Join us for a three part series on using Google Adwords for real estate advertising. In this series, you’ll learn basic and more advanced terms and concepts used on the Adwords platform, so you’ll better understand the basics of Google paid search for real estate advertising.
Real estate advertising using Google Adwords can yield some substantial results and greatly improve your lead generation. While search engine optimisation is a longer-term marketing effort to drive traffic to your real estate website, a Google Adwords campaign can generate results in a matter of hours.
If you ask real estate agents and brokers who have used Adwords strategies, you’ll understand why the service is so widely popular within the industry and other business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies.
The number one thing that often keeps real estate professionals from creating real estate ads using Adwords, however, is how overwhelming it seems. Many real estate professionals fear it’s too complicated, and while it does take some time to figure out all the platform has to offer, you can start to understand the phrases and core words associated with it with ease.
Learn more about Adwords advertising from the definitions below. In no time, you’ll have the confidence to dive in and set up click-worthy ads targeted to your niche buyers and sellers.
Google Adwords Terms 101: Real Estate Advertising Using Google
The best way to become more familiar with using Google Adwords is to learn the basics. Read through these must-know terms and definitions, so you can start your learning curve on the right foot.
Ad Campaign
An ad campaign is made up of the budget you set for your ads, the keywords and keyword groups you intend to use, the bids you make on keywords, and your actual ads. You can run more than one campaign at a time with distinct budgets and keywords. To keep things straight, you should label your campaigns based on the goals you want to achieve. You might have one high budget campaign running where you’ve bid on competitive and popular long-tail terms and one low budget campaign running where you’ve bid on moderately searched, relatively popular, long-tail keywords.
Ad Copy
Ad copy is the written words in your campaign. It’s made up of your: headline, body, website or contact information, and business name. The copy is limited to a number of characters, because Adwords are featured at the top, bottom, or right side of the search results page. This means your copy must be compelling and effective.
Ad Delivery
You can promote your real estate agent ads in Adwords in two ways:
- Standard—this approach portions out your ad(s) throughout the day based on your budget
- Accelerated—this approach publishes your ad(s) in a shorter time period and goes through your budget more quickly.
There are benefits to both methods, but if you’re new to Adwords and want to stretch your budget, the standard approach is likely your best bet to begin with.
Ad Group
Within one Adwords campaign, you can run multiple advertisements that target the same set of keywords you’ve selected. These ads are known as an ad group. For example, if you’d like to create different ads targeted towards sellers of high to medium priced homes, you can use the same keywords and name the ad group “Seller Ads for High to Med” or something similar.
Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool
This tool is a great resource to use and prevents you from wasting your budget on errors and more. Occasionally, a problem may arise with the ads you set for publication. The issues will need to be resolved in order for your ads to display. Common errors related to advertisers include not having a budget set, a keyword bid that goes over your set budget or no search volume for the keyword you selected. This tool will help prevent you from making costly mistakes and help you diagnose issues.
Ad Rank
Not all Adwords ads are optimised well enough to be featured at the top of page one of the search engine results (SERP) page. Ads must meet Ad Rank requirements and the best real estate ads will have appropriate links, a clear call to action, proper brand info, and clear and concise copy and messaging. Google doesn’t reveal their algorithm for estimating the impact of an ad, but if you follow the guidelines they suggest, chances are your ad will make the cut.
Average Position
Ad Rank is the algorithm that you have to meet to get your ads to appear and Average Position will give you an idea of where your ad appears in the search results page for the keywords you’re competing for. A high average position is between 1 to 3 and indicates you’re being shown in the first few spots of the SERPs. A low average position is around 9 or worse and means you need to adjust your ad to increase its performance. It’ll take you some time to get to a high average position, but once you do get there, you’ll benefit from an influx of clicks to your site.
For tips on how to rank high in Google search for unpaid search results, check out our post “Tips for How to Rank High in Google Search Results.”
Call to Action
Your call to action gets viewers to click on your ad and if no one clicks, it’ll impact your quality score and lower your impressions, which lowers your chances of getting additional clicks. Make sure your copy is clear and tells viewers exactly what you’re offering and where they’ll end up once they click.
We hope you’ve found this information helpful and that using Google search seems less daunting than previously. In part 2 of the Google Adwords Glossary, you’ll learn some more basic concepts and terms, so you can start using this hugely popular and successful advertising platform for real estate.
Read even more about the benefits of Google for real estate in our series, “13 Must-Know Google Analytics Reports for Your Real Estate Website.”
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