Generate Real Estate Leads With PPC – Google Ads Tips For Realtors (Episode 168)

Please support our sponsors, they make the show possible!

Try Opteo free for 6 weeks.

Get a custom proposal from Directive Consulting.

Show notes:

Hi yes welcome back to the Paid Search Podcast! This week we are talking about Google Ads for realtors and real estate agents. If you’re a realtor who’s looking for information on how to get more real estate leads from PPC marketing, this is the episode for you! We start off discussing the common problems real estate agents run into with AdWords. Then we cover some basic Google Ads tips for realtors, and we close the show with some advanced tips and ideas to help real estate agents get more leads from Google Ads. Thanks for listening and enjoy the episode!

Please share the show with your friends and join us for the after show every week on Patreon! It’s just $2 a month and we do an after show every week.

YouTube

Transcript

Jason Rothman:
Hey everybody.

Chris Schaeffer:
My gosh.

Jason Rothman:
Yes. Yes. Hey everybody.

Chris Schaeffer:
This is strange.

Jason Rothman:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Paid Search podcast. My name is Jason Rothman. Going to do a second, yes, in case we need to cut out the beginning, You never know. Yes. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the paid search podcast. My name is Jason Rothman.

Jason Rothman:
If you’re new to the show, it’s a couple of people talking about Google Ads and if you’re back, welcome back. We always love to have you here. My name is Jason Rothman, as always I am joined by my cohost and partner, the great Chris Schaeffer. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, I legally changed my name to ChrisSchaeffer.com. So I need you to say that every time. No last name, just ChrisSchaeffer.com. Thanks Jason. Glad to be here. I am a businessman and I am here to freely give away everything I’ve worked for 15 years to learn, to the internet and that’s how businessmen do it. They give away all of their knowledge. That’s what we’re here for. So you guys tuned in to the right station. If you’re into Google Ads, I’m going to make my family poor and broke to help you. That’s what I’m here for. All right.

Jason Rothman:
Hey everybody, Chris feels better. He feels better. So now we can do the sponsor. Go ahead Chris.

Chris Schaeffer:
All right, yeah. Now that I got that off my chest. Let me tell you about a tool that I use to make my life a little easier. Jason uses it as well. Optio.com/psp. The URL is important because you get a six week extended trial when you use O P T E O.com/psp. Let them know you’re coming from the Paid Search podcast and you can get this really helpful tool for Google Ads.

Chris Schaeffer:
It also helps with other search engine marketing and other online marketing aspects. But for today, I’m going to tell you the thing that I like about this tool is it alerts you about things that changes in bidding, suggestions for improvements, recommendation, sends you right into your inbox. You don’t have to go and check it every day.

Chris Schaeffer:
If there’s something important happening you need to know about, they email you, which is really cool. You don’t get that directly from the Google Ads interface. This is something unique to optio.com/psp. So check it out, great tool. We recommend it. They’ve been a sponsor for a long time and if you enjoy this show you can do us a favor by just trying it because they know that we have great listeners and great listeners. Listen to what I say and that’s it.

Jason Rothman:
Thanks Chris and I want to thank Directive Consulting for sponsoring today’s episode. Directive consulting is the go to B2B and enterprise search engine marketing agency. They do it all. SEO organic, pay-per-click, Google ads, Bing, conversion rate optimization, content marketing, social advertising, social media, digital PR, analytics. They specialize in B2B, and enterprise campaigns. You need leads, you need quality leads, they figure out how to get those and then they figure out how to scale the campaign with you.

Jason Rothman:
Check out their website, directiveconsulting.com. Look at some of the companies they work with, very impressive names. Look at their case studies. Great information in there and get yourself a free custom proposal for your enterprise or B2B campaign. Directive Consulting, directiveconsulting.com. Get your free custom proposal today. Chris, I asked you how you were, you took a fart on everybody. How does that make you feel? I hope you feel better. Great, great, great session. Okay.

Chris Schaeffer:
I’m good.

Jason Rothman:
How are you doing Chris? Really. I take a little shots, I try to talk to you during the week, I Skype you here and there. I shoot you an email and I don’t get a lot of reaction. I get more like, “Hey, why are you wasting my time?” So this is the time when I get you all alone. So really, how’s it going? It’s a Thursday. We’re doing a lot of things in the Paid Search podcast. And how are you doing?

Chris Schaeffer:
Thursdays are always good days for me. I’m usually in a lot better mood, because I take what would be client meetings, new prospect meetings, training, things like that, and I block all of them so that I can have this time to speak to my favorite buddy who I’ve never met in person.

Chris Schaeffer:
Thursdays are usually great days. That’s why when you messaged me as the formula goes, when Jason sends me a Skype, it usually starts with, “Hello.” Anybody ever types the full Hello with a capital H and a period. Then I immediately have the desire to say, “No, not interested, blocked, unsubscribe.” Something like that.

Jason Rothman:
Unsubscribe from our friendship. Chris, you make a great point. This is a good time to bring up Patreon, two dollars a month. We talk about Google Ads stuff as well, the after show for the show, we also talk about some business stuff. That’s a quick business thing. You were just saying that and it makes me think, as a Google Ads agency, freelancer kind of person, I really have three parts of my week. It’s so longer work week and weekend. It’s like Monday, Tuesday and then a little bit Wednesday.

Jason Rothman:
But Thursday, Friday, which is different kinds of work. Then Saturday, Sunday you’re off. So I’m talking about more of that in Patreon, but I’ve noticed that about my own life as well. So usually we read a Apple podcast review of the week, but today I want to read a YouTube channel comment we got Chris because we put these podcasts up on YouTube as well.

Jason Rothman:
Jonathan wrote in on YouTube, he said, “I’m an Uber driver who has been listening to your podcast all summer. And so too have all my passengers from the airport that I drive at, so you guys are known around the world.” So Jonathan does us a great favor. He gets people who arrive at the airport, they get in his Uber and then he plays the Paid Search podcast. By the way, if you’re in Jonathan’s Uber right now, welcome to the show.

Chris Schaeffer:
Give him a good tip.

Jason Rothman:
A good tip for Google Ads, it’s all about search terms. Keywords are what you target, search-

Chris Schaeffer:
That’s not what I meant. [crosstalk 00:06:44].

Jason Rothman:
If you work in finance, if you work in a hair salon, if you work in the food industry, just know that about Google Ads if you’re sitting in Jonathan’s Uber.

Chris Schaeffer:
That’s you tip.

Jason Rothman:
Jonathan spreads our word at the airport and of course since people are at the airport that goes back all around the world. I love that comment. Thanks for listening. Chris, we have some news. Go ahead. It’s breaking news. I didn’t tell you about it.

Chris Schaeffer:
No, it’s not written down so I didn’t know. But I always have that on the ready.

Jason Rothman:
We have started the Paid Search podcast forum. If you go to our website, paidsearchpodcast.com, there’s a link in the menu to the forum. I think it’s forum.paidsearchpodcast.com. It’s free. We’re just welcoming people to sign up. Share your thoughts about Google Ads, share your thoughts about the business of PPC, share your thoughts about off topic. Chris, I named the off topic area Louisville in your honor.

Chris Schaeffer:
No, you didn’t.

Jason Rothman:
I don’t know if you thought that.

Chris Schaeffer:
No, I didn’t see.

Jason Rothman:
I did. So that’s our off topic area. It’s called Louis Dashville, and honestly it’s a place for people like us and all our listeners to talk about Google Ads, talk about paying Facebook, whatever we want to talk about. But Chris, there’s a lot of questions that you and I have. There’s a lot of questions our listeners have and I thought if we could all get together, ask each other questions, it could lead to something cool.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. Yeah. I like chatting and hearing things that people wouldn’t necessarily send a comment in. A lot of people listen on the podcast, a lot of people watch on YouTube, and YouTube you can leave comments and say little things here and there. For our majority of listeners on the podcast, there is no easy way to send in a little comment. You have to go to our website and fill out the form and send the comment. And sometimes it’s just not worth it.

Chris Schaeffer:
This is a great place to just leave little notes, ask little questions that may not be worthy of a question and answer episode, but it’s this kind of thing you’d love to drop in. I especially love … There was someone who posted a comment just the other day on my Patreon page, which is a good example. It could’ve gone on the forum as well. But just sharing about how our podcasts and Jason, I’m sure you read it, just made such a huge difference in their lives and their professional lives and of course their personal life as well because of that. So love to hear it.

Jason Rothman:
Yeah. That comment had something, it said something like, “I’ve had this PPC client,” and then he talked about the results he’s giving them, but he had a comment like, “I have this client, and I’m in this industry because of your podcast.”

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah.

Jason Rothman:
And I’m like, “What the heck? Really? Wow, that’s impressive.” People are changing careers and all that kind of stuff and making a lot of money because of this show, and that is a cool thing. And Chris, not only just for little questions, but big questions you want to ask us and everyone in the forum. Say you’ve got a problem on one of your campaigns, get in there, tell people what’s happening, ask your question and you’ll get a lot of feedback. We wanted to let everyone know about that. Today Chris, we are doing a specialty episode.

Jason Rothman:
We do this from time to time and we do it when we get a lot of requests for an industry over and over, a lot of requests. We have heard from a ton of people, both from realtors and real estate agents themselves and also from agency employees who manage campaigns for real estate agents. They want us to talk about Google Ads for real estate agents, Google Ads for realtors, Google Ads for brokers. My first beef, I have a lot of beefs Chris. Can we decide on a name for your industry? Realtor, Realty Services, Real estate agent, Broker.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. They would probably fight you because as soon as you tried to nail down a name, they would say, “No, I’m not like that guy. I do something different.” It’s just too diverse, and that’s a straight-

Jason Rothman:
Good thing for keywords.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. It’s a straight lead in to … I’m just going to get down to why Jason bumped this by about four months and then another three months and then a few weeks, and then by another week is because I’ve just never really been a fan of talking about this. And I’m a bit of [curmudgeon 00:10:55] about this.

Jason Rothman:
Louisville.

Chris Schaeffer:
Louisville. Because I have never had a good experience with real estate. With any real estate clients that I’ve had.

Jason Rothman:
With Google Ads.

Chris Schaeffer:
On Google Ads right. Not personally, but just professionally. And here’s why. It may be part of my professional abilities. Possibly. I’m not going to say that it can be me, but here’s usually what happens. I approach it in the same way that I approach every other business. I try and decide what’s a low funnel, look like. Is it worth investing in the CPC for low funnel? If I can’t, maybe some high funnel stuff, I might do a blend depending on the budget, I might focus entirely on super specific terms, small geographic area.

Chris Schaeffer:
Here’s what happens. The CPC is very high and the person’s conversion is a phone call or they’re going to have to sign up on the website to look at a home, to follow a home or to see more details or request a viewing or something like that. They have to fill out an account in order to do that. A big fat zero on all of the conversion types because I don’t understand why, but I don’t know if it was the sites were just not friendly enough, people didn’t like them, or the conversion tracking didn’t work and I couldn’t fix it.

Chris Schaeffer:
But all of that led to a bunch of traffic and me just scrambling to show that, “Hey look, no, they’re coming to the site. Look at these search terms, look at the keywords, look at the CPC, look at the bounce rate. It’s good stuff.” And they’re like, “No Chris, you literally can’t prove that a single sale has come through and you’re fired.”

Chris Schaeffer:
And I was like, “Okay.” So I tried another one, tried another one, tried another one. Much of the same type of thing. I’ve just written off realtors as clients at this point. I’ve had so much frustration with it. I’ll talk a bit about the issues I’ve had as we go through this. And I’m very interested to know, Jason, what you found to be successful in that. As always, I’m here to learn and share what I know from the other side of the fence.

Jason Rothman:
Well, we’re on the same side of the fence together, because I have had some real estate agent campaigns before, multiple, and I don’t have any today. That means at some point they stopped advertising or fired me. Again, I’m in the same boat as you. I’m open to telling people that because I’m confident in my abilities and I’m confident if anybody looked at those campaigns that I was managing good click through rate, good cost per click, reasonable, not wasting money, great search terms, people looking for a realtor, Oklahoma city, that kind of search.

Jason Rothman:
But again, like you, low conversion rates and then even beyond that, when they convert, what does that mean? What does it mean? I think it’s a little bit of a supply and demand thing Chris. I work for a lot of criminal defense attorneys and one of the nice things about the legal business on Google Ads is people don’t know lawyers in their personal life.

Jason Rothman:
When they need a lawyer, they go to Google Ads and they’re very willing to convert and become a conversion and talk to the law firm or fill out a form and actually follow up with them when the law firm reaches out, because they need a lawyer. It’s supply and demand in terms of supply of lawyers that they’re looking for. You’re online, you’re looking for a criminal defense lawyer, you finally find a good one, good website and all that, fill out the form.

Jason Rothman:
When they contact you, you’re picking up the phone and talking to them. But I think with real estate Chris, if you go online and you look for home prices, houses, whatever, in a certain area, there’s an almost endless supply of websites or forms you can fill out of leads and all that. Not to mention, the longterm process of becoming a client of a real estate agent, signing a document with them and then buying a house or selling a house with them.

Jason Rothman:
It’s not like movers fill out the form, they give you a quote, you schedule and move. It’s a long term thing. And so I guess my first point is, this is real lead generation. This is not run ads, get conversions instantly, conversions become actual acquired new business. This is you get leads and then you as the realtor has to hustle and turn those leads into clients.

Jason Rothman:
So just like you’ve done a good job on Google Ads but have not seen the kind of success I’ve seen in other industries for my clients because it’s not easy. So that’s where we’re coming from. But we get a lot of questions about this topic. So we want to discuss it and give our thoughts on how we think it can go better and go right for real estate agents out there. So Chris, I want to know from you.

Jason Rothman:
I’m going to just first tell people why this is important and then I want to know from you how people are going to fail. So I want to talk about why advertising on Google is important for realtors. Let me tell you a story of how I found my house. A few years ago, I was looking to buy a home in a very exclusive neighborhood and I ended up buying a 15,000 square foot house. And through my Google searches, I did find a great realtor and worked with them and they helped me find my house and it was a great home.

Jason Rothman:
The problem is Chris, this realtor got lucky. He got lucky. What happened was, I was searching for this neighborhood searching for homes in this neighborhood over and over and over. I was in my old house, 600 square feet. Yeah, we’ve had a big couple of years here. 600 square feet, stealing my neighbors WiFi, doing searches. I want to live in this neighborhood. Houses in this neighborhood, houses in this town, whatever. How’s is this price? This square footage, all that.

Jason Rothman:
Through my Google searches, I found his brokerage, his agency that he works for through an organic listing. Listen to how lucky this guy got Chris. Because again, 15,000 square foot house, huge commission.

Chris Schaeffer:
Sure.

Jason Rothman:
I do tons of searches. I keep seeing this brokerage. Go to the brokerage. The brokerage Chris was 50 agents.

Chris Schaeffer:
Oh gosh.

Jason Rothman:
It was 50 agents. I just saw a good looking guy standing out in his picture and I was like, “All right, that guy’s got energy. That guy.”

Chris Schaeffer:
Literally by his face?

Jason Rothman:
Literally by his picture, I picked him out. Yeah, that’s how I picked him out. One of 50 on the website. So not only did I have to randomly, luckily find their website, once I was on the website, I had to pick him out of the 50 and just randomly, by the way he looked, I thought he would look like a guy who had it together, ended up working out. He got a lot of money, I got a great home. But he got lucky. He got lucky Chris.

Jason Rothman:
So my whole thing with realtors is, stop trying to get lucky. Yes, take the luck when it comes in. But you can use Google Ads and a bunch of different tools we’ll talk about on today’s episode to increase the chances that someone like me would find you. Someone else could have come in there if they were doing it right and stole my business.

Jason Rothman:
Anyway, the guy got lucky, it worked out. But I don’t want realtors to get lucky. I want them to use Google Ads to systematically get great clients. So Chris, that’s the whole point of why we’re doing this. But first, it’s always good to start off where things could go wrong. Let’s talk about how realtors can fail, waste their money and give up on Google Ads. What have you seen out there in these streets?

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, here’s a sad story. We’ll keep the negative to a minimum because we want to give you guys solutions, but I think it’s important to lay out where the failings come in, because you need to differentiate-

Jason Rothman:
For real.

Chris Schaeffer:
The border between what you think you’re doing and what we’re suggesting you do. So here’s what most of the time it ends up being. I get my setup form filled out by a realtor, real estate agent, whatever. It’s usually going to have six keywords in it, four keywords, something like that. And they’re all going to be Realtor plus the city name, Homes and city name and New homes, something like that.

Chris Schaeffer:
Super bland, vanilla common stuff. And the fact is, if I asked them the question, “What’s really valuable to you,” they will usually say, “Well, this area I’d live in and I know a lot about, I tend to sell a little bit more here,” or “I really would prefer homes that are above 300 grand, because 200, I don’t usually like to work with that. I prefer to get higher commissions with higher sales.”

Chris Schaeffer:
The fact is they’re not necessarily interested in every search, but that’s the keywords they choose. They choose things like just New homes, exact match. That’s like choosing Plumber near me, and saying that’s your number one keyword. Just to be clear, there’s more for me to talk about, but I want to go into some of this because this is the point I’m going to talk about quality of lead, and I’m going to talk about this in the Patreon today.

Chris Schaeffer:
So be sure and join that if you’re not in there, because I’m going to go a little more in depth about that, something I wanted to discuss. But that’s usually what happens. You get this plain vanilla type of stuff and there are millions of searches like this and you will be swamped because every other realtor is going to be on there for new homes. Realtor near me, realtor plus city names, stuff like that. It’s just not creative. So you don’t have focus and you don’t really know what to do when that doesn’t work. So you don’t have planning, you don’t necessarily plan-

Jason Rothman:
You give up.

Chris Schaeffer:
What happens if you don’t get any conversions? You don’t get any phone calls? And where do you go from here? You’ve reached the end of the bucket. That’s basically the end of your creativity. And I know Jason, we’ve already discussed this, but let’s say you don’t even have tracking and things like that.

Chris Schaeffer:
But we’ve already mentioned the fact that conversions can be very difficult. If you don’t have a website that has conversion tracking, has phone call tracking, that you can attribute that phone call to a specific device, time of day, a location, keyword, ad copy like that. If you can’t trace that phone call that led to a purchase of a $700,000 home for you, you’ve lost a ton of value because you don’t know what made them sign up.

Chris Schaeffer:
This is what we’ll talk about more is the advanced tips that we’ll give is these gold nuggets of keyword searches that are really good because there’s breadcrumbs that you can follow to say, “It wasn’t just new homes, it was new homes plus a zip plus around 500 or allow around 700,” stuff like that. That’s the kind of stuff that we want to get you to. But that’s the plain details of the fence, as we say about failure and success.

Jason Rothman:
Yeah. It’s overall for realtors. I’ve seen Chris just like you said, lack of focus, lack of planning, both with the keywords that you’re targeting, but also with the tracking. So most of the time what I’ve seen is realtors spend anywhere from $500 a month and nothing wrong with that. You can get some good leads for that up to maybe $3,000 a month.

Jason Rothman:
That’s where most of them at least start. There’s nothing wrong with running budgets that size this forever, but it’s a lack of focus. So you run on keywords like Realtors, you run on keywords like Homes for sale, it gobbles up your budget. We talked about this last week. You need to listen to that episode, the filters episode … Excuse me, the funnels episode. This is a classic industry. It’s one of the best examples because the funnel high in the funnel, Realtors, Homes for sale Dallas, Realtors, all that kind of stuff.

Jason Rothman:
The funnel at the top end is huge. This might be one of the most why to skinny funnels in all industries. Where we would want to go with a smaller budget in terms of keywords is deep in the funnel. Chris, Criminal defense lawyers near me, Movers near me, Plumbers near me, we like all that stuff. Maybe even Criminal defense lawyers phrase match on its own, but talking about it for real estate agents or realtors, real estate brokers, how do you feel about … I guess you and I are just pretty much ruling out the word, “Realtor,” exact match and phrase match?

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. Definitely.

Jason Rothman:
Okay. So we’re ruling it out. Then the question becomes middle funnel, I guess a throw back to Katie last episode. This actually probably would be an example in middle funnel. Realtors near me and then realtor’s a big metro area like Dallas, Realtors Houston, Realtors New Orleans. How do you feel about that middle of the funnel? Realtors near me, Realtors Dallas, Realtors New Orleans, what we would commonly refer to as geo keywords, which we commonly like. How would you feel about it for realtors?

Chris Schaeffer:
I guess for me, I’m perfectly fine with it, but I think you said it very, very well. The top of funnel is so wide, middle of funnel is now what … The size of the middle funnel for something like this is so big that it would be considered high funnel for many other industries like defense lawyer. It’s so, so big.

Chris Schaeffer:
When it comes to middle funnel for a budget, like you said a 500, which I totally agree. It seems like a lot of people are comfortable with five, three, 700 a month, something like that. If I have a budget like that, I think I’m going to completely just ditch middle funnel, and go even lower and I’m going to end up stepping on what I want to talk about on Patreon, but it’s just quality of leads.

Chris Schaeffer:
The inability to control how much traffic I’m getting just from real … If I had realtors near me and I looked at all my search terms, Realtors near me is going to be my number one search versus all the other longer tail stuff that I have. It’s just going to have so much volume.

Jason Rothman:
Yeah, Realtors near me, if we’re talking about Los Angeles, such a big metro. Realtors Los Angeles. I’m already getting just an emotional reaction because the problem is going to be, I’m going to look at that search terms report and say … And by the way, we’re going to hit basic advice here and then we’re going to get into advanced ideas. So if there’s realtors listening who are new to AdWords, search terms are what people actually type in Google based on the keyword you selected.

Jason Rothman:
It’s what people actually type in Google and they see and click on your ad. So we focus on search terms a lot. So if I’m looking at those search terms and I see Realtors near me, I see realtors in Los Angeles, Real estate agents Los Angeles, I’m going to love it. But the problem is someone searching Realtors near me in a market like Los Angeles, they could be wanting to buy a house for $300,000 and in Los Angeles that doesn’t go very far at all. And a realtor wouldn’t want that lead.

Jason Rothman:
So I’ll put it this way Chris. I’m open to what we traditionally call geo keywords Realtors near me, Realtors Los Angeles with big metro words or big metro geo parts of the search firm. I’m open to it, but number one, I would limit the budget that gets allocated to it, to control it. Number two, I would be very extremely inclined to put on demographic targeting on top of it. Layer on top of it, only target people in the top 20% of income, only target people above age 35, totally remove unknown.

Jason Rothman:
Maybe even just target people with children if you’re looking, “Okay, they have kids, that means they may want a bigger house, more bedrooms and all that.” I would definitely be inclined to layer on those kinds of things. So that’s how we would approach what it would be middle of funnel for a realtor, real estate agent keywords. My one caveat there Chris, real estate broker, that sounds so high end that I would probably be inclined to allow myself to target that one, thinking, “Real estate brokers near me. That’s someone who’s going to the country club looking for a 5,000 square foot house.”

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, I completely agree. I think that when we get down to it, anything beyond the normal Realtor, Real estate, Dallas realtor, Realtors in Dallas, stuff like that. We need additional modifiers. A lot of times when you listen to our show, we do specialty stuff. We talk about how you have the core word plus a modifier. You have Plumber plus a local geographic term, and that’s usually fine, it’s going to work. But if you do that with this system because there’s so much volume, it just won’t work.

Chris Schaeffer:
So it’s almost as if you should have a core word, a modifier and a secondary modifier. I think that’s going to be essentially what I’m going to be looking for in my best search terms. I’m going to be looking for things that are going to be more specific. And Jason, I know you have lots of ideas in the advanced section we’ll get into about what those secondary modifiers look like. So let me lay it out.

Chris Schaeffer:
The core word might be Realtor, the modifier might be something like Dallas and then the secondary modifier might be 700K, or 700s, something like that. You have all three of those in-

Jason Rothman:
5K square feet. 5000 square feet.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, that’s where it gets really advanced and you’re going to spend a ton of time because-

Jason Rothman:
Five bedroom, four bedroom.

Chris Schaeffer:
There’s so many ways you can break out the way that people are searching, and it feels like a whole nother discussion. Is it worth the effort to go after all the ways that people do home searches, price square footage, bedrooms, amenities, things like that? Most of the time it’s probably not going to be if you’re $500 a month in budget.

Jason Rothman:
I would say we’re not active right now for realtors. We don’t have any realtor campaigns for managing. If we did, I would dive into it more, but just putting a little bit of time into it, last night when I prepared for the show Chris, my inclination in terms of, “Okay, if it’s not realtor near me, if it’s not realtor or big metro area, Dallas, Los Angeles, then what are these deep funnel keywords?”

Jason Rothman:
My inclination would be, like you said, we can do amenities, but that would be very difficult, at least up front to find those keywords and what actually gets volume and then putting it into the account in a way that would not get marked low search volume. Have to figure that out. So my inclination to just get started would be to do geo keywords, but the geo would be, instead of a big metro, it would be a very tiny town or whatever neighborhood you wanted to target or zip code.

Jason Rothman:
I Googled last night my name and looked at stuff about me and I’m a narcissist and all that. But after I was done with that Chris, I Googled, “Rich neighborhoods in Houston.” And apparently there was a town slash neighborhood called Piney Point Village. Are you familiar?

Chris Schaeffer:
Yes, I had the big home there.

Jason Rothman:
I wouldn’t expect you to be, I wouldn’t expect you to be. So that validates that this is an exclusive neighborhood. Piney Point Village. One thing I would do is Homes for sale Piney Point Village, Real estate agents Piney Point Village, Realtors Piney Point Village. I would try to target those kind of very deep funnel geo keywords. I’m totally validated right now Chris. I’m sending in Oklahoma city and I did Realtors Piney Point Village and yes ads. There are ads that show up that say Piney Point Village realtors.

Jason Rothman:
If someone is onto this, and then of course their ad talks about how they’re an expert in that neighborhood. Someone’s doing this and I think my inclination is correct. If I’m working for a realtor in Houston and they want to work with large value transactions and they want to spend their small Google Ads budget as much in the deep funnel, highest value keywords as possible, I would want to spend all my budget on Homes for sale, Realtors, Real estate agents plus the word Piney Point Village as opposed to spending any of it on Real estate agents on its own or Real estate agents Houston overall.

Jason Rothman:
I think just the easiest thing to protect yourself to get the highest quality with your keywords, Realtor, Real estate agent, Real estate brokers, Homes for sale along with whatever town or neighborhood you want to specialize in and target. That’s probably my best keyword advice, at least before jumping into a campaign for months and months, trying to crack the code.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. Let’s burn through these couple of basic advice because I think everybody’s chomping to get at the advanced stuff. A couple things on the basic tracking. We’re not going to go into huge detail on tracking because we’ve talked about it extensively on old shows. Go back either by our pack of old episodes and listen to it or go on YouTube and listen to it for free. But search for stuff about conversion tracking, lead tracking, things like that. You’re going to find that we’ve talked about it several times in several different ways. Let me explain why it’s important. Now I can explain how to do it, but I’ll explain why you should do it.

Jason Rothman:
And tell people what’s possible by the way. Tell them what’s possible.

Chris Schaeffer:
Basically what’s possible is that you can know when your phone ring at four in the afternoon, and it was an amazing lead. You’ll know exactly what keyword that person searched, what they actually typed into Google, what device, what location, what time of day, all that kind of stuff. You’ll be able to track that back into your campaign and know what caused your phone to ring. What caused that person to sign up for an account? What caused that person to fill out your contact form? That’s the value. And I’m not telling you to do it because you’ll need that tomorrow for that one phone call.

Chris Schaeffer:
You will need it six months from now when things are slow and it’s the middle of winter and you’re wondering, “What was working so well?” You’ll wonder why things were working so well last spring. You want to prepare for this coming spring and you don’t know what led to phone calls. You’re looking at 600 keywords. You don’t know why $6,000 of spin led to phone calls last year and how you can prepare to boost your campaign for the upcoming season.

Chris Schaeffer:
That’s why. It’s for your future self and it’s investment into optimization as you start growing your campaigning and investing more money because you will always come to a dry time in your Google Ads campaign. There’s always an ebb and flow and you may come out of it, but conversion tracking is there so that you can be sure and come out of it with data that’s proven itself. Last thing is control over bids. I’m going to say, if you’re even considering Realtor near me, Realtor Dallas, Realtor plus geo, New homes near me, stuff like that, absolutely go with manual bids.

Chris Schaeffer:
I’m going to highly suggest you avoid any automated, maximize clicks, maximize conversions because if you put New Homes, exact match. Realtor, exact match. And next to something else it said Piney Point Village realtor, you will barely get traffic for Piney Point Village even though the value of that click is way more, you’ll just get tons more on the word Realtor.

Chris Schaeffer:
Because the fact is there’s just more out there. You need to control the value of that click by controlling the bids. Short answer, that’s very basic stuff. Again, we talk about it plenty, but if you’re a new guy out there trying to start a PPC for Realtor, that’s the truth. That’s how you get it.

Jason Rothman:
Yeah. Okay, Chris. Let’s get into some advanced kind of idea … I want to so much call them advice or tips, because we haven’t really tried them. It’s more of like, “Hey, if we got a realtor today, this is kind of the advanced stuff we’d be thinking about.” So it was kind of ideas. Neighborhood keywords, we talked about that. YouTube. The thing with YouTube is Chris, I went to middle school with a girl.

Chris Schaeffer:
Congrats.

Jason Rothman:
Does Cynthia listen [inaudible 00:35:06]?

Chris Schaeffer:
No, she never listens.

Jason Rothman:
This girl is beautiful.

Chris Schaeffer:
Oh boy.

Jason Rothman:
She’s just, I don’t know. Julia Roberts. What’s that movie with Richard Gere? Wedding On The Run or whatever it is, Bride On The Run with the Dixie Chicks soundtrack. Man, I miss my childhood, I miss the 90s. I want a time machine. All I want to do is go back to the 90s. Does anybody know how to do that? Runaway Bride.

Chris Schaeffer:
Runaway Bride. Okay. Yeah, that’s okay.

Jason Rothman:
Dixie Chicks on the [sundry 00:35:34]. All right, so this girl is beautiful and is a very successful real estate agent and I’m friends with her on Facebook and dude, she hammers it with just content, content, content. Advice videos, all that kind of stuff. She built up a following and now there’s people out there like me who don’t live in her city, hardly know anyone in her city. But if anybody ever came to me and said, “Hey, I’m moving to the city. I need a realtor.” 100% I would recommend her because she shared her knowledge.

Jason Rothman:
I’ve seen realtors that are hustling that do videos and all that kind of stuff. YouTube would be great because you can get a ton of views for a very small amount of money and control it with low bids, but you can target anything you want. Age range, demographics with income, genders, locations you want, types of videos to show up on. I just liked the idea 100 dollars a month forever and you can continue to grow your following. That’s You Tube. Segmented remarketing list Chris. This gets back to the neighborhood. If you’re a realtor, do you want to run a remarketing campaign that remarkets to anybody who’s been on your website? You could. Nothing wrong with that.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah.

Jason Rothman:
But if someone’s been to the page on your website about Piney Point Village, that town or any URL that includes a house in Piney Point Village, if they viewed a home in Piney Point Pillage, you can hit them with display ads on remarketing. Just that audience that says, you’re the Piney Point Village neighborhood expert. I thought that would be a cool thing to do. Chris, let’s get into it with landing pages.

Chris Schaeffer:
Oh, boy.

Jason Rothman:
I’ve come up with a landing page idea and I want to know what you think.

Chris Schaeffer:
Okay.

Jason Rothman:
This is advanced, okay? This is advanced. The whole thing with realtors and getting leads is that you can’t just go, “Oh, thanks for calling your conversion. Now you’re going to give me money. Thanks for filling out the form, your conversion, my AdWords person is happy, you’re going to give me money now.” No. A lot goes into turning that lead, that conversion into an actual customer that signs a contract to buy or sell a home through you.

Jason Rothman:
What I think you need to do, is people filling out that landing page lead form. That’s just the first step. That’s just the first step. So you’ve got to get them in your ecosystem. So I thought what would be great, offer them a neighborhood guide or a town guide, history of home values in that neighborhood, data about that neighborhood. Just a very short PDF you can generate and make.

Jason Rothman:
Promise them that if they just fill out the lead form, send it to them through some kind of email software and now you have someone in your email list and you can email market to them, follow up with them throughout the months that go on calling them, “Hey, just checking in.” I think that’s how I would be thinking about landing pages and getting someone on my email list as opposed to just getting a lead form submission. How do you feel about that?

Chris Schaeffer:
I like it for a very specific reason.

Jason Rothman:
It ain’t easy. It ain’t easy.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. Okay. I’m not going to comment about whether it’s good for a lead funnel for a realtor because that’s not what I’m an expert in. I don’t know about lead funnels and how to get someone to fill out a form and then eventually convert them through multiple step marketing. That’s not what I’m here to talk about. But what I do like as far as Google Ad goes, is I like the low hanging fruit for conversions.

Chris Schaeffer:
The ability to be able to get conversions more often is very nice for a real estate campaign. Because having the only conversion is a phone call or creating an account on a website. If that’s your only two conversions or a contact form, you always get onto me for according low conversion rates. Jason, even you, King of the, I generate crazy high conversion rates. You got to say the conversion rate for something like that is got to the low. It’s got to be crap.

Jason Rothman:
I’ve had real realtors that go, “I set up this great website. You can search any home in this metro MLS.” MLS well, you’re so cool because you guys have a term, that is some secret of that thing. Well, we got the Paid Search podcast. Okay. Anyway, “MLS.” And they were like, “Yeah, you can get all the data in here. We just need people to fill out the account, create an account.” [crosstalk 00:39:51].

Chris Schaeffer:
No, you are going to do it again-

Jason Rothman:
We don’t need to do that today. We don’t need to do that today. I was ready, but we don’t need to go there. But no Chris. No one created an account.

Chris Schaeffer:
No. Maybe first home buyers, maybe it’s their first time to consider buying a home and this is their first time to contact a realtor and they have no idea what they’re in store for. But anyone who’s ever bought a home, you put your email in there, you put your phone number, bing bing bing. You start getting phone calls, you start getting texts, you starting getting emails, you’re going to start and getting automatically signed up to stuff, because that’s the way realtors work. They gotta be on the ball, they’re fast moving people. They’re coffee drinkers, they get a lot of energy. That’s just the way it goes.

Chris Schaeffer:
And personally, the last time I signed up for one of those, I put all fake information in. Fake email, fake everything and once I was ready to contact the company, then I just gave them a call because I was like, “You are not getting any information.” I have this junk email that I use just for spam stuff to sign up. I was like, “I’m never going to contact you until I’m ready.” So the conversion rate on that. That’s what I love about email signups, low hanging type of stuff. Now I want to draw the line and say I’m not good to go so far as to say time on site conversion rates or page view conversion rates.

Jason Rothman:
No, this is about leads. We got to get leads.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah.

Jason Rothman:
Because this is the first step of the process for them so they have to get leads.

Chris Schaeffer:
There’s going to be that hot, brand new out of college marketing guy who’s like, “Oh I’ve got a great idea for this realtor. I’m going to put bounce rate conversion rates for their PPC.” No, I’m drawing a line there, but I do love that landing page idea you had.

Jason Rothman:
Yeah. I guess my main point with the landing pages is in, and the forms and all that, make it easy for people to give you their information, make it enticing for people. Give them a report on the neighborhood, whatever, make it enticing. But don’t expect that, that’s the end of the game. Now you have an email, now you have a phone number. And of course if you’re talented realtor, you know what to do with it, you know how to get those leads.

Jason Rothman:
Okay. Just finishing up here Chris. Placements. Placements could be huge. If you need a placements expert, just let us know because we’ve got some audience members who are placement experts. They will go deep. But there’s tons of sites. I don’t know if Zillow runs AdSense or Google Ads or whatever. It probably does. There’s tons of sites like Zillow.

Jason Rothman:
You can target placements with your display ads, exact websites, exact website addresses, individual pages. So people that are viewing Houses in Piney Point Village on real estate websites like Zillow. So there’s stuff like that you can do because if they’re viewing those pages, they might be in the market for one of those houses and you can get in front of them. Then my final kind of advanced idea here Chris, it doesn’t have to be destination cities, but what comes to mind.

Jason Rothman:
Because corporations move people across the country to regular cities. But you could target all of the United States or other parts of the world even, and you could target words like Hilton Head South Carolina real estate agents. Hilton head South Carolina real estate brokers. West Palm Beach realtors. You’ve got people all over the country or different parts of the world searching for realtors in specific cities that have some kind of travel destination, second home destination, sometimes it’s corporate relocation.

Jason Rothman:
There’s some car companies in the South Chris, who are based in Europe and they relocate executives over from Germany to the South in America or from Asia over to the South in America. And they might be doing searches in their home country, real estate brokers, Nashville, Tennessee real estate brokers, Charlotte, North Carolina, whatever. Then you can be there and guess who else is not going to be advertising in Japan on real estate-

Chris Schaeffer:
Everyone else.

Jason Rothman:
Searches for South Carolina? Everybody.

Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah.

Jason Rothman:
You’re going to get there and you’re going to get low cost for in super laser focus traffic that would be impressed that you’re running that ad that you’re set up for that. So Chris, those are our advanced ideas. You’re the guy that likes to just beat me up on here, shoot me down. But those are pretty solid ideas.

Chris Schaeffer:
Oh, man. Oh yeah. Because I could see if someone took all this advice, here’s the final picture, here’s the big picture. You have a campaign that’s focused on … Let me say, it’s not focused on New home and Realtors, you’re getting long tail stuff, you’re getting specific things and you’re getting data on a decent low conversion rate thresholds.

Chris Schaeffer:
Maybe you’re getting 5%, 10% conversion rates rather than 0.1% of people that signed up for your stupid site and it never happens or called the phone number. That’s what I like. I like this very specific and you’re still getting high conversion rates for people that are downloading something or putting their email in just some kind of conversion. Yeah. I like it. I like it.

Chris Schaeffer:
Well, as I said, I got some other stuff to share that goes in the same vein about quality of leads and we’re going to do that in the Patreon show. But before we let you guys go, I want to tell you again about a great tool, O P T E O.com/psp six week trial. Get tips, great suggestions about your Google Ads, about other marketing avenues as well directly in your inbox. See great suggestions on how to improve your campaign, your bids, your keywords, negative keywords, budgets, all that kind of stuff. Jason.

Jason Rothman:
Thank you Chris. And I want to thank Directive Consulting for sponsoring today’s episode. Directive Consulting is the go to B2B and enterprise search engine marketing agency. Check out their case studies on their website, check out the clients they’ve worked with on their website, check out their services, directiveconsulting.com and get yourself a free custom proposal.

Jason Rothman:
Chris, I guess just to wrap it up before we go into Patreon, these are ideas. My main piece of advice for real estate agents out there is control your budget, plan for the longterm. If a $4,000 a month budget for six months in a row would scare you, there’s no need to do that.

Chris Schaeffer:
No.

Jason Rothman:
Dip your toe in the water, try things out, work with a great partner, plan for the long term, track everything and experiment with some of the ideas we had here and experiment with your own ideas. One final piece of advice, realtors, some of them are great marketers and you guys are doing a lot with Facebook, you’re doing a lot with email marketing, following up on leads, all that kind of stuff. YouTube channels, I would say look at Google Ads as one piece of the puzzle and try to figure out a way to tie in the traffic you get from Google Ads into the other platforms and the other ways you’re marketing to people and it can help you just grow overall and really you don’t need a ton of budget to do it.

Jason Rothman:
But then if you want to scale, if you’re running for a brokerage and you got multiple realtors, trust me, trust Chris, there’s ways to scale. There’s plenty of volume out there for realtor keyword. So thanks for listening to the show. We will see you guys on the next episode of the Paid Search podcast, and we will see the Patreon members on Patreon right now.

Similar Episodes:

• The Sales Funnel Strategy Approach To Google Ads (Episode 167)
• How To Get Good Results In The First Month On Google Ads (Episode 171)
• Can’t Find Keywords? Don’t Panic! Here’s a Strategy! (Episode 177)
• How to Manage Google Ads Campaigns WITHOUT Average Position (Episode 172)
• How to Convey Value to PPC Clients When They Say It’s Not Working (Episode 169)