Real Estate PPC: How to Lower Your CPC

Real estate PPC (Pay-per-click) in Google AdWords is a proven digital marketing strategy from the late 1990s. Many professionals in the real estate community say, “Cost per click is way too high for PPC, and we cannot justify spending upwards of $40 per click on average.” We find several negative comments within the real estate community surrounding PPC because they do not understand how to lower their CPC.

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 lack information on Keyword Research tools. Often, people use their minds and information from their business experience to forecast what their ideal customer would search for on Google.

This excellent, effective strategy brings results but often leads to a higher CPC. The reason 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 your competitors miss 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 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 the second is the top page bid for the high range is about $60 a click. This means bidding for the top of the page will cost between $600,000 to $6,000,000 per month. To get this lower, we want to focus on longtail keywords. For instance, look at the keyword ideas and their correlating high-page top-of-page bids.

Looking 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 with a highly targeted ad that efficiently sends traffic to your website. Unfortunately, the traffic is not converting into paying customers once it reaches your website’s landing pages. This means we need to optimize our landing page for conversions or conversion rate optimization.

We want to create multiple landing pages that have adjusted calls to action 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 landing pages are doing poorly, start the process over again until we have a landing page converting at or above average.

Pro Tip: Using HotJar software 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 the clicks and movements of the mouse. If we can see exactly how motivated sellers interact with our website, we can alter our landing page copy and call to action to increase conversions.

3. Using Manual CPC to Lower Bids

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 familiar with Google Adwords know the automatic bidding, 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, most 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 manually monitor 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 maximizing conversions while maintaining a low CPC. Most 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 not take further action to fill out a form or become a client. However, by clicking on our Ad Copy, they have shown 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 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.

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 your customers’ needs. Try implementing these strategies in your next real estate PPC campaigns.