For a new agent launching a new site, what percentage of the marketing budget would you allocate to ppc (if any)??? input from experts would be appreciated...

I've been doing tons of corporate SEO as well as PPC , social advertising and the like.

Real estate is so local , in my mind it makes PPC worthless because the markets are so limited. For about 1/5th the price of a PPC campaign you should be able to get a good organic SEO campaign rolling and do much better. PPC ads only get about 20% of total clicks, compared to the #1 result which gets around 40%, and #2 which gets around 20%.

[quote=Joel McDonald]I have to take the other side of the fence from Vacationguy.

Although I agree Organic Traffic is FANTASTIC if it converts, it's entirely possible to work for months or years to get decent rankings for a phrase - only to find out it doesn't convert well (if at all).

The advantage of Adwords is that you can test to make sure your phrase converts visitors into leads/sales BEFORE wasting any time optimizing for a phrase that might not convert as well as you think. [/quote]

Agree. Adwords is a great avenue to narrow down your keywords and optimize from there. Adwords gives you great info beyond just paid clicks, like how many times it is being seen as well. So you can then compare the two together to help strategize a plan.