Skyrocketing housing prices in California are prompting nearly a quarter of residents to seriously consider moving to areas with more affordable housing.

California had nation's third fastest rate of home price appreciation last year, behind Nevada and Hawaii.

Prices climbed more than 18 percent compared to previous year, 84% in past five years and a whopping 338 percent since 1980.

Less than one in five... 19%... of state's households can afford median priced single-family detached home, which was $465,540 in September.

Guess what? Lots of these Californians are selling their homes for big dollars and moving to other states where they can buy a similar home for a fraction of price.

Arizona and Nevada are prime target areas.

In those states number of sales of homes to San Francisco Bay Area residents has risen by as much as (gulp!) 6,000% percent. That huge demand forces prices up!

Here in Phoenix area we are smack dab in middle of a home buying frenzy. In last three months we have put four of our rental homes on market. Each of them sold in ONE DAY! Offers above asking price are common.

If you are unable to associate leads and sales with specific marketing efforts that generate them you have no way of knowing what is working as an effective marketing mechanism and what is not.

The money you invest in marketing your company is precious. In order for you to maximize your marketing dollars you need to know results individual marketing efforts generate. When you know results of your marketing tactics you can make intelligent decisions about how to better allocate your marketing budget.

For instance, if you concurrently run a direct mail campaign, a search engine advertising campaign and weekly ads in industry periodicals without some method to discern results you will not know which effort generates lions share of any new business.

If you don’t know that your direct mail campaign yielded 90% of your revenue with a 2% response rate, you are powerless to make wise decision to reinvest in direct mail campaign and make changes to or drop entirely other campaigns. What’s more, if you can figure out how to double response rate of your mail campaign, you can nearly double revenue your marketing campaign without spending money on search engine marketing and periodical advertisements.

Measuring your marketing results will help you save money by allowing you to eliminate unproductive marketing tactics and at same time, will help you make more money by allowing you to reinvest in productive marketing tactics.

Do you have a method for measuring effect of your marketing?

Here are four tips for gathering information you need to make wise marketing investment decisions.