One of the easiest and most effective ways to generate new leads is with pay per click (PPC) advertising. The National Association of Realtors® (NAR) found that the first step most buyers take in their house hunting process is searching online. In fact, using the Internet to search for homes has increased among all generations this year. So if you’re going to invest your time and money to generate leads, you should certainly be considering PPC campaigns. Below are the top five tips that will help you generate real estate leads using PPC campaigns:
1. What is Pay Per Click?
In order to see how PPC can generate leads, you need to understand how it works. Pay per click is all about bidding on advertisement space. The ads pertain to specific AdWords with Google, such as “real estate in [city]” or “beach house foreclosures.” You choose the terms you want to bid on, and if you are the highest bidder, your ad will appear whenever someone searches that specific term. Now, the good thing is that you won’t pay unless your AdWords campaign is clicked on. In other words, if you don’t receive any traffic from your ads, you don’t pay.
2. Place Ahead of Your Competitors’ Ads
Within the real estate industry, you are always going to have competitors. However, there will always be new opportunities and options that can separate you from your direct competition. Google AdWords is one of those ways. If your competitors’ ads have a high ranking, find out what they’re doing and investigate; then, revamp and revise for your own campaign in order to perform at a higher level.
- Use a website like spyfu.com to find the keywords your competitors are targeting
- Analyze the keywords that are generating more clicks (real estate leads to determine what keywords you would want to include in your campaign(s)
- You can also analyze their ads, allowing you to determine what you might want your ad to say in order to grab your target audience’s attention
3. Selecting Negative Keywords
When running a Google Adwords campaign, you will want to ensure that the money you are putting into it is not being spent on keywords that are not beneficial to your business. Although you are selecting the keywords you want to target, if they are set to a broad match or phrase match, it’s likely you will see many unwanted keywords eating up your ad budget. For example, you might be targeting the keyword “homes for sale in Los Angeles” but you are spending money on “warehouse for sale in Los Angeles.”
To avoid this, you will want to input negative keywords in your campaign. Negative keywords can be placed on either a campaign or an ad group level. It is easier to input negative keywords on a campaign level as it will target all the ad groups within it.
By constantly updating your negative keyword list, you ensure your campaign is fine tuned to specifically what you’re looking for and not wasting your ad budget.
4. Optimize for Mobile Platforms
With all the recent improvements in mobile technology, people can do everything from their phone. More importantly, people want to be able to do everything on their phone, so without mobile optimization, you could be missing out on valuable consumer discovery. As a result, leads will go to your direct competitors who have already optimized their website and Google Ads for mobile platforms. Stay ahead, and generate leads using PPC campaigns that are mobile-friendly too. For example, be sure to enable the click-to-call feature available in mobile browsers. Check, too, that your landing page or website is clear and simple for users on all platforms to find information or reach out to you.
5. Choose Wisely
One of the most important things to decide before implementing Google AdWords into your real estate marketing is whether you want clicks on your website or whether you want calls. There are many different choices available on PPC campaigns that are formatted to encourage the outcome you desire, so once you’ve thought out your true goals, you can tailor your campaign to meet them.
These Google AdWords tricks will help you generate leads using PPC. However, it’s imperative for you to continue to monitor your progress and readjust your PPC campaigns as needed.
