Many real estate professionals are unsure of how to optimize their pay-per-click campaigns to see quality results. However, it is possible. Here are several PPC strategies and tips that take into account the challenges of marketing when it comes to real estate.
The Real Estate Market
Paid searches for real estate are different from those related to other industries, mostly because real estate is a very localized product. That’s not to say other services are not localized, but when it comes to real estate, the end user must physically live in that city (or be preparing to move to that city). This means your AdWords campaign should only target consumers who live in, or want to live in, your city. Don’t waste time and money on campaigns that target consumers elsewhere.
Things to Remember
Additionally, remember, homeowners, don’t rent. So, if you are designing a campaign to rent apartments or homes, make sure you aren’t targeting area homeowners. Again, it’s a waste of your time and money. So, your challenge here is, how do you prevent current homeowners from being targeted by your ads?
Also, most renters are currently locked into a lease. While renters are the ideal candidate for new home builders or for rental campaigns, the reality is they are tied to lengthy leases. They may be at the end of their lease, or at the beginning, so this makes their eligibility for a PPC campaign hit or miss on any given day.
And remember, not everyone is a candidate for a home or apartment—whether renting or buying.
Finally, your targeted customers should be able to qualify for and afford the homes you are renting or selling them.
Google AdWords can help you narrow down searches and find the ideal candidates you are looking for.
How to Optimize a PPC campaign for Your Real Estate Business
Bidding on your brand terms is important. The discovery process for real estate requires branded terms. Those looking for real estate find possibilities in many ways, like signs on the street, Craigslist ads, friends and family, or ads in the newspaper or Apartment Guide. However, many of these don’t offer them the information they need, so they turn to online searches. They perform a branded search on Google. This means these candidates are likely to find your name and your hottest leads right away.
So make sure to capitalize on these lower funnel searchers.
Use Geo-targeting
When setting up your campaign, under location options, use the recommended setting: “People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations” and “People in, or who show interest in, your excluded locations initially”. You can change these later, but it’s a good place to start.
For city targeting, you’ll want to pick the largest metro area around your targeted location. Generally, people are looking to move to another location within their city or suburb. When you use the larger metro area as your target, you’ll target those people looking to relocate from one suburb to another.
Another thing to remember is that negative keywords are helpful. These are any keywords you want to set in your search criteria that will prevent your ad from showing up. If you have no interest in targeting your ad to people looking for a certain home or property type, then your ad won’t pop up for them.
You’ll also want to prevent other city keyword matches since most city names are not unique (nor are community names). You can set up negative keywords lists which include states and state abbreviations to weed out those erroneous cities in other states.
It can be done. You can optimize a PPC campaign to target just who you want to reach, even in real estate!
