At RealtyAds, we empower brokers, owners, and marketing teams in commercial real estate (CRE) to transact by amplifying their engagement with tenant reps, decision-makers, and key influencers. Yet, we occasionally hear objections from marketing teams that RealtyAds metrics – like Hyper Targeted Views or percentage of brokers reached – don’t match the traditional digital advertising metrics they know, such as impressions, click-through rates (CTR), and cost-per-click (CPC). This friction isn’t a flaw, it’s a signal. CRE is changing its focus because traditional metrics, built for mass-market consumer campaigns, fail to reflect the niche, relationship-driven nature of this industry.
With transactions averaging months, not minutes, and involving multiple stakeholders, not individuals, chasing clicks or impressions misleads more than it informs. It’s time for a smarter approach, one that’s enabled exclusively through RelatyAds’ AI – Native solutions.
Impressions: High Impression Counts Are A Red Flag
Impressions – the number of times an ad is displayed – are a staple in paid digital advertising. They’re cheap to rack up when using broad targeting capabilities, making low cost-per-impression campaigns seem like a bargain. Agencies and alternative channels often tout: “Reach thousands of people for little money!” But in CRE, it’s a mirage. You may be reaching thousands of people, but CRE does not cater to thousands of people to transact. For instance, of 3,000 people passing through an office building, maybe 30 are decision-makers. Chasing lower costs per impression by targeting everyone wastes valuable leasing budgets on the 98% who don’t matter.
RealtyAds’ Reporting: RealtyAds’ AI focuses on reaching the right people online, even if it raises the cost per impression. Our AI-native precision ensures your message hits decision-makers, not just eyeballs. With leasing and marketing budgets under scrutiny in today’s shifting economy, every dollar must count – wasting it on irrelevant impressions isn’t an option. So instead of using metrics like impressions to demonstrate value, marketing should consider using metrics like percentage of target audience engaging to demonstrate value.
Views: Time To Prioritize Audience Quality
Views have traditionally been a big deal in CRE, with legacy listing services boasting claims such as, “In the last 30 days, 46,000 people have seen your property 205,802 times.” But the critical question is: from whom? Boosting views by targeting a broad, low-quality audience is easy – and it’s a tactic many use to slash cost per view. High-view counts might feel like a success, but they often reflect a shotgun approach that misses the mark.
RealtyAds’ Reporting: RealtyAds’ AI corrects this with Hyper-Targeted Views, leveraging proprietary data updated daily to reach a high-quality audience of decision-makers and brokers who engage, not thousands of meaningless views that won’t influence a transaction. So instead of tracking views, RealtyAds’ AI measures success by tracking and reporting broker and decision-maker engagement in real time.
Cost Per Mille (CPM): Cheaper Is Not Always Better
Cost per mille (CPM) equals the cost for 1,000 impressions. CPM as a success metric shines in business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, where broad visibility works. Think selling shoes. However, in CRE, where the audience is a niche group of brokers and decision-makers, CPM falls flat. Chasing thousands of impressions to lower CPM wastes budgets on irrelevant viewers. A low CPM from 20,000 impressions might look efficient, but if only 1% is qualified, this level of reach is waste, not value.
RealtyAds’ Reporting: Given the niche clientele of commercial real estate, RealtyAds prioritizes its focus from CPM to more concrete metrics like percentage of audience reached or specific prospect engagement. In short, we believe bidding aggressively to reach 80% of 50 known decision-makers will impact the bottom line far more than bidding less aggressively to reach 5,000 non-decision makers. So, while the RealtyAds’ approach may increase CPM, it’s done to perfect the audience quality and drive outsized returns in the transaction process.
Cost Per Click (CPC): Influencing Decisions By Committee
Cost per click (CPC) is a business-to-consumer (B2C) super metric. However, in CRE, where brokers represent tenants more than 95% of the time, the importance of CPC loses its edge. After clicking, tenants are dramatically more likely to call their broker, not fill out a form. So high high-quality decision-making interest is rarely captured via a form fill. Plus, CRE decisions typically involve committees of five or more; one click might reach 20% of the group, still leaving 80% of decision-makers untouched.
RealtyAds’ Reporting: RealtyAds’ AI measures engagement from decision-makers that sparks real-world boardroom conversations, not just clicks. Instead of prioritizing a click from a person who may or may not be a single component of a decision-making committee, prioritizes reaching the entire decision-making committee even if it comes at the expense of generating more clicks. This concept is why many marketers are now using RealtyAds’ Tenant Reach Report to outline a committee of decision-maker engagement over the life of a transaction versus a one-time click.
Form Fills: Giving Sales A Gift Or A Problem
Total form fills are often used as a metric to track marketing ROI in B2C efforts and B2B efforts where there is no representation (such as a tenant advisor). In CRE, prioritizing form fills often delivers low-quality leads—unqualified users clogging pipelines. A low quality lead is not a gift to a leasing team, it’s a problem as leasing brokers waste time chasing bad prospects instead of nurturing top prospects. Since 84% of transactions die even after a prospect tours, more needs to be done to nurture prospects.
RealtyAds’ Reporting: RealtyAds’ AI prioritizes engaging the highest-quality audience, creating educated prospects versus inflated form fill counts. What’s more, when engagement is emphasized over a form fill clients have the opportunity to better engage prospects through the full transaction process.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): An Either Or Game
CTR is defined as how many targets click on your ad divided by how many times the ad is shown. The secret most firms won’t tell you: you can prioritize either clicks or audience quality in digital advertising, not both. So optimizing for clicks will target your ad to click-prone users versus the right users. RealtyAds’ data from 10,000+ ad campaigns shows a high CTR from 500 irrelevant people is a loss; reaching 50 decision-makers who don’t click but engage with your content is much more likely to influence transactions.
RealtyAds’ Reporting: RealtyAds’ AI prioritizes audience quality over CTR, ensuring ads hit the right people versus social media users prone to clicking on ads. Instead of monitoring click-through rates, measure how top prospects are engaging your digital strategy and by deal stage. This will give both marketing and leasing far better information on how to negotiate and nurture a prospect than a click-through rate ever will, plus allow for deal insights such as RealtyAds’ Heightened Engagement Alerts.
The RealtyAds Difference
Traditional marketing metrics were built for a different game—a business-to-consumer model that CRE isn’t playing. These metrics demonstrably misalign with CRE’s long sales cycles and relationship-driven outcomes.
RealtyAds’ AI now allows clients to leverage previously unavailable metrics to deliver true leasing success, not vanity stats. In the highly competitive world of commercial real estate, these improved metrics provide leasing and marketing teams with real-time insights that translate to 18% more closed deals.
Contact RealtyAds today to level up the metrics you can report and improve deal outcomes in the process.