Three Recent Google Adwords Lessons

I’m passionate about in-bound marketing. Although direct-mail marketing can be great, my latest and greatest leads are SEO or paid advertising. You simply can’t beat a lead that contacts you to sell their house. Of course, its not an either/or. You can do both SEO and paid advertising.

The trick with paid advertising is budget control. It’s not as easy as direct-mail in tallying up costs. A mis-step cost thousands in the long run (or even short run). Depending on your budget and closing ability, you can be broader or tighter. However, it’s worth it to understand the fundamentals (even if your interviewing “gurus” to manage your online marketing). Google does provide a free support – however they lack business understanding. They are helpful for learning available features and setting them up, but not so much for decision making.

I previously made a posts about reasons I love in-bound marketing, negative keyword suggestions, and some costly Adwords lessons. Marketing is always about pushing ahead, testing, and sharpening. Here are few tips that helped me lower costs without losing leads the last several months.

Out of Country Leads. Many of us are in a local market and not equipped to manage out of market leads. The way this is commonly managed by Google’s location targeting. I was digging into my results several months ago, and noticed I had been getting increasing clicks from out of the country (particularly India and Australia). Overall, my out-of-country clicks were about $200/lead. An extra few hundred per month is a big deal. Google’s suggestion was to limit the searches to individuals in my target market. I’m not “huge” on that idea because our best leads are often across the country searching with keywords about my market. Here’s what you can do. Location targeting doesn’t have a U.S. only option, however it has an exclusion feature. I excluded every major country besides U.S. This helped reduce my cost/lead and instantly removed some low value clicks.

Keywords -> Ads -> Landing Pages. Quality score has direct impact on your cost per click. Google can be a bit random here. As one example, I ranked 8/10 (a great number!) for sell my house, but 3/10 for sell my home. I use both words dispersed. Putting aside some of the random element, I decided to test targeting each city keyword, to a city advertisement, to a city page. This might sound like a “no brainer” when I put it like that . . . but it’s not really. It took more than a few hours to set-up, and smaller cities have very little volume so you have to extrapolate your conclusions more than usua. The results were very good. Increased CTR, reduced cost per lead, and better QS. I’m looking to expand testing this to see if it can play out in other cities.

Search Terms to Blogs! It’s really hard to get a real estate blog about selling houses to crack the first page. Perhaps impossible for something as basic as “sell my house fast”. You need to tackle long tail keywords for blogs to get “direct” lead generation. One method to find long-tail keywords is checking Google Adwords search terms. By way of example, there’s quite a few queries for “buying and selling a house at the same time.” If you can create a 2,000 word blog tackling the topic from all angles, you’d have a good shot at pulling in some motivated owner-occupied leads. Even if you can’t afford or don’t want to do Google Adwords, ask a friend to give you some ideas!