Real Estate Pay-Per-Click Marketing Blog

With numbers and stats flying all over the place, the world of pay-per-click marketing can be a tricky one to get the hang of. And yet, if you want to be able to make informed decisions about your real estate pay-per-click campaign and the budget you allocate to it, there are a few basic AdWords terms you will need to be familiar with.

While a few of these pay-per-click terms may sound intimidating and complicated, they are really very simple once you know what they stand for, and an understanding of the basic PPC terms will be very useful when it comes to interpreting your pay-per-click reports. From time to time, we get clients asking us to clarify some of these terms for them, so we thought we would write this basic glossary that you can refer back to when in doubt.

Basic Google AdWords Glossary

Impressions
The number of times your ads have been shown on the search engines or on Google’s partner websites.

Clicks
The number of times that people have clicked on your ads and visited your website.

Maximum Bid (Maximum Cost-Per-Click)
This is the maximum amount you are ready to pay for a click (you will typically pay less) Your maximum bid is one of the factors that affect how high your Google ad is ranked, but Google guarantees that you will only pay the minimum you have to in order to keep your rank - one cent more than the next ranked ad.

Daily budget
With AdWords, you control how much you spend by setting a daily budget for each PPC campaign. Google may slightly exceed your daily budget on a given day to make up for other days when fewer ads were shown. However, the daily average spend over a 30-day period will not go over this amount.

Cost-per-click (CPC)
The cost-per-click is the price you pay every time that someone clicks on your ad. This will depend on a number of factors, including your maximum bid, the relevancy of your ads and website to your search terms, the general quality of your campaign and, of course, the amount of competition there is for your search terms. While the actual CPC will vary even from one click to another, reports typically show the average CPC of the report time period - a global indicator of how much you are paying for your clicks.

Click-through-rate (CTR)
This is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions, expressed as a percentage. So if your ads have had 1200 impressions and received 60 clicks, your CTR = (60/1200) x 100% = 5%

Your click-through-rate is another of the key factors that Google takes into account when determining how prominently to display your ad. The Higher the CTR, the higher your ad will rank on Google.

Conversion
Google AdWords allows you to track desirable actions that users perform on your website. These actions, called conversions, most typically include a visitor filling out an online contact form or property request form, but you can also count the number of visits to a certain key page on your website or, say, the number of downloads of a particular report - anything that is important to you. Tracking conversions is a good way of knowing how well your pay-per-click campaign and website are working together. However you have to keep in mind that actions like a visitor e-mailing you or phoning you are not automatically tracked and counted as conversions, so the success of your PPC campaign could be greater than what the reports show.

Cost-per-conversion
The cost-per-conversion is simply the unit cost for each conversion, calculated as the total amount you spent on your PPC advertising in a given time period, divided by the number of conversions in that timeframe.

If you run a business that offers international shipping, or if you sell a downloadable product, you might want to target a pay-per-click campaign to absolutely anyone in the world who searches for your keywords. On the other hand, if you sell real estate, your typical clients will come from the same areas you sell your property in, and quite probably even from farther afield, including other states or countries. In any case, you most likely have a well-defined set of geographical areas that you want to target (or should be targeting) with your estate agency’s pay-per-click campaign.

Google AdWords language and location targeting

With Google AdWords language and location targeting, you can control who will see your PPC ads based on their geographic location, their language settings in Google, or a combination of both. Google can also compare the place names people include in their search with your chosen locations to determine whether to show your ads or not.

Note that AdWords language and location targeting does not translate your ads, but simply determines who will see them. This means that if, for example, you run your pay-per-click advertising with English ads in a country where this language is not widely understood, you will most likely get a low click-through rate on your ads or even low-quality clicks. Ideally, you should create a separate AdWords campaign for each country/language you target, with matching ads and landing pages.

How it works

The AdWords Language Targeting is quite simple and allows you to select one or more of over 40 languages your audience could be using. If you chose to target the Spanish language, your ads will show only to people whose Google interface language is set to Spanish, no matter where they are in the world.

The Location Targeting options give you far more control over the exact geographic location where your PPC ads will show. You can target your ads by

• country
• region or city (not available in all countries)
• Entering a physical address and a radius from that address (currently US and Canada only)
• Drawing a circle or a polygon shape of the area you want on an interactive map.

When a search is made, Google uses a number of methods to determine where the user is searching from and matches that with the locations you targeted to decide if your ad should be displayed.

You can read more about language and location targeting in the Google AdWords learning centre.

Combining language and location targeting with keyword matching options

When we discussed how to choose pay-per-click keywords, we advised against using very broad search terms such as ‘property for sale’. The exception to this is when you are running a pay-per-click campaign that is highly targeted to the location you operate in.

For example, if you target your campaign only to London, using the broad keyword ‘house for sale’ (as opposed to ‘house for sale in London’) could work well. This is because Google will only show your ads to people searching from London or who have included the names of London-related places in their search query. Still, you will have to use the right keyword matching options, and/or make good use of negative keywords to make sure that people in London searching for ‘Bristol house for sale’ do not get to see your ad for London property.

What if you could advertise your real estate agency on the Internet and…

• …target your ads directly to people searching for property in your area?
• …only pay when people click your ads and visit your estate agency’s website?
• …track the performance of each and every ad and every cent you spend?

Just think about it! When you run a property ad in a newspaper or magazine (or even publish your own real estate magazine) it’s not easy to know how well your advertising is performing. In theory, you could, of course, (and probably should) set up a manual tracking system to determine how many enquiries your ads are generating. After all, this is the only way to know what works so you can do more of that, and what doesn’t work so you can stop flogging a dead horse with your cash. But let’s face it. How many estate agents actually do this?

The good news is that running a pay-per-click advertising campaign on search engines like Google and Yahoo! brings that very sort of control within your grasp! With a properly set up pay-per-click campaign, not only do you just pay for the Internet traffic you receive, but you can also know which ads, which keywords and even which pages of your website are performing best so you can focus your available budget on what’s most profitable to you. What’s more, with pay-per-click advertising it’s also possible to automatically track specific actions your website visitors take, such as contacting you by means of an online form or subscribing to your property newsletter.

Of course, there will be additional outcomes of a click that are more difficult (though often not impossible) to track because they do not happen directly through your website. An example of this is a visitor e-mailing or phoning you directly. However, by tracking the conversions from clicks to online enquiries, sign-ups, and so on, you can still get a good picture of how well your estate agency’s pay-per-click campaign is doing. And just as importantly, you will find out how effective your website is at converting visitors to leads.

Well, that’s just a little idea of what pay-per-click advertising is - and a little taste of how powerful it can be when it comes to effectively advertising your real estate agent business online. As you might expect, running a successful pay-per-click campaign is not just a question of pushing a button or two and hoping for the best. But fear not! We’re here to help both through this blog as well as through the real estate pay-per-click management services we offer as Touchdown Pay-Per-Click Management.

Watch this space!