Whether your goal is to find motivated real estate seller leads or buyers, using Pay-Per-Click or PPC advertising can give you great results. However, it won't always be easy and cheap.
To start a real estate Pay-Per-Click or campaign as an agent, you must create a Google Adwords account, identify your target audience, determine relevant keywords and bid, create a killer copy and landing page, and track critical metrics and adjustments.
Real estate PPC can ultimately increase your opportunity pipeline. But you must be willing to do the work because it requires knowledge of digital marketing. If you do not know where to begin, this blog is a great starting point!
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. It is a type of internet marketing model where you only get charged when someone clicks your Google ads campaign for your business. In other words, you are buying site visits instead of organically waiting for them through SEO in this paid search scheme.
PPC is a very cost-effective way of advertising online. It allows real estate agents to capture actively searching leads which translate to a higher conversion rate.
You will find PPC ads at the banner, top, or bottom of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), specifically on the first page.
They always appear when someone searches online using a search engine. And although real estate agents typically advertise on Google, you can also run PPC search ads on Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, and Yelp, among others.
GoogleAds is where Google runs its PPC campaigns. It used to be called Google AdWords up until 2018.
Basically, when someone performs a Google search related to your service on a search engine, your PPC campaign ad will enter an auction system in GoogleAds. Google will weed out irrelevant ads and if the PPC of your business passes, the ranking process will continue through AdRanks.
The bid winners (the PPC campaign that will appear on SERP) are identified through two main elements— quality score and max bid.
Quality score covers your website's landing page experience, click-through rate, and user search. Meanwhile, the max bid is the maximum amount that you are willing to pay for every PPC lead.
We'll discuss more about quality score and max bid in detail in a separate section, so be sure to check that out.
While it can be expensive, PPC advertising also results in better ROI. Here are the specific reasons why using a PPC campaign in real estate is highly suggested by many experts:
PPC lead generation is an effective way to drive potential clients to your website. We all know how competitive the real estate market is these days. But through real estate PPC, you have the chance to target homeowners at the exact moment they are looking to sell.
PPC real estate marketing brings you into the limelight, which leads to more website traffic, and, eventually, clicks and leads.
You'll get more website visitors who are really interested in selling their homes and also insights on what search terms people are using so you can tailor the PPC ads for your business according to their needs.
If you succeed in using PPC online advertising, lead capture will be very much easier for your business.
Using SEO or search engine optimization to get organic website traffic can be very difficult since there's very stiff competition in the current real estate industry. Google search analytics is becoming more and more complicated to navigate through, making the process even harder.
If you use the PPC strategy for your business, you don't have to use all your time doing SEO keyword research to create highly compelling articles that drive traffic.
The Google ads for your business will appear right above the organic search engine results, which can improve website traffic and awareness regarding your services and location.
Another great thing about real estate PPC is that it has location-targeting abilities. You'll be able to focus on finding more leads in the local market since your Google ads can appear in the geographic locations you prefer.
Moreover, the geo-targeting of PPCs on search engines can also help you leverage customer location data, align your business website's content to the user intent, and optimize your budget for better results.
As mentioned earlier, the publisher would only charge you for Google ads that got clicked if you use the PPC advertising strategy for your services.
This means you can set an ad budget and conveniently bid according to how much you are willing to spend. Regardless of your budget, you would be able to drive traffic to your website and gain leads for your services.
Unlike other means of lead generation, you can measure and track PPC ads for any industry, including real estate.
For example, using a combination of Google Ads tools and Google Analytics, you may track the clicks, impressions, conversions, and overall performance of your ads. It will also show you the correlation between how much you are spending to the kind of traffic you are getting.
All these data can be used to update your Google ads, adjust your PPC strategy, or revamp your web design to maintain a good website.
If you have the budget, you may want to consider the help of a PPC professional for better results. But if you want to explore PPC real estate marketing on your own, here are the steps you should follow.
The very first step to kick off your PPC real estate marketing campaign is to set up your Google Ads account. As mentioned earlier, this is where Google runs its PPC campaigns. Setting up your account is free and super simple.
The next crucial step is to choose your target audience according to demographics, desires, pain points, and the words they use for searching.
In this part, you have to input details about your ideal lead persona for your services. Once you have identified your target, finding keywords and setting price points will be much easier.
In digital marketing, a keyword is a word or phrase that users input to perform a search. This is the core of PPC advertising, as this determines where the Google ads you created will appear.
To come up with relevant keywords that will lead to your services, keyword research about your industry is necessary.
You may want to write down every keyword your ideal seller persona would probably use. From that list, choose a few to focus on. For example: home value, how to sell a house, how to stage a home for sale, etc.
You can use several tools, such as Ahrefs and Keywords Everywhere, to identify high search volume keywords.
After you've chosen your keywords, you need to place a bid in an auction so you can secure the placement of your ad at the top of a SERP. Bid on keywords that are highly relevant to your services.
Aside from keywords, your ad copy also sets you up for success in PPC advertising. Make sure that you write it in consideration of your ideal seller persona. Use tone and language that would appeal to them.
In terms of structure, a great PPC ad copy should include a short but attention-grabbing headline, a short display URL that includes your name or the service you are offering, a description of who you are and how you can help homeowners sell their home, and a powerful call to action (CTA).
After creating your ad copy, work on your web design. Ensure that your landing pages contain keywords that are relevant to the service you are offering.
Unfortunately, you cannot expect overnight success when you run PPC campaigns. But you can track campaign performance and make adjustments to see results.
For instance, track your ad's click-through rates, conversion rate, profit margin, etc. Depending on the results, you may want to write a new ad copy, change your CTA, include ad extensions, and more.
There's no simple answer as to how much real estate PPC advertising costs. We can only get a close approximation after we answer the questions below:
CPC, or cost per click, is the amount you pay for every click on your ad. Typically, PPC real estate marketing costs around $0.50 to $4, a bit lower than the average CPC for other industries, which is around $1 to $7.
The cost of CPC varies because of several factors, including:
The PPC conversion rate is the number of visitors that register on your real estate website by clicking your PPC ad. This includes account creation, contact form submission, and inquiries.
If done right, the PPC real estate marketing conversion rate for your real estate business can range from 3% to 20%.
Many on-site and external factors affect the PPC real estate marketing conversion rate, including:
Cost per lead can be estimated by dividing your cost per click by your conversion rate. You won't be able to identify the cost per lead without running the campaign first. Also, the current situation of the real estate industry will also impact this cost.
To illustrate, in luxury real estate markets or markets that are highly saturated, you can expect to pay $20 to $50 per lead. Some of these markets are Washington, California, Michigan, Arizona, and Colorado.
Meanwhile, in small-to-mid-sized markets, the cost per lead can range from $5 to $30. These markets include Hawaii, Georgia, Alabama, and British Columbia.
Given the figures we shared above, you can estimate your monthly PPC real estate marketing budget. Google won't exceed this number, so you don't have anything to worry about.
To calculate, identify the number of new leads you want to generate in a day and multiply it by the cost per lead. Multiply the result by 30.4 days.
For example:
3 leads per day × 30 per lead × 30.4 days = $2,736
If you sought the help of PPC professionals or real estate PPC companies, you should also include their management fees on your PPC real estate marketing budget.The cost of your real estate website, where you drive leads from PPC, should be considered as well.
Even if you are a tech-savvy real estate agent or you are running a really successful real estate business, you should still consider hiring a real estate PPC professional because advertising money is involved in the process.
Also, you would find it hard to juggle working on your ads and actually closing on deals.
Hiring a PPC professional would make everything convenient for you since you don't have to read every real estate PPC guide. You can bank on their expertise, especially on PPC trends that you otherwise won't notice.
Yes. You should also run your PPC on Bing even though it is not the Goliath of search engines. Bing has around 5 billion searches monthly and the PPC ads run on this platform also show up on Yahoo and AOL SERPs.
The fact that many real estate agents and realtors overlook Bing is a great advantage. You'll be able to tap on a large number of leads that aren't using Google.
Closing a sale from a PPC real estate marketing lead may take 3 to 18 months, depending on whether the lead is just beginning to look for buyers, whether the phone numbers given were correct, the real estate agent follow-up process, the monthly investment for PPCs, etc.
You should think of PPC real estate marketing as a long-term investment for your real estate business because you won't immediately see results. As you establish the proper workflow and follow-up for your business PPC, that's when you'll see an increase in your closing rate.
Starting a real estate PPC campaign can be daunting if you do not know where to start. You must be tech-savvy and an expert in digital marketing for you to see consistent results in your campaigns. Moreover, you should also be prepared financially because it can get expensive.
If running real estate Pay-Per-Click campaigns is not something you have the patience to do, a great alternative would be to buy leads from us at Property Leads!
All our seller leads are generated through SEO, so they are highly motivated. Also, you don't have to pay any setup fees or sign-up costs with us. You only pay for the leads you get!
Fill out our form below to start finding motivated seller leads near you!
30 N Gould St Ste N
Sheridan, WY 82801
(207) 309-3949
sales@propertyleads.com
