Out of all the methods real estate investors use to get motivated seller leads, PPC is the best. Not perfect, but the best. It’s the quickest way to get leads into your funnel if you have a high converting website. And as you close deals from these leads, the return on ad spend, or more precisely – your return on investment, will justify the effort and the money that you put into setting up a PPC campaign.
So, if you are a real estate investor who wants to learn how PPC works, you are reading the right article.
We are going to:
A lot on this topic was covered in the four part series on PPC in our REI Marketing Nerds podcast. Those of you who prefer to listen rather than read can check out the following episodes:
Episode #116 – Google PPC For Real Estate Investors: Pros and Cons of Google Ads
Episode #117 – Google PPC For Real Estate Investors: Google PPC vs. Direct Mail
Episode #118 – Google PPC For Real Estate Investors: Understanding Motivated Seller Keywords
Episode #119 – Google PPC For Real Estate Investors: My Favorite Google PPC Tips
We will start from the basics – if you are already familiar with the PPC terminology, you can skip this section and go straight to the next one.
PPC stands for pay-per-click. It means that you will pay only when someone clicks on your ad. The distinction is very important because there are other types of ads in online marketing as well. For example, Facebook has ads which are charged based on impressions or upon showing your ad to an audience.
In a nutshell, real estate investors place bids on Google Ads that are shown when search engine users type a specific keyword or a search phrase into the search box. The ad itself has three elements: headline, display URL, and description and it appears just above the organic search results. If the user clicks on the link (top search result) that is the ad, you pay for that click.
To get motivated seller leads, real estate investors bid on keywords like ‘sell my house in x fast.’
Usually, when someone talks about pay-per-click for real estate investors, they refer to ads on Google. They used to be known as Google Adwords and the terms are still used interchangeably. Pay-per-click campaigns can be launched on many internet platforms, including social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram) and other search engines (Bing, Yahoo), however, the type of targeting that is available through a search engine makes real estate investors prefer Google pay-per-click ads over other options.
When you target an audience on Facebook, you target them based on demographics – data like, age, income range, marital status, home-ownership status, purchasing habits etc. Google PPC allows you to target search engine users based on their actions, or the things they do, like if they type ‘sell my house in X’ in the search box.
Those leads who have ‘confessed’ their need to sell a house by typing the phrase into a search engine are likely to be motivated sellers, and their level of motivation is higher than social network users whose news feed was interrupted by an ad about your real estate investing company.
While Google PPC vs. Facebook PPC can spin out into a wide discussion, and each marketing professional is entitled to their opinion, at Adwords Nerds we believe that Google Ads is the better choice to bring motivated house seller leads in your funnel.
Getting motivated seller leads through marketing requires a comprehensive approach. It’s a process that involves many different channels: direct mail, social media, and email marketing, along with additional methods like bandit signs, door knocking, and cold calling.
We know this because we’ve worked exclusively with real estate investors for more than a decade. In fact, we will be the first to advise you to use a multichannel marketing strategy, however, PPC is the spearhead in the strategy – it has to be.
Let’s take a look at the reasons why that’s so.
Once you set up a Google PPC campaign, users start clicking on the ad instantly. The results are remarkable in terms of both offline and online campaigns.
For instance, time plays an important role in direct mail campaigns. You need to print out letters and mailers; then, delivery itself takes a lot of time (months) and on top of that, you wait for the phone to ring. The same goes for organic traffic through SEO. Consider the process of improving website authority through building high-quality backlinks – it may take literally years before you get better ranking and reap the benefits of your hard work.
With PPC users click on the ad right away.
The amount of feedback that marketers get through Google PPC is even better than what you can get on Facebook,and it certainly doesn’t compare with the limited performance data that you get for your offline campaigns to find motivated sellers.
Google Ads allow you to calculate ROI of PPC down to a dollar. When you do split testing (sending different versions of the same ads to see which one performs better), you can measure the feedback of users through many metrics.
If you try to do the same for a direct mail campaign, you’ll find yourself juggling half a dozen spreadsheets. Seriously, even if you have just three different marketing copies sent in two different envelope designs, you’ll need to track six different phone numbers (as is usually done) to record performance. The performance of some methods for getting house seller leads, like networking, can’t be measured at all.
And all that data Google offers to you can be utilized to improve the effectiveness of the PPC campaign.
You can start a Google PPC campaign with any advertising budget.
There is no minimum requirement when it comes to your marketing dollars on Google Ads. On the other hand, when you do direct mail, you are bound to produce a high-volume series of letters, to make the campaign cost-effective.
Of course, a big advertising budget will increase your opportunities to get leads, but you can start with less than what you’d spend on other marketing channels.
Google PPC is shown to search engine users who express an interest in selling their house and take action.
We touched on this above, but let us reiterate. People go to Google to find solutions to their problems. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every search engine user who types ‘sell my house fast’ is a hot lead, however, chances are that they are more motivated than any other audience available to real estate investors.
Let’s talk about motivated seller lists. Real estate investors compile these lists from public records, or they spend money to hire data gathering services. The lists (or other data) are then processed and entries based on different categories are eliminated. For example, real estate investors want a list of units/properties that are:
Only then do they send direct mail or start a Facebook Ads campaign to reach potential motivated house sellers.
I don’t know about you, but to me, this stack filtering sounds like a lot of guesswork. There’s much less of that with Google Ads – you target users who are actively looking to get rid of their property.
There are downsides to every marketing method, and PPC is no exception. Are there situations where real estate investors prefer traditional methods, like direct mail, over Google PPC, when they try to reach motivated house sellers? Yes, there are. The only question is whether these disadvantages are substantial enough to stop you from using PPC.
Most of the disadvantages of PPC can be easily leveraged – let’s check out how.
Real estate investors welcome each opportunity to lower the advertising costs. The cost per click (CPC) is calculated by dividing the advertising costs of a campaign with the number of clicks that are generated.
CPC = advertising costs / number of clicks
The lowest CPC for house seller leads is $15-25 per click, however, in more competitive markets, the CPC can go up to $75. CPC is one of those metrics that depend on the real estate market. If no one is competing for your keywords (‘sell my house in x’, where x is a neighborhood, city, or zip code) you can do PPC for a lower charge, but if you are in a big market, the CPC can go even higher than $75. This is due to the auction system where in our case, real estate investors place bids on keywords that are used for their Google PPC campaign.
However, the quality of these leads can offset the CPC costs, and we will examine the quality of the leads in the section that follows. You may pay more to acquire these leads, but if the house sellers are more motivated compared to the leads you got through other marketing channels, you will close more deals on them. When you close more deals, this translates into bigger ROI. Unfortunately, it’s hard to specify exactly how much the ROI will be higher because profits in real estate investing depend on the deal. Some REIs close with profit margins of $10,000, while others go way beyond that.
The idea is that if you get at least one extra deal a month, and these deals bring you $120,000 in profits for that year, your annual PPC advertising budget is more than justified.
“The Facebook Ads platform was made for the general user, while Google Ads were made for engineers” – this is what Dan said in one of the podcasts we mentioned at the beginning. Don’t let this intimidate you if you are not a technical person.
While there is a learning curve involved with doing Google PPC Ads, there are two ways to overcome this issue: either you learn how to do it on your own, or you delegate to experts.
Adwords Nerds covers both options: our Marketing Bootcamp is designed for those who want to tackle the learning curve, and our PPC Kickstart is for those who want to hire our team to manage their PPC campaign.
People are generally skeptical when they see an ad. This is not necessarily unique to PPC campaigns – it applies to all marketing methods to find motivated sellers. Where do most of the mailers end up, anyway? In the trash, yes, and real estate investors need to earn the trust of their audience fast in order to close a deal.
Since Google PPC is shown above the organic search results, users might put less trust in the ad compared to the trust they have in the website that ranks high for the search phrase or keyword.
The remedy for this issue is to create a landing page (the page where users who click on the ad are taken to) that quickly reestablishes trust. Obviously, this applies to the whole website, not just the landing page. You’ve probably heard about high converting real estate investing websites. These are designed from the get-go for capturing motivated seller leads. Element placement, lead form design, and content are all optimized to increase the on-site conversion rate.
Well, if you design the website in a way that builds your credibility to motivated sellers, you’ve done half of the work. The rest is just tweaking lead capturing forms, call-to-action buttons, and placement of other elements of the website.
Have you asked other real estate investors about the success of their Google PPC campaign? Did they report mixed results? That’s typical for anecdotal evidence – this one did it right and is satisfied, the other did it wrong and would never go for it again.
But it’s true: the most important distinction is whether they set up their campaign the right way or not. We covered the essentials of setting up a PPC campaign for real estate investors in another post and since we are delving deeper into the discussion on attracting leads here, we will review the use of keywords.
Although it seems like we’re about to go into technical talk, don’t worry – it will be easy for you to follow and it will enable you to have more control over the keywords that are included in your PPC.
When you run a PPC campaign on Google Ads, the platform allows you to specify what kind of search phrases will trigger your ad to be shown. This is known as keyword match and there are four different types of keyword match. If you want to cast a wide net in your campaign, the ad will loosely match the words that were Googled, and if you want your ad shown only to users who type in an exact keyword, then the target group is narrow, but more precise and promising.
This is very important, because it directly determines the group of search engine users (or motivated house sellers) who will see your ad.
There are four types of keyword matches:
Let’s see how these different keyword match types determine which users will see an ad for finding motivated seller leads if you are targeting the keyword ‘sell my house fast.’
The ad will be shown to search engine users who type any variation of ‘sell my house fast.’ This means that search phrases like ‘sell my home quickly,’ ‘get rid of my house now,’ and ‘sell my house cash’ will also be included in the campaign.
You will reach a broad audience and the cost-per-click for these keywords will be low, because you are advertising in front of lots of people.
However, broad match keywords are too broad. In fact, if you don’t curb the reach of the campaign, your ad will be shown to users who search for something like “sell my house doll” or “sell my house furniture.” To make your campaign effective, you’ll have to exclude negative keywords, i.e. the keywords that have nothing to do with real estate investors or motivated sellers.
Another way to restrict the audience is to use the modified broad match type. To use this keyword match in Google Ads, you need to type the sign plus before the keyword ‘+sell +my +house +fast.’ It means that users have to type all four words for your ad to be shown to them. The modified broad match allows other words to be included both before and after the keyword, and the order in which they are used can vary.
For example, ‘want fast to sell my house,’ ‘sell my house in Rino fast,’ ‘sell my house fast without a realtor’ – all of these search phrases will trigger your campaign.
Modified broad matches have high search volume and lower conversion rates. The good thing? This type of PPC is cheaper. The downside? They won’t convert seller leads as much as the match types that follow below.
In Google Ads, if you want to go for phrase match keywords, you need to type the keyword in quotation marks, i.e. “sell my house fast.” The search phrase has to match the keyword, but it also allows other words to be included before or after it.
For example, ‘sell my house fast in a week,’ ‘my husband doesn’t agree to sell my house fast,’ ‘sell my house fast to avoid foreclosure’ – all of these search engine users will see your ad if you use phrase match keywords.
Search volume goes down as it’s a smaller audience, however, the quality of the traffic is better and it’s easier to convert these website visitors into seller leads.
This one is quite simple: the search phrase has to match the keywords exactly, nothing more, nothing less. To set the exact match up, you need to put the keyword in brackets [sell my house fast].
It’s a small audience, with a high click-through rate and a high conversion rate – these users are likely to visit your site and fill out a form.
You can target the house sellers in your real estate market with exact match keywords (only those who typed ‘sell my house in west valley boise’, for instance), but the PPC might be high if you are in a competitive market.
After learning about keyword match types, you are probably wondering how to get the best motivated house seller leads with PPC. Well, if there were only one way to dominate a real estate market through leads, everyone would be doing it.
In essence, you have to decide what’s more important to you – the size or the quality of the audience? Also, you first need to determine the advertising budget that’s going to be allocated to each of the keywords you want to target.
If you want cheap, ample, low-quality leads – you go with broad match keyword types.
If you want a few, expensive, but high-converting leads – you go with exact match keyword types.
And if you want to be more conservative, you go for a mix of all four keyword match types.
Whatever your PPC strategy is, there are a number of tips that can help you improve your Adwords campaign.
Split testing is one of the main benefits of doing online marketing to find house seller leads, so use it to test what works and what doesn’t. Sure, the thought of developing different versions of the same ad might raise concerns. Some real estate investors wonder whether it’s difficult to manage split testing in the middle of a campaign or are scared to do ad tests with their own money.
However, split testing can provide you with a wealth of data about the online behavior of house sellers – data that’s gathered from motivated sellers in the real world, and it’s hard to find elsewhere. Also, you can test many different elements: ad copy, call to action, landing page features, time of day to place the ad, etc.
And the cost of PPC split testing is extremely low: imagine doing split tests with direct mail, and the kind of costs such tests would attract as opposed to PPC.
Make you set a goal that’s as specific as possible. Have a clear idea about the action you want your website visitors to take, and the way in which you would like this to happen.
What is conversion for you? Do you want house sellers to call your office? Do you want them to leave their contact details in your form? Do you want them to do something else?
Focus is the key for PPC marketing.
This is where your real estate investing CRM system comes into play. Track every piece of data about the PPC campaign. Use the CRM to track the path of motivated sellers in your lead generation funnel.
Which keyword generated a click on your ad? Where was the conversion event – on your landing page, on another page on your website, through live chat, or on your lead capturing form?
Having logs on all conversions in your CRM will make it easier to calculate the ROI (return on investment) of your PPC campaign, but it will also tell you which element of your website converts, and which one doesn’t.
We already discussed that your website is crucial in establishing trust. If search engine users click on your ad only to land on a generic website, with stock photos and scarce info on yourself and your business – you can’t really expect them to convert.
Motivated house sellers are already robbed of negotiating power (there is a reason they are motivated), so make it easy for them to learn that you are not a crook. Testimonials and other forms of social proof (social media screenshots) can boost your credibility right away.
A pro tip: show website visitors that you are the guy/gal next door. They’ve probably had enough of dealing with sleazy, suited agents who work for big companies.
There is nothing wrong with running a Google PPC campaign for seller leads alongside other active marketing campaigns like direct mail, Facebook Ads, email marketing, and the like. As long as you track the number of leads you get through each of these channels, and your advertising budget is in check – your lead stream will be fine.
Sometimes, PPC can improve the performance of your other marketing channels. PPC keyword research can boost your SEO efforts, because even though PPC keywords and SEO keywords are different, the data you get from PPC will help you pinpoint the hot keywords in your real estate market. This will not only show you which keywords to use in your SEO, but it will make your content more relevant to the motivated sellers you are after as opposed to nationwide (or global) search engine users.
Given its immediate effect, PPC campaigns are possibly the best fit for real estate investors who are looking for a way to jump start their business. However, every investor who wants to dominate their real estate market should have PPC as one of their marketing channels, as it can improve the consistency of their lead generation.
None of the other marketing channels for seller leads can compete with the advantages of PPC. Let’s reiterate them before we wrap up.
When you set up a Google PPC campaign for seller leads, the traffic to your website is almost instant. While you’ll need to optimize your website to get leads from this traffic, the hardest part is to get the traffic in the first place. Once you have website visitors, the process of creating a website that converts is a much easier task.
You can start Google PPC for motivated house sellers right away, with any budget. And if real estate investors don’t have the time to delve into the technical knowledge that’s needed to set up a PPC campaign, they can always rely on someone like us to set it up for them.
If you manage a PPC campaign on your own, make sure to zero in on your target audience by choosing an appropriate keyword match type. It’s recommended to use a combination of keyword types, although every marketer (or entrepreneur) has a specific strategy to get leads.
Once you settle on the approach that you’ll use in your PPC to bring leads to your website, test each element in the website layout. This is digital marketing, which makes split testing and conversion tracking cheap and easy to do. At the same time, it will improve the success of your campaign.
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