PPC For Real Estate Leads
If you are a real estate professional looking to boost your online presence and generate leads, then pay-per-click (PPC) advertising could be the answer!
With 96% of buyers going online to search for homes, PPC is a highly effective way to get your services and listings in front of motivated buyers.
As leading real estate PPC management providers, Real Estate Webmasters has brought leads and sales to many of its clients, like Andre Perez of District Partners:
"PPC with REW has boosted my lead generation strategy, empowering me to scale and forecast results while avoiding costly missteps. By freeing up time and resources, I can now prioritize more lucrative activities and confidently grow my business."
In this post we'll explore some of the benefits of PPC for real estate, including specific case studies and a dive into how Google Ads can help you.
What is PPC in Real Estate?
PPC stands for “Pay-Per-Click” and refers to an online advertising model where the advertiser pays a small fee each time their ad is clicked. This type of advertising is commonly used for online platforms like Google and Instagram.
Real estate professionals use PPC advertising to promote services or listings online. For example, a real estate agent may create a PPC ad campaign to advertise property listings for an area or to promote their services to a specific audience.
Why You Should Use PPC Advertising
According to the National Association of REALTORS® 2022 survey of home buyers:
“For 47% of recent buyers, the first step that they took in the home buying process was to look online at properties for sale ... Nearly all buyers used online tools in the search process at 96%.”
With so many people going online to look for real estate services, PPC advertising is an effective way to get visibility, traffic, and leads.
And the specific benefits of PPC are clear:
- Place your ads at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), giving your properties or services greater visibility to potential clients.
- Incoming traffic is directed to highly-relevant, conversion-focused pages.
- A wide variety of targeting options relevant to the real estate buying process, ensuring that ad spend is utilized in the most efficient and effective way possible.
- Reach a highly motivated and focused audience. Users who click on your ads have shown a genuine interest in what you are offering, making them more likely to convert into leads or customers.
- Only pay for clicks, so you are not wasting money on ads that do not generate any interest or leads.
- Provides trackable metrics and lots of feedback information that can be used to make data-driven decisions and adjust campaigns for maximum impact.
Case Study: Carly Carey
Nanaimo real estate agent, Carly Carey, has seen remarkable success with Google Ads.
"I'm two-and-a-half months in 2023 and I've already closed 6 deals from my PPC-SEO combo in this supposedly 'slow' market. Just these deals alone cover my entire marketing budget for the next 2 years!"
By targeting relevant keywords and crafting compelling ad copy, Carly was able to capture the attention of potential clients and drive them to her website. As you can see from the example below, you can take up a significant amount of space at the very top of the search results page with just a well-crafted ad and a few dollars...
With such an impressive ROI, Carly has solidified the value of PPC advertising for her business and can look forward to continued success in the future.
Real Estate PPC vs SEO
The main alternative to PPC is to gain traffic and leads organically, by ranking higher in search results. The process of improving search ranking is commonly referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
But how does SEO compare to PPC?
The main advantage of PPC is that it provides immediate visibility and control over your advertising spend. On the other hand, SEO can take time to generate results, only becoming more cost-effective in the long run with careful and consistent planning.
PPC allows for precise targeting and trackable metrics, but can be costly if not managed effectively. SEO can generate organic traffic and can help establish credibility and authority, but also requires ongoing effort and expertise to maintain rankings.
Learn more about SEO or Real Estate Webmasters’ SEO services.
Google Ads For Real Estate
Google is the world's largest search engine, with billions of searches conducted every day. As such, it is the most important platform to consider for PPC advertising.
Google Ads has a number of benefits over other online advertising platforms:
- Potential to reach a massive audience
- Wide range of targeting options
- High-degree of control (including budget)
- Advanced reporting and analysis
- Benefit from Google’s machine learning capabilities
Google Ads is just one of the places where real estate agents can and have benefited from the power of AI and machine learning.
How Google Ads Works
Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform that allows advertisers to create and place ads on Google search result pages (SERPs) and its partner websites.
Advertisers bid on specific keywords related to their product or service, and their ads are displayed to users who search for those keywords or visit websites related to those keywords.
Advertisers only pay when a user clicks on their ad, and the cost per click varies depending on a number of factors, including the competition for the chosen keywords.
AdRank is a metric used by Google Ads to determine the position of an advertiser's ad on the search engine results page (SERP). It is calculated based on the advertiser's maximum bid for a given keyword, the quality of the ad and landing page, and the expected impact of certain ad features.
Note that higher bids don’t guarantee a higher position as there is an SEO-like component to crafting an ad campaign.
Like SEO, you have to take into account user intent, ad relevance, effective and well-written copy, and user experience.
Handling these factors well will not only get your ads to rank higher, brining in more traffic and leads, but they will also save you money as you will be able to pay less on average per click.
Real Estate PPC vs Regular PPC
Real estate PPC is different from paid advertising or PPC in other industries in a number of ways:
- Long sales cycle: Real estate PPC campaigns need to be designed to nurture leads over a longer period of time.
- Local targeting: Real estate is a local business, and real estate PPC campaigns need to be targeted to specific geographic areas.
- Visual content: Real estate PPC campaigns often rely heavily on visual content, such as photos and videos of properties.
- Seasonal: Activity for real estate PPC campaigns can be highly seasonal, with dips during the winter months and higher competition in the spring and summer.
How Much Does Real Estate PPC Cost?
Google Ads is an excellent way to advertise because it gives you a lot of control over how much you spend AND you only pay when your ad actually works (when someone actually clicks through to your landing page).
You can also choose how you want Google Ads to target those clicks. For example, do you simply want as much traffic as possible? Or, do you want to compete for users who are more likely to convert into leads?
There are many other ways to refine ad targeting, including by location, demographics, device used, and so on. Adjusting these factors requires an understanding of various PPC performance metrics.
- Impressions: The number of times your ad was displayed on a search engine results page or a website in the Google Display Network.
- Impression share: The percentage of times your ad was shown out of the total number of times it was eligible to be shown.
- Average click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of times your ad was clicked after being shown.
- Average cost per click (CPC): The average amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
One of the most important PPC metrics is the conversion rate. The conversion rate is the percentage of clicks (users that visit your site from an ad) that then become leads, where a lead could be anything from calling a specific agent to signing up for property search updates. Anything that allows you to follow up and potentially turn a site visitor into a client.
Adding a non-optional registration feature before viewing listings is a great way to capture leads for real estate. Below you can see an effective lead sign-up form, the simpler the better!
First, since Google Ads will usually aim to use up a set daily budget, the conversion rate will determine your cost-per-lead. While there are many external factors that can influence the average cost per lead, the industry standard for home sales is $96.54.
Real Estate Webmasters routinely achieves an average cost per lead of less than $15 for many of its clients.
Next, the cost per lead will also determine your optimal budget. Since you probably know the value of a lead, you might think that any lead is worth getting as long as you paid little enough for it to be worth your time. However, at some point extra leads decline in value as they strain your capacity to follow up and close on them. That’s why it’s important to set your budget to bring in the right amount of PPC leads for your business.
Ultimately, for many in the real estate business, PPC advertising represents an excellent return on investment, since a highly-qualified click can cost as little as a few cents, the commission from a single sale can cover your marketing budget for years.
Use our PPC Income Calculator to estimate your PPC ROI.
Or, catch up on REW's PPC service offerings.