Real estate PPC (Pay Per Click) in Google Adwords is a proven real estate marketing strategy going back to the late 1990s. Among the real estate community, many professionals say the same thing, “Cost per click is way too high for PPC, and we are not able to justify spending upwards of $40 per click on average.” The reason we find several negative comments within the real estate community surrounding PPC is because they do not understand how to lower their CPC.

With that said, let’s teach you how to lower your Cost Per Click or CPC as a real estate professional when doing Real Estate PPC.

1. Keyword Strategy Optimization

Assuming this is your first go-around at setting up and running a Pay Per Click Campaign, you may be lacking information on tools for Keyword Research. Often people use their mind and information from their business experience to forecast what their ideal customer would search for on Google.

This is an excellent, effective strategy that does bring results, although it often leads to a higher CPC. The reason being is this leads to bidding on keywords that are well known and highly competitive. We want to go after the longtail keywords or hidden gems that your competitors are missing out on. To find the longtail keyword variates, we may want to use tools such as Google Keyword Planner of KWFinder by Mangools. Here’s an overview.

Let’s say we are a real estate investor in the State of Florida, and we are looking for motivated seller leads. Two of the most common phrases that come to mind are “We Buy Houses” and “Sell My House Fast.” Here is what the keyword “We Buy Houses” looks like in Google Keyword Planner.

The first thing that stands out to us is the average monthly searches between 10k-100k, and second is the top page bid for the high range is about $60 a click. This means bidding for the high top of the page will cost somewhere between $600,000 to $6,000,000 per month. To get this lower, we want to focus on longtail keywords. For instance, let’s take a look at the keyword ideas and their correlating high page top of page bids.

Look through the keyword variations we can see that “I buy houses” ($38 CPC), “we buy mobile homes near me” ($20.15”, and “we buy houses near me”($46.50) have significantly lower cost per click than “we buy houses.” This is an example of doing targeted keyword research to different match types such as “I buy houses” and longtail keywords such as “we buy mobile homes near me” and “we buy houses near me.”

2. Conversion Rate Optimization for the Landing Pages

Let’s say you are a real estate investor who has a highly targeted ad that is efficiently sending traffic to your website. Unfortunately, the traffic is not converting into paying customers once reaching your website’s landing pages. This means we need to optimize our landing page for conversions or conversion rate optimized.

What we want to do is create multiple landing pages that have adjusted call to actions and ad copy. Test them in pairs of two through split testing in the Google Adwords interface to find the winner of the pair. If both of the landing pages are doing poorly, then start the process over again until we have a landing page that is converting at or above average.

Pro Tip: Using software called HotJar has allowed our real estate investing company, David Buys Houses Florida to see how users interact with our website.

The software screen records each visitor and has a heatmap to analyze clicks and movements of the mouse. If we can see exactly how motivated sellers are interacting with our website, we can alter our landing page copy and call to actions to increase conversions.

3. Using Manual CPC to Lower Bids

At this point, our keywords have been targeted, we have effective ad copy, and our landing page is optimized for conversions. However, your CPC is still too high for your wallet’s enjoyment. Our next step is to focus on lower CPC through manual bidding.

Those who are familiar with Google Adwords are aware of the automatic bidding, which is the default option when running Google Adword campaigns.

Automatic bidding is where Google monitors and adjusts your bidding on Google to ensure top of page bids. Which comes with a lot of benefits such as:

• Increase website visits
• Increases visibility across the web
• Higher Conversions
• Targeted Return on Ad Spend
• And Increased Conversion Rate

To give Google credit, the majority of these benefits are true 100% of the time. The downside is that Google’s machine learning does not think like a human being and ends up sacrificing lower CPC by overlooking specific keywords.

More so, Google has been notorious for spending the maximum CPC even when it is not necessary. If you are manually monitoring top of page bids, you can slowly lower the CPC and watch how that affects your position in the rankings.

4. Using Remarketing to Retarget Website Visitors that Bounced

Remarketing website visitors is key to maximize conversions while maintaining a low CPC. The majority of real estate professionals overlook remarketing because they do not understand how it works. Overlooking remarketing is a mistake because, on average, only 2% of website visitors convert on the first visit.

Often a visitor will click on one of your Google Ads and did not take further action to fill out a form or become a client. However, by clicking on our Ad Copy, they have shown a level of interest but not enough to convert this moment. Typically, when this situation occurs, real estate professionals will lose them forever. Fortunately, we understand remarketing or the process of retargeting a segmented list in Google Adwords. This means we can retarget these visitors on other websites they are visiting via Display Ad Networks, Youtube, and social media.

Having a thorough understanding of how to lower your CPC is crucial to a successful real estate PPC campaign. Although a lower CPC is not the only end goal, do not forget to utilize an excellent user experience while meeting the needs of your customers. Try implementing these strategies in your next real estate PPC campaigns.