If you’re a real estate agent looking on diversifying your lead sources, there’s a good chance you have heard about Google Ads. Google Ads are the advertisements first pop up when you search for something on the internet using Google. Another shorthand for these types of advertisements are PPC ads, short for Pay Per Click because the advertiser only pays Google when someone clicks on the ad.
The locations of these ads can vary; they can be directly above your search results, on ads on your favorite website at the top or sidebar, in YouTube videos, or in a shopping ad. Usually they appear as they would below.
Normally there are 3 steps to creating a Google Ad campaign.
- Create Your Search Ad.
- Choose Keywords Based on Searching Intents.
- Set Your Search Ads Budget
Now that might sound easy, but people lose their minds trying to craft the best search ad wording, finding the perfect keywords, and playing around with the best budget. That’s how you post an ad but that’s nowhere close to the beginning of the Google Ad process.
How Google Treats Your Ad
After you have submitted your ad, Google then will rate your ad based on numerous factors. First of all, the price on a click will change every time because multiple factors have an effect on what an advertiser pays. Google uses an auction process for ad placement, so the maximum bid price you set on an ad influences where on the page your ad will be. Then, Google wants it to relate to the search topic. If you were selling shoes but decided that a lot of people buy your shoes also shop for pizza online, you might be tempted to think, “I’ll place my ad on that search for exposure.”
However, Google will not give your ad a good grade because you sell shoes and not pizza. That grade will affect how much you pay per click on that ad. So while people who actually sell pizza will get cheap costs per click, if you don’t sell pizza, you would be charged for the inconvenience you are giving Google Searchers and would pay a much higher fee.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Other elements such as location targeting, device adjustments, keyword match types, daily budgeting, conversion tracking and much, much more will effect a Google campaign. While it is easy to summarize what is needed to create a Google ad, the management of those ads is a major undertaking.
A Do It Yourself Nightmare
As an entrepreneur and real estate agent, many find the temptation to cut costs and to run PPC campaigns themselves. They, like many others, believe that they can figure out the system much in the way they figured out real estate and blunt force their way through. Many real estate agents probably have the aptitude and the wherewithal to learn how to master Google Ads; unfortunately, they do not have something vital to the success of running these PPC campaigns themselves: time.
Every minute, hour, day, week, and month lost to figuring out how to do Google Ads is lost revenue that they could have been contacting potential clients, showing homes, training their teams, and making their processes more efficient. There are just better revenue generating activities an agent can engage themselves in.
The other part of this equation is your competition. Your online lead competition is going to be using a dedicated firm or person for online lead generation, and they will already have been doing it for a while. It doesn’t really leave much room for the do-it-yourselfer with a couple hours a week to dedicate to learning how to make Google Ads to carve niche.
Add in that you will receive many more leads through online lead generation than other means and you’ll need the extra bandwidth to follow up on your lead base and not be tweaking your ads.
Let Firepoint Do It For You
Firepoint provides all their clients access to industry leading experts in PPC. We have designed our PPC lead generation to be affordable, scalable, and, most importantly, worth it. Here’s how it works.
We Take Care of Google, You Get the Leads
We handle everything on the online lead generation side. We create the leads, optimize the campaigns to get you the best cost per lead, and we then manage the campaigns on a month to month basis. Our PPC team is dedicated to making sure you get the most leads for the best price. When you sign up for Firepoint, you will be guided by our experienced account managers to pick the areas and types of housing you’d like to target. Once you select those areas that will be sent to our PPC team who will carefully craft those ads and start sending you leads. Since you already have the Firepoint CRM, those leads will automatically funnel right into your CRM!
Only 10% of Your Overall Ad Budget
Let’s start with cost because we know a lot of agents want to start online lead generation but don’t want to go broke getting it up and running. For Firepoint clients, the cost is only 10% of your overall ad budget. That means if you want to run a google pay per click campaign totaling $300, it only costs $30 for us to create, optimize, and manage that campaign for you. To make things even easier we just take that management fee out of the $300. No guessing on what the extra amount is.
No Contract – Month to Month
Just like our industry leading CRM, we don’t lock you into a 3 month, 6 month, or an annual contract. All of our Firepoint PPC campaigns are month to month which allows you to change the monthly amount if you want to spend more or less. If it doesn’t make sense for you business one month you can even shut down the campaign for a little bit. At Firepoint we want to give you flexibility in your business, and nothing shows our commitment toward flexibility more than being able to decide what marketing efforts are best for your business on a month to month basis.
Transparent Accountability
Unlike many of our competitors, we don’t hide where your money is being spent. Every 60 days we will generate a report for you that shows you which areas your money went towards and how many leads that generated. On request we can print out an AdGroup report at any time so you can get a feel for what is happening in your account. We know you’re spending your hard earned money to increase your leads. We trust our process and make it our business to show you what we have been doing. We feel anyone who would hide how your money is being spent probably isn’t spending it with your best interests in mind. And that is not Firepoint’s way of doing business.