Using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads to Get Leads
Countless millions of people use the Internet to search for what they want every day. Some of them are looking for the exact services you provide. But can they find you?
More and more, people turn to the Internet to look for solutions to their problems, including their real estate problems. Whether it’s someone wanting to buy, rent or sell real estate, often they will start their search for help online.
What’s especially important to note about these people is that they are actively looking for a solution. If you put ads along the side of the road, you’re going to get quite a few people that are just curious and some who really hadn’t thought much about their situation before.
However, the people who are searching online are more motivated. Perhaps they’ve been told “no” by somebody and they’re not willing to take “no” for an answer. So they’re looking for a solution – a solution you can likely provide. In addition, instead of you looking for them, they’re looking for you, which gives you a better position as the solution provider.
But how do you let these people find you?
One way to do this is to buy advertising with the popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. If you’ve ever used Google or Yahoo to search for something, and I’m sure you have, you’ve seen advertisements above and beside the regular search results. Often there will be a colored box above the results that says something like “Sponsored Links” or “Sponsored Results”.
There is usually also a column over to the right with a bunch of ads too. To see an example of this, try going to one of the search engines and type in something like “buy my house” and you’ll see what I mean. You generally see advertisements before you see the “natural” search results.
What is important to note here is that if you do a search for something like “buy my house”, you don’t just see random ads about weight loss, pet training, etc. You see targeted advertisements, directly related to what you typed in. These advertisers paid to have their ad come up when you typed in a specific combination of words.
So how do you get an ad in those spots and is it expensive?
Getting your ad in those spots is actually very easy. Google’s advertising service is called Google Adwords. Yahoo’s is called Yahoo Search Marketing. You just sign up for an account with them, which is free and easy to do. Then you set up your ad campaign. You put in the headline and other text and the link to your web site, which is what people will see when your ad comes up.
One very important step is to pick your keywords. These are words and phrases that you want to target so that when someone types in those words, your ad will appear. You’ll need to pick these carefully because they need to be very targeted to the people who might be looking for you.
For instance, don’t use something generic like “real estate” as the keywords. Why? Because most people typing in “real estate” aren’t looking for you. They’re looking for general information, or maybe a real estate agent, or maybe they’re looking for information about investing themselves, or who knows what. It’s too broad, too general. You need specific keywords.
If you’re looking for sellers, you might try phrases like “buy my house in Chicago”. Do you see the difference there? What else could that person be looking for? You know exactly what they’re looking for. Or for buyers, you might try something like “buy a house with bad credit” or “rent to own house in Seattle”.
Get creative with it. The goal is to think like the people who are looking for a service you can provide. Try to figure out what a person would be looking for who has a house to sell. Think about what a person would be looking for who was rejected for a mortgage. And of course, do the same for whatever type of lead it is you’re trying to generate.
You can put in just about as many keywords per ad as you like, but it’s best to limit it to a handful, say maybe 10-15. You can create additional ads (using the exact same ad wording if you like) but targeting different keyword phrases. This is important to do so you can see what’s working and what’s not. If you put too many keywords on one campaign, they don’t all get used well and you don’t really know if they were good or not.
What’s really nice is that now some of these services have “local” searches where you can target a broader term like “buy my house” but not have people all over the country seeing your ad if you’re only doing deals in your local area. They let you target the geographic areas where you want your ad to come up. These services have the technology to know where in the world a user is located so that you can specify your ad will only come up when someone in, say San Francisco, types in the phrase “buy my house” instead of people all over the country seeing your ad.
This does a couple great things. First, it allows you to target only the people you’re interested in working with and not having to deal with people all over country if you don’t want to. And second, it cuts way down on the competition, which means it cuts down on the price too.
How many people in the entire country do you think are competing for the phrase “buy my house”. I have no idea, but I know it’s a lot. On the other hand, how many people in your local city or area are competing for that phrase? Way, way fewer people. So that means you won’t have to pay as much for your ad and you have a better shot at coming up on the first page of search results instead of on page 10.
So how much do these ads cost? Well, it really varies a lot, so I can’t give you any specific numbers. These ads work on a pay-per-click basis, which means just what it sounds like. You pay every time someone clicks your ad. If someone sees your ad but doesn’t click it, you don’t pay a cent. You only pay when they click it. How much do you pay each time? That’s really up to you. You bid on those keywords that you think people will be searching for.
For instance, you may decide you’re willing to pay 50 cents per click. You would put in that information and once your campaign is started, each time someone clicks your ad, you owe 50 cents. If you bid too low, you’re not likely to get any clicks, or at least not many. It just depends on how much other people are bidding. These services will generally give you a recommendation about how much to bid. You can go lower than their recommendation if you want and you’ll probably still get some clicks, but maybe just not as many. If you bid too high, you might be overpaying. But just because you bid, say $1.00, it doesn’t mean you’ll pay that much for every click. That’s just the maximum you’ll pay. You may still get some that only cost 50 cents.
How do you keep this expense from getting out of hand? These services usually have a budget feature built in, where you specify how much you want to spend, max, per day or month. So if you don’t want to spend more than $60/month, you’d just set your daily budget to about $2. I generally would set my daily budget higher than my real budget and just keep a close eye on it. I’ve found that I get better results when I set a higher budget. But be careful with it.
It seems like it usually doesn’t reach your maximum if it’s pretty low, especially when your campaign is just getting started. I’d rather set my budget a little higher than my real budget and get some leads started coming in. Then if it starts reaching the budget and getting too expensive, I’d just lower the budget. And at any time you can “pause” your campaigns, which just puts them on hold, meaning you your ads won’t appear anymore and you won’t incur any more charges. Then, whenever you’re ready, you can resume your ad campaigns with just a click of a button.
One other thing to be aware of is that it’s not usually real-time reporting. Sometimes the stats are several hours behind. What that means is you may have had more clicks (and incurred more cost) than what is currently showing. It can be helpful to have some sort of website traffic tracking installed on your website itself that shows how much traffic you’re getting so you’ll know if you’ve received any significant traffic that’s not being shown yet.
So how many leads can you get using these methods of advertising? That’s difficult say because there are so many factors, such as: How well did you write your ad? How many people are searching for the keywords you picked? How much did you bid per click? What is your budget? If you’re using local searches, how many people in your local area are searching for those phrases?
All of these factors affect how many clicks you’ll get. However, the important thing is you will get some clicks. Even if you only got a couple here and there, they’re generally decent leads because they were specifically looking for what you provide. I wouldn’t recommend you rely entirely on this method to get your leads, but you certainly don’t want to ignore it either. If you do, you’re likely leaving money on the table because people are looking for you and can’t find you.
One thing I didn’t specifically mention, but that you probably figured out, is that you need a website to use these advertising methods. When someone clicks your ad, they have to be taken somewhere. So you have to have a website to send them to. If you haven’t already done so, you can get a website from RealTurf. You could potentially sign up now for a website, get it set up the way you want, and get a Google or Yahoo campaign setup and sending leads your way all in the same day.
Of course, Google and Yahoo usually want to check the website you’re sending people to for quality, so depending on how long they take to approve your ad, it could slow things down a little, but they usually have that done within a day or so. Regardless, the longer you wait, the more leads you could potentially miss out on.
What we’ve just discussed here is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pay-per-click advertising. There is no end to the information available on it and to really master it is an art. However, you don’t have to really master it. Just get it going, get some leads coming in, and keep an eye on it so you’re not going over your budget. If you want to keep learning more about it you can, but don’t wait till you figure everything out to get started because there are people looking for you today and there will be more tomorrow. Get your ad up there and you can always improve it later.
You’ll find the links below to sign up with Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.
Don’t have a web site yet? Get one here.
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