How to Advertise Real Estate On Google

In order to grow your real estate income by finding clients online, you need to know how to advertise real estate on Google. Using Google AdWords for real estate in combination with an optimized landing page allows you to attract potential clients and build their trust with an automated system.

Having an effective and profitable AdWords campaign requires you to plan, strategize, and optimize your ad and landing page. You can learn how to set everything up on your own, or you can utilize the expertise of a full-service digital marketing agency like Hibu. Since Hibu is a Google Premier Partner, Yahoo Preferred Partner, and Bing Select Partner, you can achieve your goals even faster. Learn more by visiting its website.

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Here are the five steps to start using Google AdWords for real estate marketing:

1. Plan Your AdWords Campaign

It’s important to spend time planning how you are going to use AdWords for your real estate business before you actually set it up. In order to use Google AdWords as effectively as possible, you need to understand the best way to target your clients, which keyword to use, and your key performance indicators (KPIs).

These are three vital components of planning your real estate AdWords campaign:

Determine Your Target Customer

As a real estate professional, you know that not all leads are equal. Since you’re going to pay for advertisements, you want leads that will bring you the maximum return on your investment (ROI) quickly. Therefore, you want to focus on how to target your ideal clients who are ready to buy or sell right now.

In your Google AdWords account, you can use the “targeting” and “observation” pages to adjust your ad accordingly. This is where you decide which demographics you want to see your ad, the locations, topics, and more. The more details you specify, the more targeted your ad will be. Although this means that Google will show your ad to a smaller number of people, the right targeting will be more profitable and save you money.

Here are all the ways you can target your AdWords for real estate:

• Demographic: Decide the ages, genders, locations, and device types you want to reach.
• Affinity audiences: Google allows you to target audiences based on what they have demonstrated they are passionate about through interactions with search, shopping habits, and watched videos on platforms like YouTube.
• In-market: You can show your ads to users who search for related products or topics.
• Custom intent: Choose words or phrases that your ideal client would be searching for.
• Similar audiences: You can expand your audience by targeting related interests.
• Remarketing: Show your ad to users who have previously interacted with your ad.
• Topics: Use just one ad to target multiple pages at once.
• Placement: Select or target your ad on other websites that your customers visit.

Your targeting choices will heavily impact how much money you pay for your ad and your click-through rates. Understanding your target audience has a large impact on your overall marketing success, so be sure to do the necessary research for each type of AdWords targeting.

Identify Keywords for Targeting

Choosing the keyword for your Google ad is another layer of targeting. Just by thinking about your customer’s intent, you can target clients based on how ready they are to buy or sell. For example, someone searching for “houses in New Orleans,” could be looking to purchase a home, but they could also be searching for information about the types of houses in this area, home prices, home styles, etc.

On the other hand, choosing the keyword “how to buy a home in New Orleans” will put your ad in front of people who are much closer to making a purchase. For this reason, keyword research is one of the most important steps in creating your Google AdWords for real estate. You can use Google’s free keyword planner tool.

You should also consider the following when planning which keywords to use in your campaign:

Determine Negative Keywords

Negative keywords aren’t discussed nearly as much as keywords, but you’ll find that they are vital to creating profitable AdWords for real estate. The last thing you want is to pay for ads that don’t convert to leads and waste your money. If keywords are the words you want to rank for, negative keywords are words that you don’t want to rank for.

For example, if you are a real estate agent in the town of Washington, Maine, you should be aware that there are 88 other towns, cities, and villages in the US with the name of Washington. Specifying that you do not want your ad to show for the same searches in Washington, Georgia, or any of the other towns is vitally important. Your AdWords for real estate will be significantly more effective if you take the additional time to research negative keywords.

Consider the Potential of Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are typically phrases of at least three to four words. These phrases don’t have the same traffic potential as more general keywords, but are great for targeting marketing. This is because the additional words indicate the people searching those terms have a very specific search result in mind. In other words, they know what they want, and in the real estate world, this often means they are closer to making a buying decision.

For example, targeting the search term “homes for sale” will put your ad in front of more eyes than targeting a phrase like “three bedroom Tudor houses in Denver.” However, as 70% of search traffic comes from long-tail keyword searches, a long-tail search term doesn’t force you to sacrifice that much visibility. In addition, the more specific search phrase will ensure your ad is only seen by people interested in the inventory you have to sell, and there’s less competition.

For more ideas to help you plan how to use real estate keywords, click here.

Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key performance indicators (KPIs) will be especially important after you start running your ad and analyzing the data. That said, it’s important to know and understand your KPIs when you’re planning your real estate ad in order to achieve your specific goal.

These are some of the most important KPIs in your real estate Google AdWords campaign:

• Impressions: Every time your ad is shown to a potential client, it counts as an impression. This helps you see how wide your reach is.
• Click-through rate (CTR): When a potential buyer or seller sees your ad and clicks on it, it counts toward your CTR. The goal of Google AdWords for real estate is always to have a high CTR.
• Conversion rate: After a buyer or seller clicks on your ad, they should be taken to a landing page and asked to take another action. Your conversion rate shows how many potential clients are taking this step. In general, the better your conversion rate, the more money you are making.
• Cost per conversion (CPC): Your CPC is how much you are paying for each conversion. The goal is for this cost to be as low as possible, but usually takes some tweaking of each ad to decrease this number.
• Average position: This number shows where your ads usually fall when they’re shown. Keep in mind that ads need to place eighth or higher to get shown on the first page.
• Quality score: Google really wants to present their users with quality content. Even if you pay more for your ads than your competitors, Google won’t optimize your ads in searches if you have a low quality score.

Identifying your KPIs during the planning phase will help you create an ad and a user experience that is fully optimized and can bring you the greatest results. It will also help you understand your data and solve problems more quickly.

2. Write Your Ad Copy

Although you can create a Google ad with images, most Google AdWords are only made of a small amount of text. Therefore, you need to make sure every word of your headlines and descriptions are optimized for conversions. For some ideas of powerful real estate words, check out our article on real estate words.

Pro Tip: To make sure your AdWords for your real estate business are written with optimized ad copy, as well as strongly researched keywords and targeting, you can use Hibu. The digital marketing experts at Hibu can help you create the best AdWords for real estate, so you can focus on what you do best.

3. Set Up Google AdWords

Once your ad is planned and written, you can set everything up in Google AdWords. Creating your AdWords account is simple, and Google will lead you through the process of creating your ad. However, you must pay attention to the details of your ad settings so you don’t miss an important factor of your ad.

These are the four sections you’ll see when setting up your AdWords campaign:

• Decide how much to spend: You choose the maximum amount you want to spend each day. It’s possible that Google will not spend the maximum.
• Choose a target audience: For your real estate ad, this is where it is extremely important to specify your location as well as the keyword and network. You choose if you want your ad to be shown only on Google search results or on other websites of all sizes.
• Set your bid: This is where you can look at your competitors and input your bid for keywords individually.
• Write your ad: After you’ve already planned your ad, this is where you input your ad copy.

Although the process of creating AdWords for real estate seems simple, your setting choices will greatly impact the outcome of your ad. If you plan out your ad strategically, it will make the set up as easy as possible.

4. Establish A Real Estate Lead Generation Funnel

In order to take users from Google’s search results to becoming your newest customer, you need to have an optimized lead generation funnel, or system in place designed to bring in new leads. Because more and more potential buyers are browsing for homes online, the best way to do this in real estate is by creating a strategic landing page and lead magnet which encourages them to provide you with their contact information the minute they see something they like.

To create an effective real estate lead generation funnel, be sure you have the following:

Landing Page

Your landing page is important for users, but it’s also one of the main factors in Google’s quality score. This is because Google only want to direct their readers to the best websites. Therefore, the design and copy on your landing page will impact how high Google ranks your ad.

These are some of the key ways to optimize your landing page for conversions:

• Prioritize simplicity: A landing page is not meant to provide the user with lots of choices or too much information. It is meant to immediately direct them to your offer. The more complicated your landing page is, the lower your conversion rates will be.
• Be clear: This is not the place for high-level language. Your customer should easily be able to see and understand exactly what you offer them.
• Use images: Images are a huge part of digital marketing. When they are used correctly, they can make the difference between customers who bounce and customers who feel compelled to give you their contact information.
• Remove menus: If you give viewers an opportunity to leave your landing page, they will. Avoid links to other sites or even your navigation menu.

Your website does not need to have dozens of pages full of content to be effective for your AdWords campaign. In fact, if viewers clicked on your ad and found a full website, it would probably be too overwhelming for them. By optimizing your landing page, you’ll make it easy for users to do only one thing when they come to your website—give you their email address.

Lead Magnet

You create a lead magnet by offering your website viewers something exclusive in exchange for their email address or other contact information. When using Google AdWords for real estate, the ultimate goal is to get the contact information of buyers and sellers in your area.

Some real estate agents have a place for viewers to add their contact information but do not offer anything additional. It is possible to find leads this way, but you will find your conversion rates and success increase drastically when you offer viewers something they believe they need.

Pro Tip: If you would prefer not to spend the time creating a landing page and email magnet, consider utilizing the real estate and marketing expertise of InCom. InCom offers web-templates and pre-written content specifically for real estate websites. If you want a high-quality website that brings leads to you without spending hours trying to set it up, check out InCom.

5. Analyze Data & Make Tweaks

When you start running your AdWords for your real estate business, you’ll find that studying your analytics and making changes accordingly can significantly improve your success and ROI. You can do this by looking back at your KPIs.

Here are a few changes you can make based on your KPIs:

• CTR: Your CTR will show you how effective your real estate AdWords are on the search page. If you have a lot of impressions and a low number of clicks, you know you need to adjust your ad.
• Conversion rate: If your CTR is high or average (at least 3.71%, according to WordStream) and your conversion rate is low (under 2.4%), it means that viewers are clicking on to your website, but aren’t confident enough to hand over their personal information. This will also apply if your bounce rate is high. You can use this information to tweak your landing page or re-examine your keyword and user intent.
• CPC: You want to be paying as little as possible for each conversion. You can’t change this number directly, but by making changes based on your other data, your CPC should decrease.
• Average position: If your ad is not showing up as one of the first three results in Google, you are not getting the results and clicks that you should. You can increase your bid or make changes to improve your quality score.
• Quality score: You can check your Quality Score in your keywords report. It ranges from 1-10, with 5 being average. Your score has four components: quality score, landing page experience, ad relevance, and expected click-through rate. If you need to improve your quality score, you can check each of the four columns to see what needs the most improvement.

Even if your ad gives you mediocre results in the beginning, you can use this data to make strategic changes and significantly improve the effectiveness and profitability of your AdWords for real estate.

Bottom Line

Using Google AdWords for real estate can be a key in growing your business and your income. It helps you find new clients and leads and even begin building a relationship with them on autopilot, which saves you time and energy. You could be sleeping or on vacation, and your Google AdWords campaign will still be working.

If you want to save even more time and energy, contact Hibu to help you set up an expert-level real estate AdWords campaign from the get-go. Its team of experts and its connection to all the search engines will help you find new leads and close more deals in less time. Best of all Hibu does not require a minimum monthly spend, making it an affordable option for marketers. Visit Hibu to learn more.

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