Maximize Your Return in Your Pay-Per-Click Real Estate Advertising
As a Realtor, you're an expert at selling real estate — but you may not be an expert at writing advertising copy or managing an internet pay-per-click campaign. We've put together a few tips to help you fine-tune your PPC advertising in order to get the best results for your advertising dollars.
First, the basics:
What is Pay-Per-Click?
Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising, is an online advertising model that allows you, the advertiser, to run ads on the Web — and you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your web site. This is called a click-through (or click-thru). The ratio of ad views to click-throughs is called the click-through rate, or CTR. Google and Yahoo (Yahoo YPN) are the two biggest and best-known PPC networks that you might advertise on; there are others, but they don't have nearly the reach of these two — and Google is by far the biggest. We'll focus here on Google's AdWords program, but all the major PPC advertising networks work on similar concepts.
One major benefit of PPC advertising, of course, is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Imagine being able to put an ad in your local newspaper that only costs you money when it causes someone to call you! But another major benefit of PPC advertising, that is sometimes overlooked, is that it allows you target your advertising precisely in a way that no other advertising medium can match. Think laser targeting: You make a keyword list, precisely targeted to your professional services. Those keywords will trigger your ad, which is precisely written to capitalize on the keywords that triggered it. And the ad itself sends users to a page on your site that is precisely written to give the user exactly what he is looking for.This is not your father's advertising — This is laser-guided-missile targeting!
How Does PPC Advertising Work?
You, the advertiser, bid on keywords related to your business. You bid the maximum amount that you're willing to pay per click, and your bids go into a pool of bids. If your bid is high enough (compared to the other bids in the pool), your ads gets shown. The keywords you bid on trigger your ad to show on Google's search results pages when a user searches for those keywords, or triggers your ad to appear on web sites that carry AdWords ads, when that site's on-page content contains those keywords. It gets more complicated that that — you can use different types of keyword matching to define how broadly or narrowly you want Google to match your keywords.
When your ad is shown and a user clicks your ad, they get taken to the landing page on your web site that you specify, and now it's the job of your web site to induce that user to call you or submit your contact form, or do whatever is it you want that user to do once they arrive at your site.
Setting up a PPC Campaign
In your PPC account, you start by setting up a "Campaign," which consists of an ad and the associated keywords that you want to have trigger that ad. (You can create multiple versions of the ad within the campaign; we'll address that a little further down.) You should set up multiple campaigns, with each campaign being tightly focused on one particular theme or topic. A real estate agent might create campaigns for "homes for sale," "condos for sale," and "land for sale," for example, and depending on your marketing approach, you might want to have even more campaigns. You also might want to create one or more campaigns aimed at real estate sellers, who are looking for a real estate agent to represent them in their sale.
Within each campaign, you create an ad and a list of keywords that will trigger your ad. A "keyword" can be a phrase -- one or more words together. A Realtor, for example, might bid on terms such as "Punta Gorda homes for sale" or "waterfront condos," while a carpet store might bid on "carpets," "floor coverings," and "rugs." You want to create a specific and unique list of keywords targeted precisely at the topic of the campaign. For your "Homes for sale" campaign, for example, you might create a keyword list that includes "homes for sale," "houses for sale," "waterfront houses for sale," "affordable homes for sale," and so forth.
Now, wait just a goldarned minute! Shouldn't the "waterfront houses for sale" be in a separate campaign aimed at waterfront houses? Yes indeed. And shouldn't "affordable homes for sale" be in a separate campaign aimed at affordable homes? Yep. Exactly so. Look very critically at your keyword list, both while you're developing it and after you think you're done, and see if there are keywords that should be separated out into a campaign of their own. After all, we're working on a laser-targeted approach here.
Keyword Matching Options
You'll want to read the support documentation in your PPC network for the keyword matching options. In Google, keywords can use broad matching, phrase matching, or exact matching. What are these options, and how do they work? Until you gain experience in your PPC campaign, phrase matching is probably your best bet to use, but here's a quick rundown:
- Broad Matching: In Google's AdWords program, this can be a good way to throw away money. The "broad matching" option in AdWords automatically includes Google's "expanded keyword matching technology," which tries to use computer "intelligence" to match your keywords with other, related, words, such as synonyms and related phrases, that in all likelihood will include terms that you do not want. Your carefully crafted "Gulf-front home" ad may be shown to people looking for a lake-front mountain cottage. Your target audience will not be well-targeted, and the click-throughs that you get are less likely to be interested in your services. As you gain experience in PPC advertising, you might want to include some broad matching, but if you do, you definitely want to use an extensive negative-match keyword list.
- Phrase Matching: Phrase matching will trigger your ad for any search query that includes the keywords in the order you specified, even if the search included additional words not part of your keyword. For example, a phrase-match keyword "waterfront homes" will match searches for "waterfront homes with a pool" and "Florida waterfront homes" — the search will always have your keyword phrase in it.
- Exact Matching: Exact matching only triggers your ad for searches that exactly match your keyword. Using the example above, if you put "waterfront homes" in your keyword list as an exact-match keyword, a search for "florida waterfront homes" will not trigger your ad.
Negative Keywords
The ability to list negative keywords for each campaign is one of your most powerful — and one of the most often overlooked — tools in your PPC toolkit.
You should include negative match keywords in every campaign you create. Negative-match keywords exclude searches that include the negative keywords you specify. For example, in your "homes for sale" campaign, you might want to list "nursing" and "retirement" and "Masonic" as negative-match keywords — because you don't want to show your ad to people looking for a nursing home or retirement home or Masonic home. If you set up a campaign for "luxury homes," you'll probably want to list "mobile" as a negative keyword, so that you don't show your ad to people looking for mobile homes. You should spend at least as much time developing your negative-keyword list as you do developing your keyword list.
If you are a Realtor who sells real estate in Florida, you should include every U.S. state other than Florida in your negative keyword list. You don't want to show your ad to people looking for "homes in Montana" or "condos in California."
Keyword Bidding
You have to specify the amount(s) you're willing to pay for each click on your ad. If you bid too low, your ad won't be shown. If you bid high, Google's AdWords program automatically adjusts your cost-per-click (CPC) to one penny over the next-highest competitor. If you bid $4/click, and the next-highest bidder is bidding $0.50/click, you'll pay $0.51 per click. But be careful: You could cause a bidding war that ends up costing everybody more money. You'll have to experiment to find the bid price that works best for you. Use Google's keyword tool to see what the average CPC is estimated to be for your selected keywords, and bid somewhere in that neighborhood to start.
You'll have to experiment to find the bidding level that works best for you, and you'll probably need to adjust your bids up or down as your market changes. A few real estate agents over-bidding in your market could cause your minimum CPC to increase significantly — and likewise, a few real estate agents who blew through their advertising budget with nothing to show for it could decrease your CPC when they drop their PPC advertising.
Writing Your Ad
Laser targeting is the key. Did we mention laser targeting? Don't forget: You're creating a laser-targeted advertising campaign here. Write your ad headline and copy so that it is laser-targeted to the keyword list you created. Are you bidding on "luxury waterfront homes"? Your ad headline should read "Luxury Waterfront Homes." Your ad copy should expand on that theme. A campaign for "waterfront condos"? Your ad headline should read "Waterfront Condos." Give that searcher exactly what he's looking for.
This is why you should create multiple campaigns, each with its own specific keyword list. Don't try to use the same ad to reach people looking for luxury homes and waterfront condos and commercial real estate. Create separate campaigns, separate keyword lists, and custom-written ads to laser target your ads precisely at the laser-targeted keywords.
Your Landing Page
AdWords, and the other PPC networks, allow you to specify a particular landing page on your web site for each ad. Do not send simply people to your web site's home page. Here again, laser target your landing page so that it exactly reflects your ad and your keyword list. Your "luxury waterfront homes" campaign should send people to a page on your web site that promotes and offers luxury waterfront homes. Your "commercial real estate" campaign should send people to the most appropriate page on your site for people interested in commercial real estate.
The Laser-Targeted Campaign
If you have followed the steps above, you have created multiple ad campaigns, each with a carefully developed keyword list, and a carefully written ad, and a carefully selected landing page, such that for every campaign, you are targeting a very precise type of search, showing an ad that exactly matches that search, and sending the user to a landing page that exactly matches that search. Congratulations! Now.....
Read, Read, and Read Some more
There is much, much more. You should spend some time reading everything you can get your hands on about PPC campaigns, and you should spend some time exploring the account management interface in your PPC account. Study up on geotargeting. Learn how to run your campaign only at specific times. Read about the differences between the search network and the content network. Set your monthly maximum budget. Explore different keyword matching options, and try out variations on your ads. Read up on Google's "Quality Score" to find out how that affects your cost-per-click.
Through research and experimentation, you'll figure out what works best for you to maximize the return on your PPC dollars.
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