Leveraging PPC

As we prepare for our upcoming buyer/seller lead webinar, we felt it important to dive a little deeper into exactly how and where these leads can be found. Today, we’ll look at Google Adwords and how it can integrate with your IDX/website to produce real results through their PPC (Pay Per Click) program. Cue the super catchy title…

How to Leverage Google Adwords for Real Estate Leads

What is Google Adwords?

Some of you may have experience with Google’s advertising option, which places strategic ads alongside a search made on Google. It’s very simple: you create an account, decide on a budget (most users load credits to their account via credit card), create an ad, and start choosing keywords to attach their ad to. Let’s back up a bit – what’s that about keywords?

Keywords are the fuel that drives your ads.

The idea behind keywording is that you pick both a popular term that others will often search and one that pertains to your service and what you’re offering. For instance, a real estate agent looking to market themselves in the Tampa Bay market might come up with a term such as “tampa bay real estate”. The catch here is that the cost of these ads are variable, meaning that a broad search such as “tampa bay real estate” will cost more than a targeted term such as “south tampa waterfront condos”. Here’s a recent search of the term for “real estate tampa”:


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CPC and your budget

The way we determine the cost of each advertisement is by what’s called CPC (Cost Per Click), which means the price you’ll pay each time someone clicks on your ad. As I mentioned above, the CPCs can be variable so you’ll want to budget accordingly. If you’ve decided you want to spend $300/month on a keyword that costs $2 per click, you’re looking at 150 clicks on your ad that funnel to your website for the month.

People want listings – your IDX can provide them

As far as real estate goes, it’s a safe bet that if someone searches for homes in the Tampa Bay area, they want to see listings and, if you want to convert the lead, you’re going to provide them. A great way to optimize the MLS data is to create a page on your website for a specific neighborhood, then present MLS listings for it. There are numerous ways to do this, and website services such as REW and Real Geeks come with this option built in. If you’re the hands-on type, a quick Google search will also return third-party services and tutorials on how to insert MLS data into your website.

Presenting this kind of data is very important for two key reasons:

  1. 1. As we mentioned earlier, offering people who visit your website real listings – centric to the area they searched for – gives them incentive to contact you once they find a property they’re interested in.
  2. 2. Google bases your search rank based on the quality of the content you provide. While Google Adwords is a great jumping-off point to market your website, you’ll also want people to find your site organically, and helpful MLS data can do this. As if this weren’t incentive enough, the better your content is in relation to the search term, the lower your CPC can be over time – and who doesn’t like to save money?!
About the Author Happy Grasshopper

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