Before You Pay for That First Click, Know What Works in Real Estate PPC Advertising

The major pay per click search engines all allow you to set a budget for daily and monthly click charges. Be careful to come up with a budget that's realistic and that you can keep in place for long enough to realize return on your investment.

Even with the immediate visitor traffic generated, know that the few that will eventually become clients will probably not do so for months in the future. Don't set a high budget that you'll need to cancel in three months. Be realistic and budget for at least a year's traffic to begin to see commissions results.

With the keyword tool at Yahoo's marketing site, you can enter keywords and phrases and see how many times they were used by searchers and the variations that were entered. Example: Entering "MyTown real estate" will show you not only how many used that term in a month, but also variations like "real estate in mytown", "mytown real estate listings", etc.

Since pay per click advertising is bidding against your competitors for the top positions, it can get expensive if you just compete for the top and most-used phrases. Look for less-used words and phrases and you can frequently get top exposure for much less.

Too many real estate agents take all their pay per click visitors to their home page. Doing this can cost you in long term repeat visitors and thus commissions.

If they click on an ad to search all listings in your area, take them straight to the listings search page. You can have links back to home and other pages there. This more direct approach is appreciated and you won't lose that visitor that leaves your home page when they can't quickly find the link to what they wanted.

With free search traffic, a high percentage of those giving false email addresses or leaving without registering isn't as large a problem as it is with PPC. If you're paying $1.00+ per click and they immediately leave because you want personal information before they can search, you can see the problem with your return on click investment.

Not only are you bidding against competitors for position, you're also competing for the eye of the searcher. A well-written ad can produce much better results three positions down from a higher-bid poorly worded ad.

Think of what the searcher is wanting. An ad touting "I give the best buyer agency service in town!" doesn't cut it. "Find all YourTown listings here" does. Note the use of the word "find" instead of search. It's proven to work better, as they want to locate homes, not search for them.

Pay per click advertising is probably the most focused and effective marketing method in history. You can set what you want to spend, write an ad designed to attract a very targeted prospect, ie: "Denver Condos for Sale", and get those condo buyers to your site in droves.

If you don't have special offerings over and above property searches to generate voluntary sign-ups, you're wasting your advertising dollars. Visitors will be glad to use your site over and over without ever letting you know who they are. Offer statistics or other special reports if they'll fill out a form to have them emailed.

It can't be stressed enough that visitors to real estate internet sites are doing their research much earlier than in the pre-internet days. With the web, the buyer or seller of real estate can begin their research much earlier with anonymity and without sales pressure.

Even if you get the visitor to value your site and information enough to provide their email address, you can't expect them to act soon or remain loyal until they do. Implement an effective and non-intrusive drip email campaign. You need to continue to be valued for your helpful attitude and low-key service approach.