Content
How to Optimize a PPC Campaign for Real Estate: 10 Steps
February 15, 2024
15 mins
Take Google Ads optimization among your core competitive digital marketing advantages in real estate. Paid advertising is one of the best ways to connect with a wider number of interested home buyers and sellers. Approach Google Ads as a scalable marketing strategy that will help you position your real estate venture business directly in front of your prospects.
Promodo experts are highlighting the best-fit paid-per-click (PPC) tactics that will help you stand out from the competition, attract more potential customers, boost conversions, and leverage more market opportunities.
On average, paid ads generate $2 in return for every dollar spent. That’s why real estate businesses consider a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy as a sustainable option to surge the return on investment (ROI).
We’ve bet on Google Ads as the most popular PPC platform that allows setting marketing budgets and managing your ad campaigns effectively. This is the way of targeting specific keywords in your ads and paying when users are clicking on them.
Google Ads embrace useful tools, wider reach opportunities, and a user-friendly interface that all make it easy to engage qualified real estate leads. Today, Promodo PPC experts are sharing first-hand expertise on how to plan a PPC campaign for real estate.
Planning your PPC ad campaigns is of ultimate strategic importance while this is where your marketing budget is at stake.
First off, Google Ads works as an auction system. This means that whenever a user enters a search query, Google uses an auction to select the best ads it will show in search results. That’s why preliminary research of the keywords related to your local real estate offerings to bid on is an essential planning step.
The placement of your ad depends on the bid amount and ad quality. Herewith, you should determine the expected:
🧱 Click-through rate (CTR)
🧱 Ad relevance
🧱 Landing page experience.
Essentially, the Google Ads platform stands out in real estate owing to search intent. With that, users who see your ads are actively searching for real estate offers like yours. Local search intent plays a pivotal role in a customer journey. Google Ads will benefit you once you target the right local-oriented real estate keywords. That’s also how paid ads will convert interested users into your future clients.
Let’s dive deep into setting up paid ad campaigns to get the desired result. We are sharing the steps for Google PPC real estate as the finest approaches to paid advertising for realtors.
After setting Google Ads account for your real estate business, you’ll access billing, permissions, and actual campaigns you are running.
Arrange all your ad campaigns in ad groups to set a budget and target options conveniently. Importantly, each ad group entails a different set of segment-focused keywords. Once users match the keywords you’ve specified in those ad groups, your ads will show up in Google search right away.
Once your Google Ads account is on, think about the segments you cover and who’s your ideal customer.
That is to stress that you’ll target specific audiences in each real estate segment. Say, your ideal customer interested in investing in local properties will differ from Gen Z home buyers. A senior couple looking for a waterfront estate will be way different from the working-class Baby boomer seeking downtown rent.
Another great issue to highlight is whether you are targeting a single locale or several geographically dispersed areas. Essentially, the volume of your paid marketing strategy will depend on the demographics and geography you’ll target across your ad groups. With that, every single audience, neighborhood, and real estate segment will make up a separate ad group.
Google Trends will give you an idea of what types of real estate are most popular within a particular location and among individual audience groups. These segmentations will help you create categorical groups like ‘oceanfront condos in Palm Beach, Florida.’
Having identified your locations, you’ll have to spend a fair share of marketing effort on exploring niche-specific keywords in real estate.
Lacking an in-house marketing team, your only option is to deploy prominent keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or Free Keyword Tool. These feasible applications will provide you with a bunch of data on essential keyword metrics:
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All these metrics are vital to consider within the real estate segments you are targeting through paid search campaigns.
Primarily, we suggest exploring high-volume search terms, the ones your potential customers are most likely using when browsing for local properties and real estate services like yours.
For starters, 5-7 niches will be ok to launch your first real estate campaign.
All paid ad campaigns start in your Google Ads account after clicking the blue plus sign.
First things first, you should identify the right campaign objective. The campaign objective should comply with your strategic business goals in real estate.
In this highly competitive niche, we suggest starting your marketing journey with the Website traffic objective. This will help you drive more visitors to your real estate website.
Driving traffic to your real estate website will generate more conversions. You’ll get more qualified leads by aggregating customer information through form submissions.
Meanwhile, you may want to pursue the Brand awareness objective that will help you make your brand name more visible and recognized without driving more visits or leads to your website.
You may also boost wider user engagement by offering real estate app installations. Mobile-friendly applications will add credibility to your brand image and make you widely recognized.
In addition to 3D virtual tours, inspire physical visits to your local properties. Driving foot traffic to the properties you sell or rent will boost offline sales.
The Sales objective assumes applying bidding strategies aimed at clicks, assets, and ads designed to boost purchasing or conversions.
With these objectives in mind, Google makes certain actions with your campaigns. That’s when you can measure ad outcomes and optimize them for more advanced ad campaigns in the future.
Make sure, the name of your ad campaign speaks to your campaign objective like “Palm Beach – Search.”
Targeting locations, cities, and areas around them is an important step while Google will match your real estate offerings with people interested in local properties. With that, they may not be necessarily living in those precise locations. Your real estate ads will show up to anyone who’s searching your keywords regardless of their current whereabouts.
Targeting audience segments is the surest step to improve your real estate campaign efficiency. Audience segments will make your advertising effort hyper-focused on in-market audiences embraced by Google, i.e. consumers actively browsing for products or services and are about to order something online. Depending on your ad objective, you may choose “real estate” and opt for in-market audiences categorized as:
🧱 For sale
🧱 Commercial
🧱 Homeowner
🧱 For rent.
Our expert says: “Pursuing detailed demographics, you may differentiate your campaigns by homeowners or renters. Another feasible option is to set in-market targeting like residential properties. You may also target specific audience segments like first-time home buyers. Orest Fershtynskyi, PPC Expert at Promodo.
Setting up ad groups is a crucial measure to arrange your ads and keywords. The range of five to seven ad groups is enough to cover all location and audience segments you may target.
The name of your first ad group should start with a specific location, like Palm Beach, FL.
Selecting the right keywords to show up in your real estate ad campaign is how you match your real estate offerings with actual user demand for local properties:
🧱 Palm Beach homes for sale
🧱 Palm Beach property for sale
🧱 Palm Beach real estate
🧱 Palm Beach condos for sale
🧱 MLS Palm Beach
🧱 Houses for sale in Palm Beach
🧱 Zillow Palm Beach.
Our expert says: In real estate, the process of discovery is distinct and necessitates a significant investment in branded terms. Your prospects are searching for real estate brands to gather more information. With that, it’s crucial to recognize that the users searching for your specific brand name are likely to be your most promising leads. Seize the opportunity to leverage these lower-funnel searchers. If you choose not to bid on your owned brand keyword terms, two potential outcomes may unfold: (1) if competitors are purchasing your brand name, they may surpass your organic listing in search results; (2) real estate aggregators, covering both apartments and new homes, who bid extensively on brand terms and brand + city/state keywords, will readily claim the top position. Once a consumer clicks through, they are just one step away from exploring all your local competitors. Therefore, it's crucial to invest in brand terms to safeguard that coveted top spot on the page. Anastasiia Ilchenko, Senior PPC in Promodo.
Now you understand that Google displays your ads to search terms similar to the keywords you fill in your ads. There are, however, different match types signaling Google about determining the search terms related to your keywords
Broad match keywords like “Palm Beach FL homes for sale” constitute the default match type for Google Ads. The specificity here is that with the broad match Google will show your ads in search results for real estate queries similar the meaning of your keywords. However, these user queries may not necessarily contain the exact terms.
Phrase match keywords like “Palm Beach homes for sale” mean that in search results your ads will align with queries containing the exact phrase or a similar variant.
Exact match keywords like “Palm Beach FL Real Estate” show up in search results for queries matching the exact term or its meaning without any additional words.
Our expert says: To prevent an overuse of keyword matching, do your best to remove low-intent searchers. For each new campaign, apply the list along with the state negatives. Orest Fershtynskyi, PPC Expert at Promodo.
The good news with Google Search Ads is that you may adjust your keyword match types whenever you want once you feel your ads are not working properly.
Our primary advice here is to cut down on negative keywords. This will help you blacklist search terms. Tell Google you want to avoid showing search terms you’ve pointed out as negative keywords. That is how you are crossing out potential search queries your ideal real estate customer won’t browse:
🧱 Airbnb
🧱 Cheap
🧱 Commercial
🧱 Lease
🧱 Management
🧱 News
🧱 Rent
🧱 Rentals
🧱 Seasonal.
Our expert says: Establish a dedicated negative keyword list specifically tailored for both full state names and state abbreviations, i.e. Florida, FL. This approach will filter out numerous duplicate and untargeted searches. Remember to exclude the state and state abbreviation of your intended location before applying the list. Anastasiia Ilchenko, Senior PPC in Promodo.
Your job here is to craft responsive ads that combine various headlines and descriptions.
Fill your headlines with the real estate keywords you are targeting. That’s how Google will match your real estate offerings with what your potential clients are looking for.
Respond to the pain points sensed by your ideal real estate client and explain how you will solve their problem. There are various marketing magnets underway ranging from suggesting free home valuations or providing local property listings for sale.
Show real estate data and relevant real estate stats like
🧱 Actual or sold listings.
🧱 Local real estate benchmarks
🧱 Median home prices
Pin placements by positioning each headline as one, two, or three. Pins will help you keep your headlines well-ordered.
Write winning Google Ad descriptions filled with the most laconic business language and accompanied with numbers and calls to action (CTAs).
Use assets (former extensions) as extra bits of information that will make your real estate ads outstanding and appealing to customer intent. Sitelinks are the assets that provide additional links beneath your ad that will induce visitors to explore relevant sub-niches you are targeting in real estate.
Furthermore, listing out callouts is a good way to inform consumers about the nature of your real estate business:
🧱 First-time buyers
🧱 Luxury experts
🧱 Relocation
Meantime, you may also visualize calls, locations, and structured snippets with the indication of your targeted neighborhoods. These are strategically important assets to generate more quality real estate leads.
Google’s Ad Rank formula aligns with ad assets. Quality Score consists of:
🧱 Ad relevance
🧱 Estimated click-through (CTR)
🧱 Landing page experience
🧱 Ad format.
Getting your real estate prospect directly to the page will scale click-through rates (CTRs) and secure enhanced quality scores.
In addition to real estate value, we recommend embracing at least three ad assets per ad. Location assets are crucial for real estate as a primarily local-oriented business. Location extensions will help you hook nearby searchers with
🧱 The mileage to your location
🧱 Street address
🧱 Details page for the location (phone number, opening hours, property photos, customer ratings.
🧱 Sitelink extensions.
🧱 Price Extensions
🧱 An active call button.
Some of the top real estate players are actively using image assets to get their ads noticed, though those are available only to Google Ads accounts with more than 90 days.
Craft a user-friendly landing page to make sure that the users who click on your ad appear exactly where your best real estate offer is. That way, you are giving your potential customers exactly what they are looking for. If your ad group is focused on Palm Beach, and your ad promotes “Palm Beach homes for sale,” then your final URL should reveal active real estate listings in Palm Beach, Florida.
Generate leads with ad headlines like “free home valuations” that will take users to a landing page where they can easily approach valuation data on local real estate.
Setting a daily budget is among the most important strategic steps because that’s how Google will be using your marketing dollar. You may change budget settings anytime depending on demand shifts or seasonal market fluctuations.
There’s an array of possible bidding strategies in Google Ads:
Maximizing clicks is an automated bidding strategy set to bring you the maximum amount of clicks under your daily budget.
Maximizing conversions is a bidding strategy with automatic bids that will help you gain the maximum conversions under your daily budget.
Targeting cost per acquisition (CPA) will help you boost maximum conversions at the targeted CPA you’ve set.
While most of your competitors start their marketing journey in real estate by maximizing clicks, your primary task is to set up conversion tracking as the best way to gauge leads and sales. With optimized tracking of your ad performance, you’ll know how good are your real estate campaigns.
Regardless of spikes and falls in your marketing efforts, monitoring critical metrics is of ultimate importance to understand which real estate ads and ad groups are most effective:
The best-fit evaluation option is leveraging ad performance tools like Google Ads Performance Grader. With that, be sure to explore search advertising benchmarks that will provide you with the industry averages to pursue.
With continuous monitoring of the search terms that are triggering your ads, you’ll refine the selected keyword and cut down on negative keyword lists. With that, there is a bigger chance your real estate ads will show up for relevant queries.
Not less important is A/B testing your real estate ads. Continuous experimentation with various ad variations and approaches will let you know which real estate ads most resonate with the actual demand of your potential clients. Creating multiple ads with unique headlines, descriptions, and calls to action will identify the best-performing ad campaigns.
Overall, we recommend benefiting from Google Ads as a win-win paid ad strategy. The option is far beyond mere advertising your real estate business. It provides real estate professionals with a world of an unparalleled opportunity to
🧱 Deliver value
🧱 Scale your real estate business
🧱 Win more quality leads
🧱 Get more conversions
🧱 Build wider relationships in real estate.
Consider paid advertising as a substantial addition to your organic search engine optimization (SEO) marketing endeavor. Google Ads stands is your exceptional opportunity to target quality real estate leads.
PPC advertising comes as a powerful marketing strategy that empowers realtors and real estate investors in crafting highly focused marketing campaigns to generate leads. The competition, however, is overshadowed by the increasing investment of prominent real estate brands. This hindrance alone is challenging the marketing efforts of too many small-and-mid-range local players.
Pursuing the effectiveness of your Google Ads real estate campaigns, your job is to minimize unqualified traffic and generate more qualified leads. Still, in most cases, the question of how to optimize a PPC campaign for real estate remains open.
Following our tips and tricks for PPC optimization, you’ll attract the target the right audience to your real estate website. However, with so many nuances underway, we suggest getting further expertise from our PPC specialists to maximize your profits and achieve strategic marketing goals.
In one of our international collaborations, we helped our Client turn into an emerging real estate leader in the UAE.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
Senior PPC Specialist
More than 7 years in marketing. Experience of working with leading players of Ukrainian retail, western projects. Current lecturer at Promodo Academy on Contextual advertising, targeted advertising and digital marketing courses.
PPC Expert at Promodo
Orest has been in contextual advertising for over three years, working with niches such as pet products, a store selling beer and bar equipment, household, garden and garden products, jewelry, designer furniture, a mobile bank, and retailers.
Orest has worked with the following geolocations: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Sweden, France, Italy, Norway, the UK, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, and Uzbekistan.
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