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.

The best online real estate marketing in the world is of no use at all unless you are able to turn enquiries into clients and eventually sell property to some of them. The first step to achieving this is to follow up your pay-per-click or search engine leads promptly, professionally and effectively.

When you’re selling real estate, you naturally have to take into account that the buying process is much longer than in most other cases, and will probably stretch into months - sometimes even years. This is why it is vital that every single thing you do as you follow up your leads contributes to building a relationship of trust with your prospects - that essential element of making the sale.

Respond to enquiries immediately

Remember that you are not alone! Your prospects have most definitely contacted several other estate agents enquiring about similar properties, or maybe even the same ones they are asking you about. Always make it a point to respond to pay-per-click leads and enquiries as soon as you possibly can, and in any case within a maximum of 24 hours.

The early bird catches the worm here, and you will gain a significant advantage over other estate agencies simply by being the first to get back to your clients. What’s more, you’ll come across as being efficient and professional and you’ll also show your prospective clients that you care for their business - two more points in your favour!

Use a combination of phone and e-mail wherever possible

The phone is a much better way to establish a personal relationship than just using e-mail, so make sure you call your prospects if they have left a contact number. At the same time, you should also use e-mail to send extra information about relevant properties, such as brochures, photos, Internet links and so on. What’s more, by sending e-mail, you give your clients the information in a written form that they can easily refer to. It may be a good idea that when you send an important e-mail, you suggest that your clients print it out - you never know when that piece paper could show up again, weeks or months down the line, and serve as a reminder of the property or of your real estate agency.

Depending on the particular case, it may be best to call first and e-mail follow-up information later, or else send the information first and then call to discuss it. Still, always make sure you follow up one with the other, giving your client enough space so they don’t feel pressured.

Make sure you understand what your clients are asking for and answer all their questions

Don’t let your busy schedule get the better of you! Part of establishing your professionalism as a real estate agent is to communicate well with your clients, and that begins by understanding well what they are telling you. So read their queries carefully and make sure you do not leave any points out as you answer them. There is nothing more frustrating for a client than to receive an e-mail that does not adequately address all their questions or doubts. Don’t count on your clients getting back to you for clarification if you are sloppy in your replies - they may very well not!

Ask questions yourself to find out as much as possible about your clients

Show an interest in your real estate clients and ask the right questions to find out as much as possible about them - what sort of property they are looking for, their reasons for buying, what they expect from the property and so on. Many times, your clients may not be too sure of the answers to these questions themselves, in which case you can also be of great use by helping them to clarify their thoughts.

Be prepared with alternative properties

No property hunter feels comfortable around a pushy estate agent, so when you suggest alternative properties, make sure they are relevant to what your client is looking for and do it out of a genuine interest to help. You may want to consider using professional real estate agent software to help you keep track of both your property portfolio and your clients. That way you save precious time by quickly matching clients with ideal properties, and at the same time you make sure you never miss out on a sale by forgetting to mention a property that could have been the one.

Keep in mind once again that finding the right property takes time and what your clients want most is an agent who has the patience to help them find what they are looking for.

Follow up your leads

Show an active interest in your clients and their business by following up on your communication according to the schedule you agree. If they told you they would think about it and call back in a few days but don’t, let an adequate amount of time pass and give them a call. Remember, do this out of interest in the client, and not in that particular sale itself.

Be professional at all times

Honesty and integrity is the one thing all clients look for in a real estate agent. You may be the most knowledgeable about your property market or have the largest property portfolio, but if you don’t manage to win your clients’ trust, it’s all for nothing.

Professionalism involves a whole list of things, from being prompt and efficient, to respecting your clients and not using cheap tactics, like hinting that a property is about to be sold to someone else. Clients can sense that fake concern and your reputation will suffer because of it.

Remember that if you want to get the most out of your pay-per-click advertising, you will have to deal effectively with each and every single lead, so that you maximise its chance of converting into a sale at some point in the future. Follow the above tips and you’ll be definitely on the right track!

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.

In our last blog post we gave you some tips on designing your PPC landing pages. Once you have given your landing pages some thought and figured out what you want them to achieve, it’s time to work on getting visitors your website. Enter search keywords stage left.

What is a keyword?

A keyword is a word or phrase that people type into a search engine when looking for something specific online. For example, a property hunter wants to buy a property in Barcelona, so she fires up her favourite search engine and types in the keyword ‘Barcelona property for sale’. Maybe she already knows what she’s looking for and searches for ‘apartment for sale in Barcelona’, or even specifies a specific district of Barcelona by typing in ‘apartment for sale in Gracìa’. The search engine will display relevant search results and show PPC ads for advertisers who bid on the search keywords used.

The importance of choosing only the right keywords for your PPC campaign

When you run a pay-per-click campaign, it is crucial to carefully choose and bid on keywords that your potential clients are searching for. This is important because your keywords are part of the filter that helps make sure your ad is only seen by people who are likely to become your clients.

While it’s true that you only pay when someone clicks to your website, you still run a great risk of paying for useless clicks from curious people if your keywords are not well focused on your target audience. Besides, the major search engines like Google and Yahoo! take into account the relevance of both your keywords and your ads. This means that if a greater proportion of those who see your ad actually click on it, you will be rewarded with a lower cost-per-click for the relevant keywords.

How to find the best keywords to bid on

Step 1: Identify your target audience

Give a thought to the sort of people you are targeting. If you are planning a general pay-per-click campaign to generate leads for your estate agency, your target audience will of course be much broader than if you are advertising million dollar luxury apartments or large country estates. Keep that at the back of your mind as you think of what keywords they would use to search, but don’t let it limit you too much at this stage. You’ll have time to refine your keyword list later and even once your PPC campaign is underway and you can test what works.

Step 2: Brainstorm

Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and come up with a list of keywords they would use to search for the kind of property you sell. Consider different types of property, different locations, general terms like ‘real estate’ and ‘property for sale’ and even names of specific residential areas or developments. It’s a good idea to type up your list so you can copy and paste your keywords later and easily sort things around in the meantime.

We also recommend an excellent (and free) keyword generation tool called Good Keywords to help you build your keyword list. Using its phrase generation function, you can input up to three lists of keyword components (e.g. a property type list, ‘for sale in’ and a list of locations) and the program will automatically generate a list of combinations of keywords.

One little problem with this program that we have found in other keyword generators too is that it also outputs combinations you might not want. For example, if you input ‘villa’ and ‘house’ in list A, ‘for sale in’ in list B and ‘Barcelona’ and ‘Valencia’ in list C, you will also get ‘villa for sale in’ and ‘for sale in Barcelona’ as output keywords and must weed these out yourself.

Step3: Do some keyword research

There are several ways to discover new keywords you can use. One is to look through your website’s logs (ask your webmaster) to see which keywords people are searching on to come to your website. Another way is to run some web searches on the keywords you have so far and look at the top few websites to see what other relevant keywords they are using in their titles, description (the text that appears at the very top of the web browser), keywords tag (this one’s a bit more tricky because you need to look at the web page’s source code) and in the web page itself. You can also do this with your direct competition.

Step 4: Use the Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords keyword research tools to expand your keyword list

The Good Keywords program also allows you to input a keyword and search through Yahoo!’s database for suggested similar keywords, which are returned with monthly search counts. Of course, you will have to pick and choose through the suggestions to determine which apply to your business. Alternatively, you can use the free Yahoo! keyword research tool, which will give you the same results as Good Keywords.

Google also have their own free AdWords Keyword Tool. Although they do not reveal exact monthly search counts, you get a separate extra list of additional keywords to consider. This is usually only very generally related to your input, but often opens up a whole new avenue of keywords you may have overlooked.

Step 5: Edit and refine your keyword list

By now you should have a sizeable list of keywords that is rather broad in scope. This is the time to go through the list and separate the chaff from the corn, deleting those keywords that are irrelevant to your business or unlikely to result in conversions.

You will have to look out for keywords that are too general, such as ‘real estate’ or ‘property for sale’. Such keywords will attract clicks from a very broad audience who could be looking for property just about anywhere in the world. Even something like ‘real estate Spain’ is not a very good idea if you only sell property in a particular area.

If you target your PPC campaign to a very specific region, you might be able to use broader keywords successfully in certain cases, but more about that when we discuss language and location targeting. We’ll also be talking about the different ways your keywords can be matched to search queries, the benefits and drawbacks of the different matching types, and when to use what.

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Remember that drawing up a keyword list is not the end of the story. Only time and close monitoring and testing will tell you which keywords perform best for your business. And because online conditions such as your audience and your competitors are always changing, fine-tuning the keywords you use is an essential part of keeping your pay-per-click campaign running at optimum performance.

The first things that come to mind when most people think of pay-per-click advertising are ads and keywords. But really the ads and the keywords are just means to an end - merely a way of getting potential customers to your website. What your visitors see after they click is what it’s all about!

The page someone lands on after clicking the link on your pay-per-click ad is called your (drum roll…) ‘landing page’. No matter how efficient your pay-per-click campaign is at driving top quality pre-qualified traffic your way, it is your landing page that makes or breaks your pay-per-click success. An effective, well designed landing page is one that is easy to use and highly relevant to what your visitor is searching for. On the other hand, a poorly designed landing page can be distracting, confusing or even downright disappointing, and will probably make your visitors browse around aimlessly without any sense of purpose, or even leave right away.

When you’re paying to get people to see your message, you want that message to be as clear and direct as possible, so that your audience instinctively knows what action you want them to take and are encouraged to do it.

Here are 6 pay-per-click landing page tips that will help you achieve just that:

1. Don’t send pay-per-click traffic to your homepage

As with any rule, there may be a couple of exceptions of course, but your homepage is generally a pretty bad place to send PPC visitors to, and the same probably applies to the other pages of your website. Why is this? The main reason is that you want your landing page to be as simple as possible, so that visitors have a limited set of actions they can perform (such as filling an online enquiry form, subscribing to your property newsletter or searching your property database).

If you use one of your general website pages as a landing page, chances are that there will be at least a good dozen links to other parts of your site where your visitors can wander off and get lost reading some article or other. The result is that they will probably forget why they clicked on your link in the first place and your chance to obtain that precious lead is lost.

2. Make sure your landing page is relevant to the search that’s bringing in the traffic

If someone’s searching for seaside villas, don’t send them to a page on city apartments. This may sound like stating the obvious - and it is - but it’s all to common to see pay-per-click ads lose out by sending visitors to vague or irrelevant landing pages. Once people have searched for something particular on a search engine, they want to find what they are looking for immediately. So don’t expect them to have the patience to hunt around your website for what they are after, just because you could not be bothered to send them to the right place. They won’t!

3. Design your landing page to be clear and useable

Simple landing pages work best. Avoid cluttering up your page with a hodgepodge of text and images. Plan a clear layout that flows logically and leads your visitor to easily find what they are looking for and, eventually, to take the action you want.

Also, make sure your page headline is clear and emphasises your page’s relevance to the search. The headline will be the first thing a visitor sees and is crucial when it comes to deciding if your landing page is of interest or not. The most important information you want to give your visitor should be ‘above the fold’, visible in the top part of the web browser without the need to scroll down. This is also a generally good place to put things like enquiry or subscription forms so they are easily found and filled in.

4. Limit your visitor’s options

Less is more applies to PPC landing pages too! We’ve already mentioned this, but it is so important it bears repeating. Even when you are designing a specific landing page, it may be tempting to lose sight of your objective and offer a host of other links and possibilities ‘just in case’. Don’t! Keep things simple. Build up to the action you expect of your visitor and make a strong call for them to do it.

It is human nature that, when faced with multiple choices, we tend to procrastinate and may very well end up not doing anything at all. In any case, if you do decide to offer a small choice of outcomes of a page visit, make sure that you have proper tracking in place so that you can tell if anything is leading your visitors astray.

5. Track your landing page’s performance

Running a pay-per-click campaign for your real estate business without finding out how well your landing pages are doing is just like investing blindly in the stock market and hoping for the best. It’s very easy to find out how many people have filled in your property enquiry form or subscribed to your newsletter, but if you offer alternate means of contact, such as by e-mail or phone, you should plan to track those too.

Tracking e-mail is simple enough, because you just have to create a new, specific e-mail address associated with your pay-per-click landing page and redirect e-mails from this address to your main e-mail account for convenience. You can then use your mail program to identify e-mails coming from PPC leads (and even filter them to a special folder).

To track phone leads, you can set up a specific phone number (or extension) that is only advertised on the landing page. This may involve additional expense, but is well worth doing if you want to have the complete picture of your PPC campaign’s performance. Alternatively, if you can come up with a special online offer, you can use that to make callers reveal that they saw your number on your pay-per-click landing page.

6. Test, test and test - and then test again!

Did you know that simply changing a picture, headline or even a font colour on your landing page can affect your conversions? That’s right! But no amount of expertise or intuition will tell you what will work best in a particular situation. The only way to know is to test different versions of your landing page against each other so you know what gives best results.

Of course when you want to test combinations of three headlines, four images and two opening paragraphs, things can become messy. But fortunately there are ways to do this automatically and quickly by multivariate testing, and so eke out every last bit of performance from your landing pages.

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As you put these 6 landing page tips into practice, remember that you don’t have to (and won’t) get it perfectly right the first time. There is no automatic way to know what will get you the most leads or sales in your particular case for your particular audience. Naturally, intuition and experience are a great help for finding shortcuts and avoiding pitfalls as you improve on your landing pages. But the real performance gains are generally achieved through an ongoing process of finding out what works and building on that, over and over again. If you do that, you just can’t go wrong!