How you can Create PPC Campaigns for Actual Property Advertising
Even if you have a smaller real estate business, you don't have to rely on third-party databases to get traffic to your listings through real estate marketing.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) allows you to bring people straight to your real estate website, where you own the medium and have control over how you present yourself. This means that you can showcase your entire portfolio without your viewers being distracted from others' entries, instead of your entry appearing in a sea of competitors – and possibly getting lost.
PPC campaigns are usually not difficult to set up. With a few changes, you can reach your target audience more efficiently and bring motivated buyers to your website.
PPC real estate marketing trends
With six million homes sold in the US in a year, it's no wonder that the competition between real estate agents is fierce.
As you'd expect in such a competitive marketplace, real estate marketing plays a huge role, and the tactics companies employ are constantly evolving.
Today we see many brokers using trends like virtual staging, drone photography, inbound marketing, and lead verification automation. New trends come and go, the need for a good website never changes – nor does the need to drive traffic to your website.
This is where pay-per-click (PPC) comes in.
One of the difficulties in driving traffic to your website is the competition from huge online real estate databases like Zillow (236 million monthly users) and Realtor.com. Let's take a look at a search query for "Homes for Sale in Naperville IL".
As you can see, these big websites dominate the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Organic ranking isn't the only way to get to the top of the SERPs, however, and PPC may grant you a path to the top of the lists. A successful PPC campaign can cause your website to appear at the top of the page for the keywords you choose and potentially generate a lot of traffic.
You pay a small fee for each click. However, if you make good use of the latest trends in property marketing, you can get a solid ROI. PPC allows you to bring traffic to a medium that you control, which puts you in control of your marketing.
Choosing Keyword Phrases For Your Real Estate Marketing PPC
With PPC, your website can appear at the top of the SERPs for virtually any keyword. However, your real estate marketing will not benefit from an irrelevant search term. This means finding the keywords that are right for you and involving people who convert to leads.
Start by understanding your target audience.
- What is your customer profile like?
- What information are your potential customers looking for?
- How do you look for this information?
Think about your target audience and write down a list of all the ways they can search for your business.
Also, in order for PPC to work for you, you need to make sure that your landing pages reflect the keywords that you are advertising. When someone clicks on your ad, they need to state why they clicked in the first place on the page they land on. Take a look at your current pages and list all the keywords that reflect the content of your website.
Once you've created a list of keywords, it's time to narrow it down so that the keywords you're bidding on are relevant to both your audience and the pages they land on.
Part of being successful is understanding where someone is in the buying cycle. For example, someone searching on the keyword "Best Chicago Suburbs" might be at the beginning of the cycle, where buyer intent is much lower than later. Later in the cycle, they may search for "Buy Houses Naperville IL," which means they could become a lead quickly. This distinction is intended to help you understand the value of each keyword and to focus your property marketing PPC on increasing ROI.
After you've narrowed down your list, head over to Ubersuggest to see the cost per click and the level of competition for each keyword.
Optimize your site for PPC campaigns that use local keyword phrases
In all of our previous examples we have used what is known as a "location modifier". For example, the terms "Naperville" and "IL" in "Buy Homes Naperville IL" allow us to target a specific area. Nothing will stop you from promoting "buy houses" and you will likely get a lot of traffic – but there is no point if you are selling houses in Naperville and the user is looking to buy one in Ft. Lauderdale.
Local keyword phrases are crucial for real estate agents as they are selling a product with a fixed location. Because location is one of the driving forces behind home purchases, many people use these modifiers in their searches.
When using local keyword phrases, your landing pages need to match the search intent. If your ad says “Homes for Sale in Naperville” then that promise must be kept. Lots of people go back to Google when they see homes for rent or homes outside of Naperville.
Set the maximum CPC budget for your PPC campaign
When you set up your real estate marketing campaign, you will be asked to set a budget and set the maximum amount you would like to pay per click for a given keyword (max CPC). Remember, you are not tied to anything – you can always adjust and tweak this for the best results.
To get an idea of your budget, set the goals you want to achieve with your PPC campaign. To take a simplified example, to make $ 5,000 per month from your advertising and the average value of your homes is $ 100,000 with a 1% commission, you need to sell five homes per month through your PPC.
The average cost per click for real estate-related keywords is $ 2.37 with a conversion rate of 2.47%. To sell your five houses, you might need a little over 200 clicks at the price of $ 494. While your numbers may differ from the industry average, you can always adjust your budget based on your average conversion rate and cost per click.
Also, remember that it's not just about the price you pay per click, the quality of your advertising is also a factor. Google wants to send users to high quality results. If your ad achieves this, it is more likely to be preferred by the search engine's algorithm.
Another way to maximize your budget is to increase your click-through rate (CTR). The average click-through rate for real estate ads is 3.71%. However, if you produce a great ad copy, you might get even better results. Keep in mind, however, that these are industry averages and your experience may vary. An ad budget of hundreds (or even thousands) doesn't guarantee a sale, but PPC is worth a try for most markets.
Decide which ad platform is suitable for your real estate marketing
When we think of search engines, of course we are drawn to Google because it is the largest with 3.5 billion searches a day. However, there are many different search engines and many other ad platforms.
The ad platform you use should be determined by your business goals and audience. For example, if you're selling sleek condos to millennials, your advertising will look very different than if you're targeting seniors looking for a second home.
This differentiator can help support your real estate marketing campaigns by choosing the right platform.
Social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest are important sources for real estate marketing and offer excellent PPC options. 99% of Millennials and 90% of Baby Boomers start their property search online. With billions of people on social media, this could be a perfect way to reach them.
The great thing about PPC on social media is that it is highly visual media. While you might be limited to text with Google Ads, social media lets you add videos, images, and other effects. These tools can help make your advertising stand out from the crowd. However, you need to choose the platform and message that resonates with your audience.
57% of Americans ages 25-30 are on Instagram, compared to 23% of 50-64 year olds. On Facebook, however, the numbers look very different, with 68% of 50 to 64 year olds having accounts. This data shows that people look for information differently, and your advertising needs to reflect that. Maybe Google is the best way to reach your audience, or you might discover an alternative like Instagram that gives you the most useful real estate marketing campaign.
Here you can see how different an advertised post on Instagram can look like from the conventional ads on Google. These different formats allow you to target specific demographic audiences and potentially maximize the effectiveness of your property marketing.
Regardless of what platform you use, you need to make sure your message fits the medium and you are giving people the experience they are looking for. You can diversify your marketing with different advertising platforms. However, you need to focus on the techniques that are best for each campaign.
Decide which ad format is best for real estate marketing
As you set up your ads, you will find that you have many format options. The options vary depending on the platform used. However, the following options are available for Google:
- Search ads: These are the "traditional" ads at the top of a SERP. These are particularly useful for real estate marketing as they allow you to reach a target audience at the precise moment they are looking for your product.
- Shopping ads: Shopping ads are product-oriented ads that can also put you at the top of a SERP. However, shopping lists are more commonly used for very specific searches like “buy barbie dolls” where many retailers sell the same products.
- Show advertisements: Display ads allow your listing to appear on other people's websites. While this can be an inexpensive way to reach a large audience, it is more difficult to gauge where these people are in the buyer cycle because they haven't done a specific search.
- Video ads: Video ads play between videos on YouTube and are a great way to add a more interactive aspect to your advertising. Many people use YouTube as a search engine. This is another great way to reach motivated buyers.
- Gmail ads: These ads appear at the top of someone else's Gmail inbox and allow you to reach a target audience. The difficulty with real estate marketing Gmail ads is determining buyer intent. You may be targeting someone interested in real estate. However, this does not guarantee that he will want to buy a home.
The key to these different types of ads is finding the ones that best suit your business goals. For many real estate companies, these are likely search ads.
This is because this method is the best way to understand the intent of the viewfinder. Someone made a specific query to Google: "Find houses in Naperville". This will give you a better understanding of what they are looking for and better assess where they are in the buying cycle.
You can use options like display ads to reach a target audience, such as: B. People visiting a home improvement website. However, you have no control over search intent. Since you're selling something very specific that is location focused, search ads are a great place to start.
Conclusion
Pay per click advertising is an essential tool for your real estate marketing. If you want to take back clicks from online real estate databases like Zillow, you need to find alternative ways to get traffic to your website.
PPC is a great way to do this, and it could bring in large numbers of targeted, highly engaged visitors to your website with strong buyer intent. From there, you are in control of the medium and do not have to rely on a third party to control your interactions with customers.
If you're investing in real estate marketing trends like virtual staging and drone photography and want to maximize their effectiveness, you can do so by presenting them to a targeted, engaged audience. With good PPC, you can do just that because it can significantly increase your lead generation and potentially sell more homes.
If you need help with your PPC campaigns, reach out to my team to see how we can help.
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