What if I told you I had a crystal ball…
That revealed exactly what the people are you were thinking?
Do you think you might be able to use that information to grow your business?
To close more deals?
Well, I have good news for you:
Google Search is that crystal ball.
Let me give you an example:
Here are the top searches for a particular year. Do you think you can guess what year they’re from?
It will take most people about a second to guess “2020,” and they’d be right.
All over the world, people reveal their inner most selves to the Google Search Bar.
Don’t believe me? Type “Why do I” into Google and see what it suggests.
This is a direct view into what the people around you are thinking about, worrying about, and searching for.
With Google Search Ads, we know what someone is thinking, and can target our marketing accordingly.
This is a marketing super power.
Think about it: aren’t you more likely to respond to marketing if you see it when you actually need it?
You’re a lot more likely to click on that “Spirit Halloween” ad on October 30th than you are on November 1st, after all.
It’s the exact same thing with motivated sellers:
They are far more likely to respond to a marketing campaign when they are actually motivated to sell.
Before a seller wants to sell, they don’t care about your marketing at all.
After they’ve sold, they couldn’t care less about your homebuying business.
It is only when they are looking to sell that you have an opportunity to close the deal.
I’ve often said that truly motivated sellers are a bit like fireflies:
They flicker in and out of existence very quickly. If you want to catch one, your best chance is when they’re lit up….
But once that light goes out, good luck.
This is basic stuff, but investors often forget how crucial timing is to their entire business model.
And this is why Google Search Ads are still KING for finding motivated seller leads online:
They have a problem, and they are actively looking for a solution.
We are hitting the person at exactly the right time.
And that’s why Google Search Ads produce one of the best close rates of any real estate investing marketing channel, year after year after year.
Timing isn’t the only reason to consider PPC in your marketing stack:
Instant website traffic: as opposed to SEO, you can start driving traffic to your site with PPC today. One major benefit is that if you absolutely need leads (like, right now), you can start driving traffic to your website and collecting leads (assuming you have a good website, and are targeting the right traffic, and running the right ad).
Extremely measurable stats (even for novices): even if you’re a newbie, most PPC platforms (like Facebook or Google) will provide data, and explanations of what each piece of data means. For example, Google will break down in a simple, visual way, how much each click is costing you, how many people have seen your ad, etc.
Quickly determine ROI in your market: one major benefit of running a PPC ad, is that you can quickly determine it’s ROI (return on investment) in a short amount of time. In maybe 1 month (shorter or longer depending on your budget, ad content, and campaign setup) you can get a fairly good idea of how much it costs you to acquire a lead from paid advertising. The platform you work with will usually show you stats like: $25 per click, $250/lead. You then can measure how many of those leads end up converting. If a lead costs you $250, and it takes 10 to convert, then you’re closing a deal for every $2500 you spend. If that makes great profit, then double down on these ads (because they’re sure to end up costing more as time goes on).
They can be improved over time: another benefit is that after you’ve figured out an ad set that brings you leads on a regular basis, you can go to work making it more efficient. That’s what we’ve done for years at Adwords Nerds, finding out things like what headlines convert better, what landing page layouts convert better, and more. By tweaking your ad content, audience, budget, campaign, and landing page, you can either raise or decrease the cost of each click or lead of your campaigns (within reason).
Does this mean that Google PPC is ALWAYS going to be the best marketing channel for EVERY investor?
Of course not.
Competition varies, strategies vary, market conditions vary
(and I’m going to show you how to understand all of those later in this guide).
But, for my money?
Google PPC remains the single most powerful marketing channel in real estate investing, period.
A lot of investors may be asking, “which is better: PPC campaigns, or mailers?”
Many investors expect me to come out and bash direct mail. After all, I’m the “Google Ads For Investors” guy, right?
It isn’t like that at all. I think direct mail is an incredible marketing channel for investors. There’s a REASON that direct mail has been the primary marketing channel in REI for several decades.
So, which is best for you?
It depends on your budget, your market, your website, and your goals.
PPC will provide much more measurable data (how many people saw, clicked, converted, etc.), down to the penny, of what each lead is costing you.
Another benefit of PPC is that you’ll be able to land in front of motivated sellers at the exact moment they’re looking for services like yours.
For example, if you use Google Ads (also known as Google AdWords), and run search campaigns for keywords like “sell house fast Cleveland”, then your ad will be shown to searchers exactly when they type that in, and therefore are in a state of mind to click over to view your services. This is different than running Facebook ads, where you’re essentially interrupting them to tell them about your services. Yes, they may be interested, but not at the moment.
And mailers are the same way: you may indeed be targeting homes that are run down or in need of work, or that are located within your targeted service area, but how do you know whether they are actually ready to sell, or interested in what you offer? For this reason alone, I’d say that PPC definitely has a leg up for it’s measurability, and ability to end up in front of people at the right time. But at the end of the day, it’s up to you.
Finally, let me just say, you don’t have to think in terms of either/or. In other words, you can run PPC ads, and run mailers. In fact, that’s what I encourage most of my clients to do.
Now that you understand why Google Ads are such a powerful tool for finding motivated seller leads, let’s start at the beginning:
What is Google PPC, anyway?
Whenever you start talking about Google Ads for Real Estate Investors, a lot of terms start getting thrown around. The whole thing can get very confusing very fast – not to mention the fact that many investors regularly mix these terms up!
To start, let’s define two critical terms: PPC and Google Ads.
PPC stands for “pay per click”, and is a type of direct, online advertising. As the name suggests, it’s a method of direct marketing where you pay (auction or bid style) for every click over to your chosen URL.
“PPC” is a generic term. If someone says they’re doing “PPC,” that could mean a variety of things: that they’re running ads on Facebook, or Microsoft Ads (formerly known as “Bing,”), Google Ads, or ads on any number of lesser-known platforms (LinkedIn! Reddit! Instagram! TikTok! etc.)
“Google Ads,” or “Google PPC,” specifically refers to advertising on Google’s own platform.
Within the “Google Ads” umbrella, there are actually several different advertising options:
Google Search Ads, which are what most people think of when they think “Google Ads.” These are the ads that are displayed above and below the search results when you type something into the Google Search bar.
The image above shows a Google Search Engine Results Page (sometimes called “SERPS”). Everything in the red box are Google Search ads.
However, Google Search Ads aren’t the only game in town.
As part of Google PPC campaign you can include “Google Search Partners.” “Search Partners” includes ads that show up in reach results on non-Google sites.
This is a pretty diverse group of placements, which can include anything from ads that show up in YouTube and Amazon search to sites like the New York Times or the Guardian, which use Google to power their own in-house search functions.
Google also offers the Google Display Network, which are third-party websites (i.e., not Google itself) that choose to show Google ads somewhere in the layout of their site.
The above images shows a website that includes Google Display Network ads. Everything in the red boxes is a Google Display Network ad.
Google owns YouTube, and so Google Ads also include YouTube Ads as part of the Display Network.
The above image shows examples of YouTube Ads. Everything in the red boxes is a YouTube Ad.
I realize that’s a lot to keep track of, so let’s keep this really simple:
For the vast majority of real estate investors, plain-vanilla Google Search Ads are going to be their best advertising channel.
Why?
The leads from Google Search are consistently better quality and close more often.
Not only that, but Google search ads are relatively easy to set up (as opposed to YouTube ads, which require video production expertise).
For most investors, the best way to break into Google PPC for motivated sellers is to focus their budget and strategy on Google Search, then expand to other parts of the channel as things evolve.
Now that we know what we’re talking about when we talk about Google PPC, let’s dive into HOW we target motivated sellers in Google Search.
Valuable PPC Terms Real Estate Investors Need To Know:
Impressions: What occurs when your ad is visible on someone’s screen. For example, if I google “sell my house fast” and your ad appears on the top of the Google search results page, this will register as 1 “impression.”
Clicks: What occurs when someone clicks on your ad. Note that this often results in a visit to your webpage, but not always; for example, someone might click a phone number in order to call you directly via mobile phone.
Conversions: A goal that you are tracking inside your Google PPC account. Conversions is often interchangeable with “lead” for most real estate investors, and lead generation (form fills, phone calls, texts, chats initiated, etc) are the most common conversions tracked. However, “conversion” could refer to any goal that is being monitored; for example, a visitor spending a certain amount of time on your webpage (regardless of whether or not they contact you).
Landing Page: Whatever webpage you send people to after they click your ad. Many real estate investors send visitors to their homepage, but occasionally a specialized landing page is used, as when you develop a special page just for visitors from a particular area or advertising campaign.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR): The percentage of people that clicked your ad after seeing it. For example, if an ad received 100 impressions and 5 clicks, the “Click Through Rate” would be 5%.
Conversion Rate (CR): The percentage of people that converted after visiting your landing page. For example, if 100 people visited your landing page, and 10 converted, your Conversion Rate would be 10%.
Cost-Per-Clcik (CPC): The average cost to generate a single click over a given period of time. CPC can be measured at the keyword level, ad group level, campaign level, or even channel level (as in, “Google’s CPC is actually lower than Facebook’s in my market!”). CPC is an indirect measure of competitiveness, since Google Ads operate as an auction: the more competitors, the higher the CPC will be on average.
How, exactly, do we target motivated sellers with Google Ads?
Google Search Ads use keywords as their primary mechanism.
Most people have a basic understanding of what keywords are and how they work – but the reality is a bit more complicated than that.
To start, let’s discuss the difference between keywords and search terms.
A “search term” is whatever someone types into Google.
If I go on Google.com and type in “which president had big hat,” that exact string of words is my search term. Straight forward, right?
But keywords are different.
Keywords ate NOT what someone types into Google.
A keyword is a way of telling Google what kinds of people we want to target with our ads.
It’s a targeting mechanism, and because of that the way you use keywords will have a big effect on the kind of results you get.
There are a few different types of keywords, and using the right types in the right contexts can be the difference between profitable generating motivated seller leads and deals and going broke.
Let’s dig in.
Types of Keywords
There are three basic types of keywords you need to know:
Broad Match Keywords (which are written without any punctuation, as in: which president had big hat)
Phrase Match Keywords (which are written inside quotation marks, as in: “which president had big hat”)
and Exact Match Keywords (which are written inside brackets, as in: [which president had big hat])
Each keyword match type has a specific set of uses, as well as certain benefits.
Broad Match Keywords
Broad Match Keywords are the widest-ranging and most variable keyword type. You can think of a broad match keyword as a general theme. When you give Google a broad match keyword, it goes out and tries to match your ads with people using search terms that are broadly associated with that theme.
For example, if you use the broad match keyword sell my house in a Google PPC campaign, your ad could be matched up with people searching for:
sell house
Zillow
buy a house in my state
…and so on.
Google considers things like “Zillow” and “buy a house” as broadly related to theme of “selling a house,” so all these searchers would be considered a match for your keyword.
When should you use a broad match keyword?
Use broad matches when you’re trying to generate as much volume as possible, and are willing to accept some randomness as a result. Broad match keywords put you in front of the biggest possible audience…but they pull in some off-topic matches as a result.
Phrase Match Keywords
Phrase Match Keywords are right in the middle in terms of size of audience generated and the level of focus that audience has.
When you use a phrase match keyword, you are a specifying a group of terms that you want included in any search term Google matches you with.
For example, if your keyword is “sell my house,” you’re telling Google that the terms sell, my, and house should be present whenever they decide to show your ad.
Note that phrase match allows other terms to be added before, after, and in between those terms.
So, if you use the phrase match keyword “sell my house” in a Google PPC campaign, your ad could be matched up with people searching for:
sell house fast
I need to sell my house
I need a home to sell
sell a house in World of Warcraft
(Note that Google considers “close variants” like My/I, Home/House, Sell/Sale, etc, to be matches in this case).
Phrase match keywords are more specific than Broad Match keywords, and thus will have lower search volume overall. They’ll also generally be better-targeted and more on point, depending on how you structure them.
Exact Match Keywords
Exact Match Keywords are on the opposite-end of the focus-volume spectrum from Broad Match Keywords.
Exact Match Keywords give us the highest possible level of focus. Because of this, we end up with the smallest audience of the various match types.
This makes sense when you think about it. If I ask you to go outside right now and find me an adult, you’ll probably be able to do that. That’s a fairly generic request.
But if I ask you to go outside and find me a 6-foot tall Scandinavian woman with red hair, that’s going to be much more difficult. It’s an extremely specific request, and thus most people you meet aren’t going to qualify.
The same dynamic is at play with Exact Match Keywords.
“Exact Match” means that Google is only supposed to match up our ads with people who type in exactly what our keyword says, plus or minus some minor variations.
Exact Matches are denoted by brackets, so if my keyword is:
[I need to sell my house]
…Then Google should only show my ad when someone types that exact phrase into Google Search.
Note that this match type DOES allow for what Google deems “close matches.” This might include swapping out “house” for “home,” or “need” for “want.” It’s a bit uncertain how Google decides what constitutes a a “close match,” but it’s safe to say that it shouldn’t demonstrably change the intent of the keyword.
Because of their extreme level of focus, Exact Match Keywords tend to have higher Costs Per Click
(because other investors also know these keywords perform well, and are also targeting them. High competition levels + low volume = high prices).
However, Exact Match Keywords tend to have higher Click Through Rates and Conversion Rates, which means their average cost per lead actually averages out most of the time.
Think of Exact Match Keywords as a night out at a really, really nice restaurant. Yes, it’s going to be expensive, and yes, the portions are going to be small…but the food is going to be amazing, so overall you’re going to have a great time.
Now that we understand keyword match types, and how they influence our lead quality, let’s talk about picking the right motivated seller keywords.
One of the most common questions I get from real estate investors is “What keywords are you using to target motivated sellers?”
And look – it’s totally understandable for you to be looking for a specific list of keywords you can use to generate more motivated seller leads.
(And in fact, I’m going to give you one as part of this guide.)
But this questions reveals a critical misunderstanding about PPC for real estate investors actually works…
And if you can understand it, you’re going to have a huge leg-up on your competition.
You with me? OK, here we go.
Here’s the problem with question “What keywords are you using to target motivated sellers?”:
The investor asking this question is indicating that they think the secret to success in Google PPC for real estate investors is all about finding the “right keywords.”
But it isn’t.
This is going to go against what literally every other “Google Guru” has ever told you about this stuff, so give me a minute to explain myself, OK?
See, most people believe Google Ads are like a grocery store.
You walk in, browse around, pick out the stuff that looks good to you…
Then bring it up to the register to pay.
Some stuff costs a dollar, some stuff costs 4$, some stuff costs 20$.
You pay your money, take your stuff, and head home to make a delicious dinner.
Simple, straightforward, easy…Right?
It is…except that isn’t how Google Ads works.
Let’s imagine if Google Ads was a grocery store. What would that be like?
For one, the stuff on the shelf would change minute to minute.
Somedays, the Campbell’s soup is there…other days, it might not show up at all.
Secondly, the prices would always be changing depending on how many other people are in the store and want a particular item.
Busy shopping day? Lots of people looking to pick up a can of soup?
The cost for that can might be triple what it was just yesterday.
Even if you did manage to pick up the can of soup you wanted in the Google Ads Grocery Store
…it might not actually be soup in the can.
I know it says “Soup” on the label and everything, but every now and then you’re going to crack that baby open and find Cashews inside. No refunds.
And finally…just because something happened in your store doesn’t mean the same thing would be happening down the street.
Every single store would experience it’s own series of weird fluctuations and changes, independent of the others.
A typical grocery store is an example of a Clear System.
You know the rules, you know how everything works, and it works the same every time you go.
Clear Systems are predictable: put in a dollar, get a can of Campbell’s Soup.
But Google Ads isn’t a Clear System.
It’s a Complex System.
A Complex System is one in which the elements of the system interact…and in so doing, change the underlying rules of the game.
Complex Systems are largely unpredictable: put in a dollar, get a can of soup with cashews inside.
A real life example of a complex system is the stock market.
In the stock market, prices go up and down over time depending on what other people think of a particular stock.
Apple’s got a new iPhone coming out tomorrow?
Stock price goes up.
New iPhone doesn’t have a camera and requires you to type with your nose?
Stock price goes down.
(I made that up, by the way – don’t sell all your stock just yet.)
What’s more, the individual actions of all the people investing in stocks can create wildly unpredictable events.
My favorite example is the Flash Crash of 2010.
This was a trillion-dollar stock market crash.
What caused it?
No one really knows, but as far as we can tell, it was just computer programs with automated buy-sell programs setting each other off.
Totally unpredictable, totally random…
But still enough to send the entire economy reeling for about 36 minutes.
That’s what you get when you work inside complex systems.
Now, let’s bring this back to our original question:
“What keywords are you using to target motivated sellers?”
Take a moment and think about the stock market metaphor we’ve been playing with.
If I came up to you and said:
“Listen, friend, have I got an offer for you. I’m going to give you the exact list of stocks purchased by the world’s most successful stock investors. I will tell you EXACTLY what they purchased 2 years ago in order to make their millions today.”
…Is that a compelling offer?
NO!
Because what people bought 2 years ago doesn’t matter today!
By now, the market will have shifted. If people made lots of money on a stock, then public perception will have caught up, and the valuation (and thus, cost) of that stock will have risen. You can’t make money buying stock that was underpriced – you need to buy stocks that are underpricing today!
This is the same problem with keywords in Google Ads.
If there was some incredibly profitable keyword that made investors filthy rich, how long would it be before everyone found out about it?
Not long.
And once everyone found about it, what would they do?
Start to bid on it themselves.
And if everyone started to bid on it, what would happen?
….the cost would go up.
All of a sudden, that “sweet deal” of a keyword isn’t such a sweet deal, anymore.
Add to this the problem of location.
It is simply not the case that every keyword performs the same in every market.
Where you invest – which towns, cities, counties and states you target – will have a massive impact on the performance of a given keyword.
Some keywords are incredible in some markets and poor performers in another. Competition varies wildly, costs vary wildly, and volume varies wildly.
And finally, there’s one BIG complication that everyone ignores:
Most people just type in “sell my house.”
Look – we have seen time and time again, that real estate investing is a “short tail” industry.
That means that the vast majority of searches are concentrated in a small number of keywords.
That’s because the person who’s ultra-motivated and needs to sell their house tomorrow….
And the person who’s kicking tires, thinking of moving in a few years, and is just curious about what they could get…
…both type “sell my house” into Google most of the time.
Sellers are just not typing in “I want to sell my house to a real estate investor and I’m willing to take 70 cents on the dollar” into the Google Search Bar. It doesn’t happen.
See, marketers have told investors that people do that. People are always going on and on about “long tail keywords”, these sort of rare, hard-to-find, ultra-specific keywords that are supposed to be where all the best deals are hiding.
That advice doesn’t come from real estate. It comes from ecommerce, where there ARE a lot of long tail keywords. If you’re selling shoes, people might be searching for different styles, sizes, colorways, etc. All of these variations are potentially valuable keywords to target.
But real estate is different. People aren’t searching about selling a particular type of house. They aren’t searching, typically, about a particular reason for selling.
They just type in “sell my house,” because that’s what they want to do.
What all this means is that keyword selection is much less of a big deal in REI than it is for most other industries.
Now, am I saying that keyword selection is meaningless? Am I saying that you should just throw “sell my house” into your Google Ads account and be done with it.
Not at all. Keyword selection can have a big impact on whether your close deals or not, and there’s an art and science to doing it well.
But there is no magic list of keywords that will guarantee your success.
There is no secret keywords where all the motivated sellers are hiding.
There’s no proprietary keyword strategy that the big dogs have that you don’t.
See, most investors assume that keywords are the end-all be-all of PPC for real estate investors.
If someone starts with Google Ads and does well, they think it means they picked the right keywords.
And if they get started with Google Ads and have difficulty, that must mean their keyword list is bad.
This kind of thinking leads investor after investor down complete blind alleys and dead ends, always looking for a better keyword list, always trying to find that magic keyword that will solve all their problems.
The only way you find what works in your market right now is through vigorous experimentation and optimization.
That’s it.
It takes work and it’s hard…but in the end, it is worth it.
And I should know – that is literally what we spend most of the day doing at AdWords Nerds.
OK, now that you understand the problem with obsessing over keywords….
How do you pick the best keywords for finding motivated sellers?
As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to give you a list to start with in this section.
But I also want you to understand the reasoning behind that list, so you can add your own keywords as you go.
The thing that makes some keywords better than others for targeting motivated sellers is intent.
“Intent” refers to what we can figure out about what’s going on in the searcher’s head, purely based on what they type in.
For example, if I type something like “pizza place near me” into Google, it’s safe to assume that I’m probably looking for local pizza places.
Likewise, if I type in “new-york style pizza place near me,” you can assume I’m not only looking for any old pizza place, but specifically a New-York style pizza place.
(Connecticut has the world’s best pizza, by the way. Don’t @ me.)
From the example above, you can pull a few general rules for figuring out intent:
1. The more terms within the search, the more specific it is.
(Typing in “new-york style pizza place near me” has more terms, and is more specific, then searching for “pizza place.”)
2. The more specific the search, the more motivated the searcher.
(Someone typing in “new-york style pizza place near me,” is probably more serious about getting pizza right now than someone who simply types in “pizza place.”)
3. If the search term includes intention clues, the searcher is likely to be more motivated.
An “intention clue” is any word that directly indicates intent.
Possible intention clues for motivated sellers might include:
Fast
Now
For Cash
…and so on.
Pulling all this together, we can deduce that the highest motivation-level keywords will generally:
Using this general rule, we can figure out that the keyword “sell my house fast for cash” will generally produce more motivated leads than the keyword “sell my house.”
Motivation, Volume, and Trading Off Between The Two
Now that we know how to figure out which keywords will produce motivated seller leads, shouldn’t we just target only the MOST motivated, specific keywords?
Not necessarily.
If you’ll recall our conversation about match types, as the specificity of a keyword increases, it’s volume generally decreases.
In short, there are FAR more people typing in “sell my house” in any given market than are typing in “sell my house fast for cash.”
That includes motivated sellers, by the way. Remember: most people, regardless of motivation level, type in basic variations of any keyword.
There’s another issue with hyper-specific motivated seller keywords:
Marketers.
As my friend Patty Dalessio often says, “Marketers ruin everything.” And that’s the case with motivated seller keywords, as well.
Because everyone knows that investors want highly motivated leads….
AND everyone knows that very specific keywords generated highly motivated leads….
Marketers will often search for motivated seller keywords in order to find investors targeting those keywords. They will then reach out to pitch you on their services, offer you their wholesale deals, ask to “take you out to lunch” so they can “pick your brain” about real estate investing, and so on.
This is what’s behind a lot of people’s issues with “spam leads” in Google Ads. They solely target overly-specific, investors-only keywords…and get swarmed by marketers and wholesalers for their trouble.
For any keyword selection you make, you have to consciously make a tradeoff between focus and volume.
Highly focused keywords will produce highly motivated leads on average…but there are FAR less of them to go around.
Broadly focused keywords will produce less motivated leads…but you’ll have way more opportunities in the process.
Which strategy is right for you?
To be completely transparent, it largely depends on your market.
Highly-populated urban and metro areas can often get by with only highly-focused keywords. They have so many people in their target area that the lower volume isn’t really an issue.
On the other hand, urban and metro areas are often higher-competition as well, which can raise prices to an absurd level.
Rural and less-populated areas will often need the extra volume that broadly-focused keywords can bring just to hit a decent lead volume over the course of a month.
However, every market’s different. Las Vegas and Washington D.C., for example, often have extreme “out of area” lead quality issues due to the large amount of travel into and out of the area. This requires a stricter targeting approach than you might otherwise prefer.
Bringing It All Together: Keyword and Match Type Selection For Real Estate Investors
When you combine keyword match types with keyword selection, you have a fair amount of control when it comes to targeting your ads in Google.
Let’s take two classic motivated seller keywords that have stood the test of time:
Sell My House Fast
and
We Buy Houses
Both of these keywords have their strengths and weaknesses, but they will show up in almost any motivated seller lead generation campaign.
Assuming that we are building a traditional, control-based campaign, each of these keywords would be placed inside it’s own “Ad Group” (essentially, a folder inside your Google Ads campaign).
We can then target multiple variations of each keyword.
For example, we could target multiple match types AND long-tail variations using our target market:
Ad Group 1
“Sell My House Fast” (Phrase match)
“Sell My Connecticut House Fast” (Phrase match)
Ad Group 2
“We Buy Houses” (Phrase match)
“We Buy Houses In Connecticut” (Phrase match)
Similarly, if we want to cast a wider net, we could use broad match keywords (which will produce the highest volume of clicks, but also the most noise).
In that case, I’d likely combine the two keywords into a single ad group.
Ad Group 1
Sell My House Fast (Broad match)
We Buy Houses (Broad match)
Note that, because we’re using broad match keywords, variations like “In Connecticut” will automatically be included.
Either of these approaches would be completely viable, depending on the market you’re in and the state of your competition.
OK, so now you understand what Google Ads is all about – why it’s important, why it ISN’T like a grocery store, and how to target motivated sellers efficiently.
Now it’s time to dig into one of the more complex aspects of Google Ads:
The Auction.
You’ve heard me say multiple times that Google Ads is much more like the stock market than anything else. Well, the Ads Auction is why that is.
Every time someone searches for something online – whether it’s Nike Shoes or who was the president with the top hat, an auction is taking place.
In the blink of an eye, Google is processing every bid placed on those keywords by any number of advertisers. For a keyword like Nike Shoes, that might be hundreds of companies.
Google quickly takes into account multiple factors – historical click through rate of every ad, advertiser bids, algorithmic changes to those bids, landing page quality, and more (all of which I’ll be explaining to you here) – and instantly sorts everyone’s ads into the order you see on the screen after your search.
This happens over and over again, millions of times a day. Each time, it’s a little bit different – competitors drop out or run out of money, automated rules kick in that raise or lower bids, ad’s stop or start on a schedule – but for the searcher, the entire process is seamless. It’s all pretty wild.
Understanding how the auction works is important for understanding what strategy makes the most sense for you.
After all, the auction in your market is the primary determinant of what it costs you to generate a lead or a deal. Smart bidding = cheaper leads = better results.
So, how does the Google Ads auction work for real estate investors, anyway?
It’s Not ALL About The Money: Bids, Cost Per Click, and Quality Score
The exact processes and algorithms behind the Google auction are a secret. Google’s not keen on giving away exactly how everything works.
However, we understand enough to have a basic picture of how things work.
Imagine a simplified auction for the keyword “sell my house.”
In this hypothetical scenario, there are only two investors bidding on this particular keyword.
In the simplest version of this auction, each investor chooses an amount that represents the most they’re willing to pay for a click from someone typing that keyword into Google. This is known as their Maximum Bid.
Investor A places a Maximum Bid of $10.
Investor B places a Maximum Bid of $6.
Because Investor A bid more than Investor B, their ad will show up in the top spot, and Investor B’s ad will show up in the spot below.
Imagine that someone clicks on Investor A’s ad in this case. What will they end up paying?
They won’t end up paying $10 – their original bid – because, remember, that represented the most they would be willing to pay.
Because your actual cost per click is determined by the bid below yours, Investor A will likely end up paying something like $6.50 (an incremental amount above Investor B’s bid).
So, in this case, Investor A bid $10, beat out the next highest bid of $6, and ended up paying around $6.50 for the click.
Remember, however, that this was a hypothetical scenario. Google actually wouldn’t want it’s ads to run this way.
Why not?
Because in this type of auction, whomever bids the most will always win.
Though this sounds like it would be good for Google, it doesn’t turn out that well in practice. Google realizes that they will make the most money over time if they show searchers the ads that best serve their needs.
While the advertiser with the most money will sometimes also be the one who best serves the searcher’s needs, that won’t always be the case.
So how do we create an auction environment that doesn’t always just default to “who pays the most, wins”?
Quality Score.
Quality Score is Google’s attempt to factor in something other than “who’s willing to throw giant wads of cash in Google’s direction.” Whether they succeed or not is up for debate, but understanding why Quality Score exists (and how it works) will help you optimize your own ads for cheaper leads and better performance.
Think of Quality Score as a multiplier. You have your Maximum Bid, set at whatever you like. Then, instead of going straight into the auction, you multiply your Maximum Bid by your Quality Score.
Let’s take our hypothetical example from earlier:
Investor A places a Maximum Bid of $10.
Investor B places a Maximum Bid of $6.
The first time we ran this experiment, Investor A got top placement, and Investor B got second-place.
Now, however, let’s factor Quality Score into the mix.
Say Investor A has a quality score of 5 (a tiny bit less than average).
And say Investor B has a Quality Score of 10 (the highest you can go).
Before we decide who wins the auction, let’s multiply their bids by the Quality Scores:
Investor A places a Maximum Bid of $10, with a Quality Score of 5.
10$ X 5 = 50.
Investor B places a Maximum Bid of $5, with a Quality Score of 10.
$6 X 10 = 60.
Because Investor A’s combined score is 50, and Investor B’s combined score is 60, Investor B now gets the top spot for their ad.
Here’s what this all boils down to:
All other things being equal, higher Quality Scores allows you to get better ad placements for less. They essentially make your auction dollars go further than they would otherwise.
That’s why Quality Score is important for real estate investors to understand:
In a hyper-competitive industry like real estate investing, you’re going to be regularly competing with hedge funds, iBuyers, and various other companies that have no problem whatsoever dropping millions of dollars of marketing spend into your target market.
Paying attention to Quality Score can level the playing field and allow you to compete where you otherwise might be shut out.
Getting a Leg Up: Improving Your Quality Score
“OK,” I hear you saying, “I get it – Quality Score can help me find more motivated seller leads online. But how do I improve my Quality Score?”
And there’s the rub: Quality Score is an infamously finicky metric to improve.
For one, I think that Google consistently gives real estate investors a lower than average Quality Score.
Google SAYS this isn’t true, but what I can tell you is that, after having personally looked at hundreds of different investor campaigns…lower than average scores are more common than high ones. That includes campaigns that are absolutely crushing it.
Secondly, even if you’re not starting off at a disadvantage, Quality Score is a lagging indicator. It can takes days, weeks, or months before changes you make inside your campaign are reflected in your quality score.
All that adds up to make Quality Score (which I’m going to abbreviate as “QS” from now on to save myself some typing) a tough nut to crack.
So – How do you improve QS?
Quality Score is broken down into three components:
Landing Page Experience
Ad Relevance
Expected Click Through Rate
You can view these components inside your Google Ads account:
Quick note: only Keywords can have a Quality Score, so you can only view QS numbers when you’re in the Keywords section of your account!
Let’s explore each of these elements in turn.
Landing Page Experience is all about whether or not your website provides a “good experience” to the person who clicks your ad.
What does “good experience” mean, exactly? Google is a bit vague about the exact criteria they use. From their own support documents:
“You should make sure your landing page is clear and useful to customers, and that is related to your keyword and what customers are searching for. All these factors can play a role in determining your landing page experience status.”
In practice, here’s what I look for when analyzing Landing Page Experience:
It’s possible to drive yourself nuts worrying about all the little things that Google’s looking at.
For my money, the only landing page metric that really matters is Conversion Rate. If people are converting, the page is working just fine, thank you very much.
Ad Relevance is all about whether your ad fits with what Google thinks the searcher is looking for.
For example, if you are advertising your home buying services on the keyword “Nike Shoes For Sale,” it’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to meet that searcher’s needs. Google will thus determine that your ad is not relevant to the searcher, and penalize you accordingly.
The above example may seem a bit goofy – “I’m a real estate investor, I’d never bid on a keyword about shoes!” – but keep in mind that broad match and phrase match keywords can get your ad in front of an incredibly wide variety of people if you’re not careful. I would not be surprised at all if the broad match keyword property for sale got matches up with Nike Shoes for sale – after all, in Google’s “mind,” shoes are just another type of property!
What does Google have to say about Ad Relevance?
“‘Ad relevance’ measures how closely your keyword matches the message in your ads. A below average score may mean that your ads are too general or specific to answer the user’s query, or that this keyword isn’t relevant to your business.”
There are two keys to improving Ad Relevance: selecting the right keywords and tailoring your ads.
The first is relatively self-explanatory. If your keywords are putting you in front of the wrong people, it won’t matter if you’re the greatest real estate investor who ever lived – you’re never going to be deemed “relevant.” This is one of the potential drawbacks of wider-focused keyword match types like Broad and Phrase match.
(Note: if you’re using these broader targeting methods, one of the best ways to make sure you’re getting in front of motivated sellers is to use an effective list of negative keywords for real estate investors).
The second method for improving your Ad Relevance is to tailor your ads to the keywords you’re targeting. Instead of using generic language, use language that specifically speaks to people using your target keyword. Instead of using the same ad over and over again, create tailored ads for every ad group you create.
People using different keywords will respond to different things. Often, they will be more likely to click on an ad that uses the exact language they used when searching. Keep this in mind when creating your ads: more specific language means higher relevancy, more clicks, and more leads.
Expected Click Through Rate is the final element which makes up your Quality Score. This is an interesting one.
Unlike the other elements of QS, which look specifically at things that you are doing in your account, Expected CTR looks at the performance of your ad as compared to the performance of your competitors in that same ad position.
Let’s say that you’re bidding on the keyword “sell my house.” Most of the time, you’re showing up in position 3.
Now, you won’t always be in position 3. You have competition, and sometimes they show up in that position instead of you.
With Expected CTR, Google looks at the percentage of people that click your ad when you’re in position 3, and compares it to the percentage of people that click your competitor’s ad when they’re in position 3.
If your competitor is more likely to generate a click in that same position, Google rewards them with a higher QS. Why? Because Google only gets paid when someone’s ad gets clicked! More likely to get clicks = more likely to get Google paid, and Google likes getting paid.
You can improve your Expected CTR by creating ads that are more likely to get clicks. What kind of ads are more likely to get clicks?
Basically, the more likely people are to click your ad, the better your ad is going to do.
Now that we’ve examined what the Google Ads Auction is, why understanding it is critically important for real estate investors, and how investors can use the rules of the auction to level the playing field against much bigger competition…
Let’s talk about how you actually get involved in the auction:
Bidding Strategies.
Placing your bids on a motivated seller keyword in Google PPC has gotten alot more complicated in the past few years.
There used to only be one or two viable strategies for the average investor. Real Estate Investing has always been, on average, a relatively low volume market. That meant that a lot of the “fancier” bidding strategies routinely underperformed in real estate investing.
(In fact, one of the ways I used to be able to tell if a particular “Google PPC Guru” was full of it or not was by whether or not they recommended some of these fancy-pants bidding strategies. If they did, that meant that they only knew “best practice” – and hadn’t actually tested it out with real investors).
However, times change, and the possibilities for real estate investors to get involved in Google PPC have changed as well.
For one, Google has come a long way in improving the accuracy and efficiency of some of their bidding algorithms. It used to be that any human could outperform the algorithm if there wasn’t a ton of data for Google to feed on. The required amount of data needed for Google to optimize has come down significantly in recent years, changing that calculus a bit.
Secondly, Google has changed a variety of features inside Google Ads that have pushed advertisers towards more “algorithmic” options. They’ve reduced the amount of data advertisers get on what, exactly, people are searching for when they see their ads. They’ve reduced or even removed match types, limiting your options for dialing them in. They’ve also widened what they consider a “close match,” meaning that even Exact Match Keywords target more broadly today than they did a few years ago.
All of this adds up to a shifting PPC landscape for investors looking for motivated seller leads. Change is the name of the game in online marketing, and ultimately, it is the companies that adapt the best to those shifting conditions that come out on top.
As a result, I’m going to be covering a wide array of bidding strategies, all of which have worked for us while generating motivated seller leads for our clients. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, and which one ends up being the right match for you will depend largely on your market, your budget, your risk tolerance, and your close rate.
Types Bid Strategies: Manual vs. Algorithmic
You can broadly lump bid strategies into two categories: Manual, and Algorithmic.
You can think of Manual Bid Strategies as anything where you set your bids yourself. You make the decision, you punch in the numbers.
Algorithmic Bid Strategies, on the other hand, are strategies where Google ultimately sets the bids for you. You will often set constraints on what Google can do – for example, by setting a maximum amount you’re willing to spend, or a target that Google should aim for – but by and large, you are letting Google take the wheel and hoping for the best.
Let’s start by looking at Manual Strategies.
Manual Bid Strategies
Manual CPC
Manual CPC refers to “Manual Cost-Per-Click.” That means that we are directly our maximum bids for every keyword ourselves.
This approach gives you, the real estate investor, the most control over where your money goes. You can set a specific bid, down to the penny, for every keyword you like.
Because it’s highly control-focused, Manual CPC works best with account builds that focus on Exact and Phrase match keywords. That way, you can really dial in your bids based on the quality of clicks you expect a keyword to produce.
Imagine an ad group in which you are targeting the following keywords:
[sell my house fast]
“sell my house fast”
While these are technically the same keyword, they use different match types. As a result, the phrase match variation (“sell my house fast”) will produce a higher volume and wider variety of clicks than the exact match variation ([sell my house fast]).
Using the Manual CPC bidding strategy, you can factor this into what you pay. For example, if the keyword “sell my house fast” is currently being bid at $10 per click, you may want to bid more for the exact match variation. After all, we know that low volume and high competition levels often drive prices up for exact match variations.
There’s another reason we may want to bid more for an exact match keyword: they tend to generate higher-performing traffic. Exact match traffic tend to click more, convert more, and close more (see our section on keyword targeting to understand why).
The downside to Manual CPC? Labor. To get the most out of this strategy, you need to manually set every bid, which means really needing to pay attention to the individual performances of every keyword you’re targeting.
If you don’t do that – say, if you just set one bid for all your keywords and forget about it – you’re giving up the single biggest advantage this strategy has (control).
This strategy works best if you’re not targeting a huge area, have relatively low search volume, and are paying a lot of attention to your account.
This is not a good strategy if you’re planning to “set and forget.” In fact, just don’t do that at all, OK?
Manual CPC also suffers a bit when you’re bringing high volumes of data, or if you’re using broad match keywords.
Data volume is an issue because it means crunching more and more numbers in order to make wise decisions, increasing the amount of work required.
Broad match keywords are a problem because many of the variations they generate are not visible to the advertiser, giving you less control over your individual bids.
Manual CPC With Enhanced CPC
Yes, I know I just said “CPC” twice, and yes it’s redundant. I didn’t name these things, OK?
Enhanced CPC is an optional setting available to you when using Manual CPC. It allows Google to dynamically raise your bids if the algorithm predicts a given searcher is more likely to convert.
This is kind of a half-way point between Manual and Algorithmic; you still set the bids manually, but Google is allows to bump them up whenever it sees an opportunity.
Manual CPC with ECPC enabled is my default starting bid strategy for most accounts. Why? It’s a nice balance of control and dynamic adjustment. It allows you to tap into Google’s algorithm for a boost when necessary, but the advertiser is still calling the shots.
Although I used the word “bump up” and “boost” to describe what this option does to your bids, let’s be clear: Enhanced cost per click gives Google A LOT of leeway. I’ve seen this option go so far as to double the manually-set bid. You should be aware of that when considering this option.
Still, even with Google occasionally getting a little over-zealous, I often find that ECPC increases the number of conversions generated from an average real estate investor’s PPC campaigns. That’s because even the best-meaning investor often under-manages a manual CPC campaign.
This is just a fact of life: we all pay less attention over time than we initially thought we would. Life happens, stuff gets complicated, and staring at our Google Ads Campaign for another hour becomes the last thing on our mind.
(By the way – this is one of the reasons that working with an online marketing agency dedicated to real estate investors can be a good idea. It’s all we do, so we don’t mind the grind.)
If you’re going with a Manual bidding strategy, starting with ECPC enabled is a good call. Monitor how it does, and if you don’t like it, you can always turn it off.
Algorithmic Bidding Strategies
Algorithmic bidding strategies are any strategies that rely on Google’s algorithm to dynamically set bids. They come in a variety of flavors, some of which make a lot of sense for investors…and others which don’t.
I will say this before we dig in: There is a lot of hype about this kind of thing in the real estate investing industry. Everybody’s talking about AI, machine learning, deep learning, etc.
And yes – sooner or later, this will be how all advertising is done. I really believe that.
But sooner or later isn’t now. It’s important that we deal with the technology we actually have TODAY, rather than the technology we expect to have years from now.
The fact is, Algorithmic Bidding Strategies don’t always work for real estate investors. Because REI is so focused on motivated sellers – a niche within a niche, and a tiny percentage of the overall housing market – and because the sale-to-close cycle can take so long, it can be very difficult for the average investor to utilize these tools.
That’s because all algorithmic bidding processes work best when they have a LOT of data.
Take an ecommerce store selling deodorant as an example. They might sell hundreds of sticks of deodorant a day, and thus have thousands of conversions for an algorithm to work with. That’s a lot of data, and a lot of opportunities to test.
A real estate investor working with motivated sellers, however, might only get 10-20 high quality leads a month, depending on their budget. Even if they close a deal from those leads, that close is likely to happen several weeks or several months after that person converted from website visitor to lead.
This makes the optimization process very slow and very difficult, even for a company as advanced as Google.
I’m not saying these strategies don’t work – and I’m going to explain to you exactly how investors can use them. What I am saying is that these strategies are still largely situational, aren’t right for everybody, and that you need to whatever hype that online marketing dude on YouTube is trying to sell you with an absolutely massive grain of salt.
Cool? Cool. With that out of the way, let’s explore some of the best algorithmic bidding strategies for real estate investors.
Maximize Clicks
This bidding strategy does what it says on the tin: tries to get you as many clicks as humanly possible.
Clicks are an odd thing to focus on. After all, clicks cost you money…and just because you got a click does not mean that click is going to turn into a lead.
Maximizing clicks can make sense for real estate investors in a few scenarios, however:
When you’re very tightly focused. If you’re only running a few very specific exact match keywords, maximizing clicks can make sense. You won’t be worried about optimizing for the wrong people, because you’re maintaining a high degree of control over who’s seeing your ads.
When you’re seeding a dataset. You might optimize for clicks if your area is low-volume and optimizing for conversions doesn’t make sense for you. At least, while using clicks, you can start to feed Google’s understanding of your account.
You might also use this option if you want to speed up a back-end test that’s moving slowly – a landing page split-test, for example.
Maximize Conversions
Maximize conversions simply tells Google to go out and get you as many leads as possible within your budget.
This is a popular option used in Google PPC accounts targeting motivated sellers. A potential drawback of this approach is that you place no constraints on what Google can bid for a given conversion, as long as it’s within your budget. This can lead to inflated lead costs.
That said, Maximize Conversions is often the best choice of the algorithmic bidding options for investors. Why? Because most investors will lack the lead volume need to effectively utilize bidding options like Target CPA and Target ROAS, which I’ll explain below.
Target CPA
“CPA” in this context stands for “Cost Per Acquisition” – essentially, your cost per conversion. Since most investors count the generation of a lead as a conversion, this boils down to “cost per lead.”
In the Target CPA bidding strategy, you give Google a certain target cost you want to spend, on average, for a lead. Google will then look at the auctions for the keywords you are targeting and try to find opportunities where it thinks it can get a conversion for that amount.
Target CPA is perhaps the second most common algorithmic bidding strategy for real estate investors, and it can often work well. It has a few important drawbacks, however:
If you don’t understand your market and back end numbers, you can underperform. This point is critical, so let’s examine it for a bit.
Costs-per-click in your market are dictated largely by the amount and intensity of competition you face. More competitors, spending more money? High CPC. Few competitors, with smaller budgets? Lower CPC.
Note that no one is checking with you about what you’d “like” to pay per lead. You may have a “target” price for Apple stock, but the market highly values Apple at the moment, you may never end up buying anything.
What this means is that if you set a Target CPA that is below the realm of possibility for your market at the moment, you will not generate much of anything in the way of leads.
Now, that might be a good thing, depending on what your backend numbers are.
I’m referring here to your overall close rate for online leads. Let’s say you close, on average, one of out every twenty leads you receive. Let’s also assume that your average profit per deal is $10,000.
If you pay $500 for every lead you receive, you will, on average, break even ($500 X 20 leads to close a deal = $10,000).
Anything less than that, and you’re making money. Anything MORE than that, and, well…it’s going to be a sad Christmas this year.
Understanding these numbers is critical to understanding whether you’re making or losing money, on average, with your marketing.
This may seem basic, but many investors ignore these numbers in the heat of competition. I’ve have multiple clients tell me they will pay “any amount” for leads in their market.
While I appreciate their gumption, those same clients will quickly change their tune once they see their bank accounts emptying out. No one can pay infinite money for leads; everything depends on the bottom line at the end of the day.
To effectively use Target CPA, then, you must understand both what is realistic for your market, given the competition you face, and your close rate for these leads on the backend. For these reasons, I prefer to switch to Target CPA once a campaign has had some time to mature, gather data, and establish a baseline of performance.
Target ROAS
“ROAS” stands for “return on ad spend.” With this strategy, you are telling Google to optimize for whatever keywords will produce the biggest bang for your buck.
This is a great strategy, but it was developed for industries with high numbers of conversions and very quick feedback loops for revenue. Imagine an online store selling Widgets; every check out would be a conversion, and could easily feed revenue data back to Google, allowing the algorithm to dial things in accordingly.
Real estate investing isn’t a great fit for this model. For one, the “sales cycle” in real estate investing is long, sometimes taking months to put a deal under contract. It takes even longer for actual revenue to be generated from a sale.
That means that long periods of time can elapse between Google making decisions about bids and the consequences of those decisions. Google tries to fill in the gaps with “data modeling,” which, as far as I can tell – and I’m not scientist, mind – just means “making things up.”
To compound the difficulties, REI lacks an easy way for feeding revenue back to Google. In an eCommerce scenario, check outs can be fed back to Google through Analytics; nothing as simple or fast exists in real estate as of this writing. This means that individual investors need to upload deal information into Google manually, and ensure that their data hygiene is 100% up to snuff, which is no small task.
Choosing The Right Strategy For You
Now that you know the ins and outs of the various bid strategies, how do you know which one is right for you?
I have a general rule of thumb:
For control based campaigns (i.e., lower volume), use Manual CPC with ECPC turned on.
For volume based campaigns (i.e., higher volume), use Maximize Conversions with ECPC turned off.
There are always exceptions, which it’s why it’s important to understand the pros and cons of each of your options.
What if you’re not sure which to use? My suggestion would be to run a Campaign Experiment and test the bidding strategies against one another!
Check out Google’s detailed help doc on testing bid strategies to learn more.