Real Estate Marketing Ideas: How to Use Google AdWords to Grow Your Business

Google AdWords can seem confusing at first, but if you learn how to use it, you can increase the traffic to your real estate website exponentially.  AdWords enables you to advertise on Google, which puts your ads in front of a huge audience.  It will take time to optimize performance, but it offers great benefits for your real estate website.

The Basics

You as an advertiser bid on certain keywords (i.e. “real estate agent”) by setting a maximum bid.  Google will decide which advertisement gets displayed for each keyword based on your bid and your quality score.

How is your quality score determined?

  1. Relevance of your ad copy.
  2. Relevance of your ad to the landing page.
  3. The number of times the ad has been clicked on.
  4. Historical account performance.
  5. Other relevance and performance factors.

That’s a lot to take in, so it’s best to focus on the most important factor, which is relevance.  Google wants to help people find what they are looking for, so they reward advertisers who have relevant ads and content.

 

Choosing Keywords

So now that you understand the basics about how AdWords works, it’s time to move on to the important topic of keyword selection.   First, you need to brainstorm.  What keywords will customers use to find your services?  Generate a list of relevant keywords, and then use Google’s Keyword Tool to find out how popular each search term is.  You can also use the tool to expand your list of keywords.  Narrow your list down to about 20 of the most relevant keywords to start.

Create Your Ad

Next you will create your clickable ad.  It’s short, so you want to make it a clear, compelling message.  Be sure to use your keywords to make your ad relevant to both the search terms and your landing page.  This will help you boost your quality score.

Click through RateBidding and Budget

Now you can set your budget and bidding structure.  You can choose to let Google set your cost-per-click (CPC), while still staying within your budget, in order to get the most clicks per day.  This is a good option if you don’t want to spend a lot of time monitoring and adjusting your campaigns.  The other option is to set your bids for clicks manually.  This allows you to choose the maximum CPC for each keyword, which gives you more control over the targeting.

Analysis

Now you’re ready to go, but once your ad starts running, there will be more adjustments to make.  Google provides you with a wide variety of tools to monitor the performance of your keywords and ads.  One of the most relevant metrics is the click-through-rate (CTR).  A CTR under 1% means that your ad is not targeting the relevant audience.  Next, you’ll want to take a look at the average position.  If it’s 11 or more, you ad is most likely not appearing on the first page of the results.

Once you spend some time analysing the performance, you will be able to get even better results and more traffic to your site.  It will take some time to learn, but once you have it optimized, it will bring a lot more traffic to your site.

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