What is PPC Management for Real Estate Companies?
PPC management for realtors refers to creating and optimizing PPC advertising campaigns. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.
A paid advertising firm for realtors often begins by getting to know you and your needs before providing expert PPC ads management. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a local area real estate company is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide realtor ecommerce site.
Local real estate companies, for example, are often only searching for contact form submissions or calls. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that grows traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, we recommend you start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.
In contrast, ecommerce-focused real estate companies are most likely to be interested in online sales. Using paid advertising, you can drive traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense to include for some online businesses. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.
To optimize and scale realtor PPC campaigns, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For some real estate companies, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.
Your real estate company should use a variety of advertising tactics and marketing tools to be successful with paid advertising. Pay-per-click campaigns for realtors should include strategies like:
- Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
- Increase conversions for your real estate company through qualified leads or online sales.
- Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
- Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
- Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
- Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.
A Few of Our Paid Ads experts
Types of Paid Ads for Real Estate Companies
The options for running paid advertising for your real estate company are numerous. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for realtors.
1.) Local Business Ads
You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your real estate company. One platform may be more effective for your local real estate company than another. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Let's talk about a few nearby advertising choices.
Google is going to offer two options.
As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.
Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.
Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in the area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. For all types of real estate companies, we often use Facebook Ads.
2.) Social Ads
Almost all online ads you see on social networks qualify as social media ads.
The trick to social media advertising is keeping the ad creatives fresh. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative modifications for campaigns with higher spending.
One of the best things about social ads is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. The opposite is true when you run search ads since your ads will only show when someone is actively searching for what your real estate company has to offer.
That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.
3.) Search Advertising
If you know people are searching online for the products or services you offer, you'll want to invest in search advertisements.
There are some people out there who refer to this as realtor Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. An advertisement that appears on the search results page of a search engine is called a search ad, which are above the organic SEO placements.
If you have been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. According to a StatCounter study from October 2022, about 3.57% of online users use Bing as their primary search engine.
4.) Display Ads
Many different message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (even nearby news stations), gossip sites, and more run display advertisements.
These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.
To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.
5.) Retargeting Ads
Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your real estate company website, landing page, or sales funnel.
It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your site after they've had time to think through different options.
You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.
6.) Shopping Ads
This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.
To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your real estate company.
With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.
7.) Video Ads
You can run video ads on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other social networking websites.
If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.
To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.
Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!
If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your PPC advertising campaigns.
Tips for Managing Paid Ads for Realtors
With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for real estate companies and other industries, we are a team of paid advertising professionals.
Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.
1.) Keyword Research Tips
In the context of paid advertising, you'll find keyword research for realtors mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for that your real estate company is targeting.
For example, a person looking for a real estate company nearby might search "local realtor" on a search engine. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.
However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the real estate company needs to expand their advertising reach? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.
Typically, the paid advertising manager will discuss with the real estate company about what types of products / services to target more often. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.
Suppose the paid ads manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby real estate companies" or even "realtor services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. The second phrase is targeting a service, which might result in a more lucrative conversion.
Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. You can use negative keywords to prevent your PPC advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more property buyers.
For example, a person looking for "free services from real estate companies" or "how to advertise to realtors" is unlikely to convert with you. However, they might see your paid ads if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".
You can see that as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend, the needs for keyword research become more complex.
2.) Audience Research Tips
When you hear audience research talked about for real estate company paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.
We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.
Facebook custom audiences were heavily relied upon by real estate company paid advertising managers in the past. After all, one of the most appealing features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which realtors lined up to exploit.
A number of factors, including data privacy and machine learning, have had an impact on custom audiences over time.
When Apple released its iOS 14.5 update, they included a pop up message that allowed users to easily opt out of personalized ad tracking. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices. This even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.
For most realtor-focused advertising companies, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. By choosing your own interest-based targeting, you tend to do more harm than good because their algorithm often understands your ideal audience better than you do.
While there will still be plenty of real estate company paid advertising agencies relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. Don't take our word for it though. If you've been involved in the creation of Facebook ads, you've probably noticed the removal of interest-based targeting options here and there. Maybe you've even seen changes to how "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is recommended during the setup process.
This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.
This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within realtor ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.
3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips
The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your real estate company paid advertising campaigns.
When we take on the management of a paid ads campaign for realtors, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:
- Is there a benefit-focused headline?
- Are there any images above the fold?
- Is the content written in a compelling manner?
- Am I able to find a lead form right away?
- Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
- Does the page load quickly?
- Is there social proof?
- Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?
There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.
Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.
4.) Funnel Tips
As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.
For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their internet marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:
- We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
- We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
- We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
- We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.
There are many different types of funnels, so your real estate company isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.
5.) Conversion Rate Optimization Tips
Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.
Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.
- You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
- You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
- You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
- To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
- Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid ads you get one dollar in return.
For most real estate companies, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.
To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising company to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.
Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your site you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.
Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid ads.
6.) Ad Creation Tips
This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.
When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for realtors, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.
You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.
To do this, you need to build out amazing ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"
This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.
If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.
Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.
Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your PPC Solutions
Let's work together on paid ads for your real estate company! We are a full-service PPC ads management firm targeting realtors with multiple internal teams focused on social media marketing, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. In most realtor-focused PPC firms, only one person handles all tasks, but this is not the case for us! For those real estate company paid ads firms, campaign optimizations and creative ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.
Choosing a paid ad company for your real estate company is not an easy task. With more than 20 years of experience, you know you can trust the PPC strategies and tactics we suggest for your real estate company. These are often the same paid ads strategies we use for our own lead generation.
Real estate companies should choose our paid advertising firm because they feel confident we are the right team. Our PPC professionals are a good option for numerous reasons:
- Having been in business since 2004, we have more than 20 years of experience.
- We rely heavily on sales funnels and paid advertising to shore up our organic search rankings.
- Our internal advertising team handles all realtor-targeted online marketing packages, such as PPC ads management, sales funnel development, and ad creatives.
- If you call us during normal business hours, you will likely get an answer from one of our teammates within a few rings.
Let's discuss what our paid ads experts can offer your real estate company! Realtor-related small businesses often hire us for paid advertising management plans, but larger real estate companies can also hire us to augment their marketing departments.
We hope you consider our company when searching for a paid ads company for your real estate company. To start a discussion with the helpful staff at our paid ads agency, send us an email or give us a call if you have any follow-up questions.
