In this article
Where the buyer actually looks
For most Indian property buyers the research runs through three places: the portals (99acres, MagicBricks, Housing), search (“2BHK in Whitefield under 80 lakh”), and Instagram, where project videos and walkthroughs get watched at night. A developer needs to be present in all three, but not equally — the portals bring the enquiries, search brings the serious ones, and Instagram warms them up.
Print, hoardings and the flyover banner still have a place for a launch. They are not measurable, which is the argument for putting the bulk of the budget where the result can be seen.
Search and local SEO for a project
A project page that ranks for its locality and configuration — “3BHK apartments in Sarjapur Road” — brings buyers who already know what they want and where. The page needs the real details a buyer compares: carpet areas, price range, RERA number, possession date, floor plans, and honest photographs. A page that hides the price sends the buyer to the portal to find it, and the portal shows them the competitor next door.
Meta and Google ads, run to a cost per site visit
Meta ads work for real estate because the audience can be chosen by area, age and intent, and because a walkthrough video is the format buyers actually watch. Google search ads catch the buyer at the moment of intent. Both are wasted if the measure is “leads”: a lead in real estate is a phone number, and most of them never visit. Measure cost per site visit, and cost per booking, or the campaign will be optimised for the wrong thing.
That measurement needs a landing page per project, a form that asks two qualifying questions, and call tracking — not a link to the home page.
The follow-up: where the enquiries are lost
Take last month’s enquiries and count how many were called within an hour, how many were called more than once, and how many were invited to a site visit with a specific day. For most developers the honest answers are “some”, “few” and “almost none”. That is the leak, and no amount of advertising fixes it.
A written sequence — the first call within the hour, a WhatsApp with the brochure and a floor plan, a second call two days later with a site-visit slot, a reminder the day before — turns the same enquiries into more visits. A CRM makes it happen when the telecaller is busy; a spreadsheet does not.
Measure it, then decide
Every enquiry should have a source, and every booking should be traceable back to it. With that, the portals, the ads and the search work can be compared on what they actually cost per booking rather than on how many phone numbers they produced. Most developers who do this for a quarter move money from the channel that sounded good to the one that sold flats — and find that fixing the follow-up was worth more than any of them.