If you can rank on the first page, Google can become the gold mine of real estate lead generation. However, as you may have noticed, search engine optimization (SEO) alone cannot guarantee a position above the fold. If you can’t wait forever to start generating organic leads, then at some point you should use Google Ads paid search PPC ads.
Do you want to generate profitable leads through PPC? Talk to Ankita Mankotia
As a white label agency, we have optimized AdWords accounts for many homebuilders and sellers. Experience is accompanied by learning, and learning is accompanied by wisdom. Today we share some of this wisdom with you so you can run a very successful Google advertising campaign and avoid the pitfalls that lead to failure.
Issues in Real Estate PPC Advertising
Like other industries, real estate PPC has its own challenges. Capturing them produces a stable stream of leads that you can grow and turn into buyers. Failure can lead to a loss of confidence in the effectiveness of AdWords, apart from losing many potential customers.
General AdWords Challenges for All PPC Advertisers
Before we get to the challenges specific to real estate PPC, let me remind you that Google Ads is a keyword-driven medium. Your success depends on how precisely you target relevant keywords that your audience is searching.
Relevant Keywords
You can continuously reduce cost and increase leads if you show your ads to people who are really interested in buying, selling or renting property (depending on your business model and goals). You’ll keep losing money and leads if your ad is visible to an audience that is likely to click on your ad, but unlikely to buy or rent a property through your company.
High-Converting Landing Pages
The second most critical challenge for all PPC advertisers is to design high-converting landing pages. Advertising without optimizing the page that the customers will see once they click on the ad is like putting the cart before the horse.
AdWords Account Structure
After you select the keywords, arrange them under coherent AdGroups. Ideally, you should have a dedicated conversion optimized landing page for each advert or Ad Group.
AdWords Challenges for Real Estate PPC
The following issues are specific to real estate PPC and must be addressed before you can execute rewarding lead-generation campaigns.
You Have a Strictly Local Product (but not Audience)
You have an extremely local product, so your campaign must target people who either physically live in that city or want to relocate there.
Homeowners Don’t Rent Apartments
If you’re marketing apartment communities, your advertising should exclude homeowners because they’re highly unlikely to rent apartments.
Renters are Interested but Might be Ineligible
Renters are perfect leads for a home builder, but they might be ineligible to buy a house on any given day because they are usually tied up in 12-month contracts.
Many Candidates Might Have Poor Credit Scores
Finally, people must be able to afford the product. Even if you’ve done everything right, credit checks may disqualify many interested candidates for a new home or apartment.
Luckily, AdWords can target people at the granular level if you “know the ropes”. The following strategies deliver optimum returns on investment for real estate sellers and realtors looking to generate qualified leads using Google Ads PPC advertising.
Strategies for Real Estate PPC
1. Bid on Brand Keywords to Capture Hot Leads
You might think, “Why? My brand isn’t famous enough for people to search for it.” You can’t afford to ignore your company or brand name in your keyword strategy for the following reasons:
The process of understanding property search
Those looking for real estate can come across your brand in a variety of unpredictable ways. They may remember you from Craigslist, for example, or you may remember the sign outside your office or in the real estate you sell. They can get your name from friends and housing guides and search you on Google to find out more about you.
Prospects searching for your brand may turn into high quality leads when you appear at the top of the search results and click to visit the landing page. CPC (CPC) bids for your brand keywords are likely to be minimal, and you’ll get quality leads at a low cost.
Stop competitors stealing your leads
Instead of bidding on a brand search, you can steal your most popular leads by displaying them above your organic list in case a competitor bids. In addition, real estate aggregators can take the top spot and direct searchers to one page to see all of their local competitors.
Pro Tip: Make a high bid on your brand’s keywords to help your business appear at the top of the page when someone searches for your brand.
2. Master Geo-targeting to Eliminate Irrelevant Locations
The geo-targeting feature of Google Ads effectively addresses localization issues and eliminates ad delivery in unrelated locations. Here’s how to get the most out of AdWords geotargeting for real estate PPC advertising:
1. Log in to Google Ads, click Location Options, and select Users or Users to View Destination Locations in the Target column. “. Your ad will now be displayed to users who are in the selected area or have searched for properties in that area.
2nd In the Exclusions column, select Users in your area or Users who are interested. Yes, these are also recommended settings. They are aimed at people who may want to travel within the same city as well as people at your destination. However, we recommend that you revisit geotargeting once your campaign has started and your account has started receiving data.
3 The third most important task is to set up bid adjustments for your location. The idea is to increase your bid as your search gets closer to your target location and lower your bid as your search moves away. You can step through your bids to show your ads to searchers closer to your accommodation location.
As searches move away and lead quality deteriorates (theoretically), you can lower your bids to reduce the number of unexploded clicks.
3. Use Negative Keywords to Prevent Unwanted Exposures
Negative keywords are search phrases for which you don’t want your ad to show up.
For example, if you’re dealing in residential properties and don’t want to target farmhouse buyers, you can list ‘farmhouse’ it as a negative keyword. It will prevent your ad from showing when someone searches for farmhouses in your targeted location.
The second type of keywords a real estate PPC advertiser must list as negative keywords relate to locations.
For example, if you’re selling a property in Dover, NJ and haven’t excluded unwanted locations by listing them as negative keywords, your ad might be eligible to appear for searches for at least 20 different Dovers in 20 different states.
The workaround the non-unique location issue is rather simple.
Make a list of state names and abbreviations and include them as broad-match type negative keywords. This will prevent your ad from triggering when someone searches for a Dover in another state.
Just make sure to exclude the target state from the negative keyword list!
4. Aim for Best Ad Positions for Real Estate PPC
According to Google, Ad Position is the order of your ad in the auction results as compared to other ads. An ad position of “1” means no other ads were ahead of your ad, but it doesn’t mean your ad will necessarily appear on top of the organic search results. It can also be the first ad shown below the search results if no ads are shown on top of the page.
Ad position depends on Ad Rank, a metric that Google uses five factors to determine. These include your bid amount, Quality Score, Ad Rank thresholds, the context of the person’s search, and the estimated impact of the ad extensions and ad formats you’re using.
Ad positions are reported in exact numbers from 1 to 7. However, average ad positions may be reported in decimals. Being on top of the page (Ad position 1) means your ad has a high CTR (Click-through Rate) as well as a high CPC (Cost per Click).
Being in the top position also means that your ads are clicked more often. The CTR difference between advertising positions 1.0-1.4 and 1.8-2.2 can be up to 50%. Increasing traffic by 50% with a very high CPC can be very expensive and may not be profitable at all.
What is the best advertising position for real estate PPC in? According to the survey, the most profitable average ad position is 2.1, 3.5, or 4.6. The exact position may vary from industry to industry, but it probably won’t be the top position. Therefore, if your ad consistently appears at the top of your page, lower your bid until you reach the sweet spot between CTR.
The only exception is the brand name keyword. Because the CPC is likely to be low, you can set a high bid and display it in the “1” position to claim ownership of your brand.
5. Best Keyword Match Type for Real Estate PPC
With Google Ads, you can choose one of four different match types for each targeted keyword.
Partial match is the default match type, and when associated with a particular keyword, your ad will appear each time your search phrase contains that keyword. Your ad will appear regardless of the other keywords in your search terms or the order of those keywords.
For example, if the target phrase is “Buy a condo in New Jersey” and you select a partial match, then “Buy condo furniture in New Jersey”, “Best condo project in New Jersey”, “Buy a house in New Jersey”, etc. Your search may show ads. “.
As you can see, Broad Match provides maximum visibility, but the traffic quality is low. Probably not the best type for potential real estate customers.
In the screenshot above, you can see the ad that the New Jersey search term “buy condo” displays.
Please note that the first and last ads do not include the keyword “condo”. You mention the house, but you probably chose a rough match.
The second, third, and fourth displays correspond to the user’s intent behind the search. It could be an exact match or a phrase match that triggered these ads.
So, which type of keyword match should you select for real estate PPC?
The best keyword match types for quality real estate lead generation are Phrase Match and Exact Match.
Phrase Match triggers your ad when the search terms contain your target phrase in the same order. However, the search terms may include additional keywords before the beginning or after the end of the target phrase.
For example, if your target keyword is buy condo in NJ and you select broad match, your ad may also show up during searches like best project to buy condo in NJ and buy condo in NJ fsbo.
Exact match requires the search term to exactly match the target phrase before the ad can be displayed. However, Google has updated the exact match type to take into account similar variations of the target keyword, such as misspelling, singular or plural, words, abbreviations, and even the same search intent.
Therefore, the exact match is no longer so accurate.
It’s important to stick to exact match and phrase match if you want to generate quality leads at the minimum cost of acquisition. Include the location, property type, and offer in your target key-phrase and lock them in using exact and phrase match.
The same four match types also apply to negative keywords. Use them intelligently to filter out low-quality clicks.
6. Google Ads Extensions for Real Estate PPC
The Google Ads extension is an excerpt of information that makes your ads more relevant and clickable for searchers. There are more than 18 ad display options. The next six are great for real estate PPC advertisers.
Location expansion
The address display option allows you to include your address in your ad. Address display options not only encourage people nearby to contact you, but also help you find a way to your office. Disclosure of your address also conveys an atmosphere of reliability, transparency and reliability.
Sitelink Extension
This extension provides an opportunity (and space) to link your service offerings and additional information that customers may need.
People can click on the extension and go straight to the most relevant page that they want to visit. For example, you can link to floor plans, condos, studio apartments, or single-story homes.
The sitelink extension can have a phenomenal impact on CTR as people can find what they’re looking for and go to that page without wasting time.
Price extension
Price is the first thing many customers want to know. This extension allows real estate advertisers to provide pricing information directly on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and answer their top questions before they are asked.
This extension helps to eliminate poor quality leads while increasing the flow of eligible leads.
With the price expansion, you can include up to eight price cards in your ad. Users can click on the most attractive price to go directly to the property’s page.
Call Extension
Most of the humans now use smartphones to go looking online. The name extension permits them to talk immediately in your salespeople in preference to going in your internet site and taking the longer route.
Callout extension
This extension adds 25 characters to provide important information about your business. Callout extensions can be used to highlight certain strengths, benefits, and features that viewers may find impressive or useful.
Conclusion
Real estate has a lengthy sales cycle. Success depends on a consistent and healthy flow of leads that you can work on and convert to buyers. PPC, of course, is one of the best ways to generate this flow. The only challenge is to prevent irrelevant clicks and attract only qualified leads.
AdWords is a data-driven medium. If you don’t know the science of Google Ads, you might lose more money than you make in the long run. On the other hand, paying attention to details such as those mentioned above can significantly reduce cost and increase the quality of leads.
I hope you found some value in the article and are better prepared to handle real estate PPC. Should you need assistance, I’m glad to help. Click Here to schedule a call with us!
