PPC for Estate Agents: 6 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

Most PPC campaigns run by estate agents are not fully optimised. That’s because many advertisers just setup their campaigns and do not manage and monitor them.

Lack of time is a factor. Another factor is lack of knowledge on how to carry out exceptional campaign management to improve them and increase leads and enquiries.

Targeting homeowners, renters and those looking to buy new properties requires a well structured Search campaign. As an estate agency you will need to do thorough research before setting up your campaign, and then manage it regularly to improve performance.

I’ve included seven tips here to help with the campaign management to help boost your ROI.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

Effective PPC strategies for estate agents require that you setup tracking to see how campaigns, ads and keywords are performing. Without this tracking, it’s almost impossible to know where leads and enquiries are coming from, and therefore harder to manage the campaigns.

For an estate agent website, there may be a number of actions that you would like to track. This could include people using the contact form or visitors calling the number or signups or downloads and a host of others. And you can setup tracking for any of these in the Conversions section under Tools & Settings.

So, you can setup conversion tracking for each of these in Google Ads. And you can also use goal tracking in Google Analytics to track form submissions and then import these goals into Google Ads for conversion tracking.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

Because people search for estate agents in their locations with all kinds of search queries, it’s important to know how relevant some of these are for you. If some searches are not relevant, then you should block them by adding them as negative keywords, under the Keywords tab in your campaign.

You may have added some of these negative keywords when you first created your campaign, but it’s important to check regularly if there are no new ones to add.

Doing this will help to improve your PPC Ads and many estate agents see the benefits of it.

 

3. Find new keywords

When you first created your PPC campaign in Google Ads, you may have carried out some research to find keywords to bid on. However, this should not end there. As part of your campaign management, you should be regularly looking for new keyword opportunities to add to your account.

The Keyword Planner tool is the tool that will help you with this. And you’ll find it in Tools & Settings in your Google Ads account.

And any new keywords you find, should be added as exact and phrase match type to control the search queries that you get.

For estate agents this should be an ongoing exercise because the way people search is constantly changing and according to Google about 15% of searches each day are completely new to them. So, there are many opportunities to tap into there.

 

4. Check Recommendations

On the Recommendations page, you will see suggestions and opportunities to improve your campaigns. These recommendations are created by the machine learning system when it finds opportunities to improve your campaigns.

Some common recommendations you’ll find in there include bid strategies, keywords, responsive search ads, dynamic search ads, missing keywords and many more.

And you can either apply them if they are relevant or dismiss them if they don’t make sense for your campaigns. Updating them either way helps to improve the account and campaign Optimisation score.

It’s important to do this regularly to get your score closer to 100% because that helps the system to send better recommendations in the future and this improves the overall performance of your ads.

 

5. Do competitor analysis

Knowing what PPC marketing strategies other estate agents are employing will help your marketing and advertising efforts. You’ll be able to see in-depth information about the search queries they are appearing for and some keywords they’ve added to their campaigns.

An impressive SaaS platform that will help you with this is SERanking with its competitor research tool.

Also, take a look at the Auction Insights report in your campaign. This shows a lot of estate agents that you are appearing with in the search results and how you are positioned on average relative to them.

So, you can see how often you appear in the top positions and absolute top positions in the results. To appear higher you can try out other bid strategies like Target Impression Share and set it to appear in the top or absolute top positions.

 

6. Consider broad match type keywords

When you first create a PPC campaign for your estate agency, it’s best to only use phrase and exact match type keywords. These match types help to give you more control over the search queries that you get.

This is an example of a keyword in phrase and exact match:

“estate agent Surrey” – phrase match keyword
[estate agent Surrey] – exact match keyword

But as you manage your campaign and add more negative keywords, you should consider adding broad match keywords. Broad match keywords target a wider range of searches and help you get searches that your phrase and exact match keywords are not getting.

But make sure you regularly check your search terms report to make sure you are getting the right searches – and block any that are not relevant by adding them as negative keywords.

 

Case Study

The Smart Estate Agency is an estate agent that offers a better value option for homeowners through their low cost listing service. They contacted me when they were running basic Smart campaigns and I recommended setting up a targeted Search campaign. This campaign helped to increase click through rates by 700% and they were able to achieve a 6% conversion rate. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

I’m a PPC specialist and I work with estate agents to promote their businesses. Use the form below to contact me to discuss your advertising requirements in Google Ads.