Google Ads for Estate Agents: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

A Google Ads campaign for estate agents is the most effective way to promote your services and estate agency online. This is an inbound channel, meaning you are targeting people who are actively in the market looking for your services.

And so, the conversion rates are naturally high and you pay less for each customer acquisition than most other forms of advertising, both online and offline.

More and more estate agents are seeing the benefits of running pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns. A search on Google in any location, reveals a list of agencies that are using text and call-only ads to promote their estate agencies.

Follow these tips to setup an effective Google Ads campaign for estate agents

 

Campaign objective

If you want to get enquiries and leads then a “Leads” campaign objective is for you. This encourages people to take action when they see your ads and they can contact you directly from your ads by phone or through a lead form that you create in ad extensions.

And they can also contact you from your website by calling or using email or a contact form.

 

Campaign type

Next, you will pick the campaign type that is most relevant for your ‘Leads’ objective, that you selected above. This objective presents with you with about five campaign types that you can choose from, including Search, Display, Video and Shopping.

The most relevant and best that you can run for your estate agency is a Search campaign because you target people that are actively searching for an estate agent and for properties online

 

Budgets

The budget you set determines the amount of clicks you get each month. There are a number of approaches you can take to setting your budget and this will depend on a few factors.

A great start would be a test budget to see what returns you get and then look to increase it as performance improves. So, a minimum amount to start with is $500 or £300 per month and then increase it as you go.

Of course the average cost per click will determine how many clicks you get. And during your keyword research you will be able to see what the average cost per click is for each keyword you are interested in.

 

Bidding

Google Ads offers two bidding strategy types, automated and manual bidding. As an estate agent, using an automated bid strategy helps you to leverage the power of machine learning to bid efficiently at auction time.

So this saves you a lot of time and means your ads can be more competitive and achieve a better return.

 

 

A good bid strategy to start with is Maximise Clicks. This strategy gets you as many clicks as possible for your budget. Later you can change to Manual CPC if you want to control your bids and set individual bids for keywords and bid higher too.

 

Keywords

A Google Ads campaign for estate agents requires good keyword research to find the right keywords to bid on. Use the Keyword Planner tool in Tools & Settings to do the research and also use the forecasting tool to see what you are likely to pay for each click and what budget to set.

Also, start with phrase and exact match to control the search queries that you get, and later add broad match to expand your reach and increase clicks and leads. This is an example of the match types to use:

“Estate agents near me” – Phrase match type
[Estate Agency near me] – Exact match type

 

Text ads

When writing your text ads, think of the benefits that your potential clients will be looking for from an estate agent. The choice of keywords you have will determine this and it’s important that your main keywords are included in the headlines to get people to click more and increase your click through rate and conversions.

Try to talk about the benefits of your service and how they are different from competing estate agents benefits. And include a call to action in each ad with the primary action that you want them to take from your ads or on website. This can include calling, downloading, contacting and so on, and depends on what you are actually offering.

 

Ad schedule

The ideal days and times to run your ads can vary and depend on a number of factors. People search for estate agency services and properties at all times including weekends and evenings so it’s important that your ads are visible 24/7.

Later as you get more traffic and enquiries or leads, you can assess which are the best performing days and hours and then change to those only.

So, without targeting all times initially, you lose out on a lot more data and won’t know which are the best performing days and times.

 

Where your ads appear

Your ads can appear in a number of places on Google, the Google Search Network and the Display Network if you have opted into this. This also includes Google owned properties like YouTube and Maps.

 

Case Study

The Smart Estate Agency help homeowners sell their homes effectively through their outstanding advertising services. They contacted me because their conversion rate was low and they had many irrelevant searches triggering their ads. I was able to help them increase their conversion rate to 6% and reduce their cost per conversion to just £7. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

Want to know how a Google Ads campaign for estate agents can help your business? Use the form below to get in touch to discuss your requirements.