Listing Presentation, Traffic: How to Sell Fast and Net More, Becoming a Mega-Producer, The Science of Online Marketing, 10 Steps to Real Estate Success, 20 Questions: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Real Estate but Were Afraid to Ask, The Virtual Office Model, Max-Bang!, and The NEW Ultimate Listing Presentation. Jones' North Carolina-based company has been profiled by major media outlets as an innovator and a pioneer in the industry, and CNN's Pulse on America claimed FavoriteAgent.com is "changing the way real estate is being done in America." This article is cross-posted in the following locations: BlogMattBlog.com, RealBlogging.com, NewsGeni.us, TheCommissionCheck.com, RevampedAgent.com, and now Amazon Kindle.