AdWords For Real Estate: What Happens When You Optimize a PPC Campaign for Real Estate?

You would agree that it is very difficult to get the first-page position on Google and even on other search engines merely with SEO. Another concern with the search result is shuffling of organic results. Search engines occasionally play with their rules resulting in loss of high ranks and qualified leads that come from top ranks.

In this situation, Google AdWords or PPC seems to be the best option to retain your position and maintain the flow of traffic without worrying about search engine updates.

PPC has many advantages but for real estate, it starts with challenges. Many realtors report huge losses in PPC because they aren’t able to understand the challenges and find ways to solve those issues.

Here we’ll discuss the challenges lies in the road to success for real estate PPC marketers and the best ways to optimize real estate AdWords ads for desired results.

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Real estate PPC challenges

PPC for real estate is different from AdWords marketing for other products in many ways. The challenges PPC advertisers face in optimizing AdWords ads for real estate are unique in many ways.

First Challenge: Real estate is an extremely local product that limits its acceptability to a wider range of targeted audiences. For example, your targeted customer would be a local living in the city you are targeting. Or he must be interested in the city due to job, business or family reasons.

Second Challenge: Homeowners won’t rent. It is highly unlikely that homeowners of the targeted city would take an interest in your real estate ads. As a marketer, your job is to prevent the homeowners from viewing your ads.

Third Challenge: Renters are potential buyers but they are locked in long term leases. For example, a person locked in a lease of six months would take any decision on buying a home only after six months. The challenge here is to target the renters that are in the last month of their renter lease.

Fourth Challenge: Real estate investment is a big financial decision and not everyone is capable of buying homes. For example, a buyer with poor credit score won’t be able to fulfill his dreams despite having a strong need for a home. But your job is to showcase real estate ads to everyone interested in buying homes.

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Let’s start a PPC campaign while keeping the challenges in mind

Bid on your brand term

Real estate clients get information about homes available for rent and sale from a variety of sources that includes physical signs on highways; classified websites; friends and random search. But these sources provide only primary information about available real estate.

Limited information results in half-hearted searches and for this reason Google AdWords PPC Experts are advised to invest in branded terms to get serious buyers. Or you can say that the partial info inspires the buyers to conduct the search with branded keywords to get comprehensive information on the available real estate.

Not investing on branded keywords would result in loss of hot leads – competitors bidding on brand + city/state keywords would occupy the top space.

Win with Geotargeting

Google AdWords gives two options in locations setting – people interested in targeted areas and people interested in areas excluded in the keywords list.

In the first search, you would find people presently located outside the targeted area but are interested in locating to the area you are targeting.

In the second search, you would find buyers interested in the same city or suburb. To target these buyers, you can choose the largest metro area close to the targeted city/state. In this way, you can bring people interested in the excluded areas to your list of targeted audiences.

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Advantage of negative keywords

You know about negative keywords but in real estate, you need to be very careful about city/state keyword matches. There could be areas with similar names. Your job is to locate the areas that could come in a broad match search and prevent clicks from these searches.

For example, you should mark abbreviations that look similar and could appear in a broad search.

Google’s liberal keyword matching policy – Exact Match – has become a challenge for real estate PPC marketers because it brings a wide variety of low intent searchers to the list. And the only way left to weed out the unwanted buyers from your list is to prepare a detailed list of negative keywords.

Add ad extensions

Ad extensions factor in Ad Rank formula but it isn’t the only reason for using these extensions for real estate PPC.

Location Extension: Track the buyers looking for real estate in the targeted area. Bring them to your office by highlighting your presence with distance to your office, street address, and clickable call button.

Sitelink Extension: There are many ways in which you can apply sitelinks in ad copies but for real estate, it is a floor plan that works well. For example, a buyer looking for a one-bedroom studio apartment would be more interested in the floor plan matching with his needs. By highlighting the floor plan, you can easily bring targeted audiences to your website.

Price Extension: It can be said that this extension is quite useful for real estate PPC. You can showcase up to eight price cards to attract buyers and you would be surprised to know that this extension makes the AdWords visually appealing and tempting. You can easily beat the competition on price segment.

Call Extension: It is a goldmine for real estate PPC marketers. You can open a line of communication by providing a call extension to potential buyers. But make sure that the call is received. You can use the extension during business hours so that no call is missed.

Conclusion

The bottom line of real estate PPC marketing is to narrow your AdWords keywords to exclude clutter as possible to prevent unqualified traffic from blocking qualified leads. And there are multiple ways of targeting potential customers with Google AdWords PPC ads. I can also help in optimizing your Google AdWords PPC ads for hot leads that convert into sales.