How Google Adwords is used by REALTORS® to find Qualified Sellers

It takes months to rank high in organic search results for competitive keywords. But did you know that your company can secure the top slots instantly, if you are willing to spend the money on Google Ads?

Google AdWords is a popular online advertising platform among real estate professionals looking to place themselves at the forefront of sellers the moment they search for their services. In fact, many real estate professionals are tripling their website traffic and seeing their website rise on Google by hundreds of positions across main keywords through Google PPC advertising programs.

How to Optimize Your Google AdWords Campaign for Success

While Google AdWords can get you high-converting real estate leads, it can also end up being a money pit if you do not know how to fully optimize and properly set it up for real estate leads. 

After auditing hundreds of accounts, we found there are several reasons why your PPC Search campaigns may not be performing, but we narrowed it down to the top 7:

• Weak Ad Copy
• Incomplete Conversion Tracking
• Ad spend inefficiency
• Not collecting enough data to make an educated decision about your campaigns
• Lack of solid goals (your KPI's, which we'll cover shortly)
• Poorly designed landing pages
• No Retargeting

The biggest hurdle real estate professionals face is the set up of conversion landing pages. They opt to drive leads to the homepage where there is no call-to-action or no system for capturing leads. These pages leave visitors in utter confusion as to what they are supposed to do next.  

You see, it may seem logical for realtors to be starting their real estate PPC advertising with the set up of a Google AdWords account and the actual campaigns. But you really should not be getting into doing that until you have your website and lead generation ready. We recommend starting at the tail end of the process and working backward.

How Google AdWords Successfully Helps Realtors with Generating Leads

Advertising on AdWords is not the same as on Facebook. On Facebook, you advertise primarily based on interests and demographic information. On Google, however, you can target based on intent.  By intent we mean that you can target consumers based on where they are in the selling process (e.g., ready to sell or seeking market information). It's this targeting that makes the platform so valuable.  

Google AdWords itself is a boon to real estate professionals to speed the process of revenue generation. The main benefits to using Google AdWords to attract sellers in the real estate industry include:

- Instant Results

The biggest benefit to using Google AdWords for lead generation purposes is that it works faster than SEO.   Obviously AdWords is as competitive as SEO, if not more. But the good news is that along with the bid amount, the quality score of the keyword determines which ad receives the highest positioning. Of course, this does not mean that you should not use SEO at all, as it has more long-term benefits. It simply means that with AdWords there is a better chance of driving more traffic and leads, instantly. 

- Increased Brand Awareness

Just because your ad is getting lots of impressions but few very few clicks and contact form submissions/phone calls, does not mean it is not having a positive impact on your business. By simply having your brand name appear on the top SERPs, your real estate ads is already getting increased brand awareness. Perhaps sellers are not ready to sell their home. Or they are simply seeking more information before taking the big step.  If you leave significant, positive impressions, consumers will come back to you when they are ready to do business.

- Easy to Measure

One advantage that internet advertising has over traditional advertising channels (e.g.  TV and Print Magazines) is that it is very easy to measure. It can be very challenging to effectively measure your SEO campaign since you cannot always get a precise measurement on what moved up/down your rankings. With AdWords PPC it is a different story. This is probably one of the best resources you have to measure what’s working and what is not because it comes equipped with plenty of useful metrics and tools that do that task for you.