Digital Marketing For Luxury Real Estate : The Google Ads & PPC Playbook

What are Google Ads and PPC?

Google Ads (formerly Adwords) is the name for Google’s suite of advertising capabilities that range from ads on Google and span across their partner sites (ie:Youtube) and even apps. According to Google, their ad platform is “designed to help businesses and marketers connect with billions of people who are finding answers on Search, watching videos on YouTube, exploring new places on Google Maps, discovering apps on Google Play, browsing content across the web, and more.”

With all of the research that goes into marketing luxury real estate ideas, this can make for a perfect combination to leverage for luxury real estate lead generation. The term PPC stands for “pay per click” and is often associated with Google, but can also be in reference to any advertising where you are paying each time a prospect clicks on your ad.

How Does Google Ads Work For Luxury Real Estate Marketing?

Google Ads operates on an auction-based system. This means that when someone searches for a keyword that you’re targeting, your ad is entered into an auction against other advertisers who are also targeting that keyword.

Google then uses a number of factors to determine which ads should be shown in the search results and in what order they should be shown. When possible, you want to show up #1 on the search results page for real estate lead generation so let’s take a look at how these auctions work. 

Search results factors that impact your ad placement and potential for the “click”: 

-Your bid amount: How much you’re willing to pay per click. 

-Google’s quality score: A number that represents how relevant and useful your ad copy and landing pages are to the person who is searching. 

-The expected click-through rate (CTR): A number that represents how often people who see your ad are expected to click on it 

-The ad’s position on the page: The higher up on the page your ad appears, the more likely people are to see and click on it

If your ad is chosen to appear in the search results page, it will appear next to the search results with a small green “Ad” label next to it. This lets potential customers know that they’re looking at an advertisement rather than an organic result.

How Can Agents Utilize Google Ads & PPC As Part Of Their Luxury Real Estate Marketing Strategies?

Google Ads can be an extremely effective way to reach new customers and grow your Real Estate business. How much so? Well imagine if your website comes up every time someone searches for a current list of homes for sale in your area. 

Or even better, how powerful would your real estate lead generation tactics be if you had a landing page detailing your recent sales and market experience, that shows up every time some searches for “best real estate agent in (your city name)”.

Even better…what if your website shows up with a list of homes for sale in your area when someone searches for a specific search like “homes for sale in 90210 with 5 bedrooms over 2 million dollars”.  If you can learn to leverage the Google Ads platform or find a professional to manage the process for you,  you can build your lead funnel and grow your luxury real estate marketing ideas.

Luxury Real Estate Marketing For Lead Gen – Can PPC & G-Ads Work?

At Easy Agent PRO, we manage a lot of clients who are building their business utilizing our Leadsites with Google Ads strategies through PPC advertising within Google Search (check out how well Luxury Agent Darren Oconnor is doing with his Leadsite here)

For the most part, Real Estate Google Ads campaigns are built around common keywords and these work in EVERY market.

“Homes for sale in (city/town name/zip code)” OR “Real estate for sale in (city/town name/zip code)”

These are the most heavily used phrases and on average, our users pay anywhere from .25 per click to $2 per click to have their ad and branded, Real Estate LeadSite show up in search result pages for phrases just like these. 

This works, and with a good landing page strategy, will be an effective luxury real estate lead generation tactic, but it can be expensive and may not be the best way to find Luxury Buyers.

For example, “homes for sale in Phoenix” gets searched over 10k times per month so if you are bidding on this phrase, be prepared to pony up a lot of money to cover it OR expect your daily ad budget to be eaten up by noon every day.

In addition to being expensive, the challenge with these phrases in the luxury markets are pretty simple… the phrasing is so generic, that you really have no idea if the prospect would be interested in luxury properties or would even qualify for them. 

So how do you make it work? We are going to dive in deeper to go over this, but in short, you build digital marketing luxury ad campaigns that focus your ad spend budget on phrases that are MORE SPECIFIC and include keywords that your luxury prospects are MORE LIKELY using to find their next home.

Sometimes this is obvious, but often it can be market specific and if you figure this out, you can get a big leg up on your competition.

For example:
“Homes for sale in Phoenix” gets over 10k searches per month which will cause you to quickly burn through thousands of dollars per month with little assurance that you’re even going to find a luxury buyer.

Instead try these luxury real estate marketing ideas…
“Luxury homes for sale in Phoenix” (avg 170 searches per month)
“Million dollar homes in Phoenix” (avg 30 searches per month)

“Homes for sale in Phoenix with private pools” (avg 10 searches per month)

Now instead of spending thousands of dollars on broad phrases with 10k searches per month, you instead build strong, luxury buyer ad campaigns around higher intent keywords that you can confidently spend money on and likely cover for only $200-$300 per month.

Refined keywords are just one simple part of why luxury agents are having success with our strategies so let’s get started on how YOU can build a playbook for your market. 

Need luxury real estate marketing ideas? Let’s Dive In To Our PPC & G-Ads Playbook!

Step 1: Define your audience’s geography and create lists.

What specific cities, towns, neighborhoods, and zip codes do you want to sell luxury real estate in? Create a list to make sure you are allocating MOST, if not ALL, of your budget here. The more specific the better, these will be your core keywords.

Now that you have defined the areas you want to sell luxury real estate IN, now you need to make a list noting where buyer prospects are likely moving FROM.

This will not be an exact science, but what you are doing is trying to identify trends to allocate your budget and resources into. 

If you sell in the Hamptons, it is likely many of your prospects are currently living in Manhattan or other affluent cities and zips NEAR the Hamptons. If you are a luxury agent near Florida’s panhandle, it is likely many of your prospects are coming from affluent cities in the south.

So in preparation for a high quality digital marketing strategy for luxury real estate, we encourage all agents to CREATE A LIST OF EVERY CITY NAME AND ZIP CODE that prospects may be coming from. You will use this to build a custom audience inside Google Ads.

Pro Tip:
If you work in a market with second home or vacation home purchases, find the local tax records and create a spreadsheet or database of EVERY property owner in your local, desired areas.  If you don’t have time, pay someone to do it. You can do a lot with this data, but for this exercise you will be able to sort and identify homeowners who do not live in your zips.

This may help you identify trends and find zips of owners who own local properties, but do not live in your area. 

Step 2:
Create a list of unique attributes of your market that luxury buyers are looking for.

This is the special sauce and how you can really get a leg up on your competition and spend smart money on your real estate digital advertising.

The average home buyer is looking for “2-3 bedroom homes” and “y” square footage. They are also looking for homes in good school districts that are near parks or near their work. 

These are extremely common keywords that work in most markets, but what makes Google Ads- and PPC really interesting and unique to finding luxury prospects is they think differently and are looking for more unique characteristics in their home searches.

They search for “4 car garages” instead of 2
They search for 5+ bedroom homes instead of 3
They search for “homes near private airports” instead of the interstate
They search for “homes near (elite private school names)” instead of public ones
They search for “homes in (specific affluent neighborhoods)”
They search for “oceanfront homes”, “lakefront homes”, “homes with elevators”, “10+ acres”, “near Apple headquarters”, “over 1 million dollars”, “luxury homes”, “homes with mountain views”

We recently worked with an agent in a luxury market who told us his prospects are looking for real estate “near private marinas”. These keywords were showing ZERO searches in his market, but he was confident that these were important attributes so we set up ads geared towards these keywords and IT WORKED.  Best of all, we were getting clicks for 64 cents because there was no competition. 

Step 3:
Make sure you include a good lead capture process and call to action in your luxury real estate marketing ideas.

For the most part, we suggest setting up very specific “search results pages” like this for each of your ads and keywords that force users to “opt in” to view more details on any specific property that they want to view.

There is some debate around whether this is the right way to utlize your digital marketing for luxury real estate, but in our experience, leads become very expensive if you do not do this.

We also recommend that you make sure your CTA is friendly and the form has Facebook and/or Google opt-in buttons to make it as easy as possible for prospects to add in their info. You can also offer more value to the form like offering them a “relocation guide”.

We also like this idea because it lets the prospect know you will be following up with something soon.

Step 4:
Create additional pages with thoughtful content and beautiful photos or videos.

As discussed in Step 3, we suggest sending people to pages with “lists” of homes, so why would you create pages with content? There are a few reasons. First, by creating pages with content, you are offering prospects something they can not find on Zillow or other sites (prospects can see a list of luxury homes for sale AND a video tour of the neighborhood on your site- for example).

This will naturally keep prospects on your site longer and give you a better chance of building rapport with your audience.  In addition, if you create content by following our SEO guidelines here, there is a chance that in 6-12 months after publishing, your content may rank in organic results.

If this occurs while you are doing Google PPC as part of your luxury real estate marketing ideas, you can potentially show up as an ad at the top of search results AND have your page organically rank underneath the ad.

In addition, Google loves ads that they deem high quality for the user’s experience so we suggest adding in these extra pages as sitelinks.

Sitelinks will give users more page options to click on, increase your quality score (for lower click costs), and give you more ‘real estate’ in the search results page (which can possibly move your competitor to page 2).

Step 5: Have a 6-12 month action plan for follow up.

100% of our Google Ads clients get leads (forms filled out) on their Real Estate Leadsite, but we tell every agent that their success will lie in the follow up. 

Your follow up should include automated calls, automated texts, and phone calls directly from you or a call center if you use one. For Google Ads, the lead volume can be high, depending on your ad spend, which makes calling everyone in a timely manner difficult, so it is important that you use automated texts and emails from your CRM to connect with leads AND further qualify them on how you can help.

If you need help building follow up sequences, we have put together a few sequences for buyer and seller leads. Feel free to reach out to us here and we will email them to you. 

Step 6: Luxury real estate marketing ideas to re-target (aka re-marketing) ALL your website visitors, not just the leads.

Google PPC is a GREAT way to get qualified, luxury real estate prospects  on your site. If you have a high quality campaign set up, you can get 1000 visitors to your site each month for as little as $500, but the reality of PPC traffic is MOST PEOPLE WILL NOT FILL OUT YOUR FORM, so what do you do with them? 

It’s sensible to follow up with people who want to be followed up with, but since you are paying for traffic it would be wise to have an action play for attempting to re-target any site visitors to your real estate website. The great thing about re-targeting PPC traffic is we can assume that they are…at least..somewhat interested in real estate because you utilized steps 1-4 to make sure you are targeting people with high intent. 

The best, and easiest, way to do this in our experience is through Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube. In order to get these in place, make sure you have set up pixels on your site for each platform (more on that here).  I have seen incredible results re-targeting Google PPC traffic on Facebook.

Need some help with this strategy? Reach out to our sales team or join our Facebook group to have an open discussion with other agents.

Step 7: DIY or DFY? Real estate lead generation services for PPC.

The internet is an amazing resource to learn just about anything, especially digital marketing strategies in luxury real estate, but the reality is… do you have the time to learn or set them up AND sell? Even if you do, a proper Google Ad campaign will have thousands of keyword variations along with hundreds of search result pages that need to be set up on your site. 

If you do not have a proper set up, your click costs will be higher and your landing page experience may be falling short of expectations of the user. 

Marketers (like us!) with Real Estate experience in Google Ads have the ability to get effective ad campaigns set up that are customized to your market with high quality scores in a matter of days and are well worth the expenditure.

Want to see if our digital marketing strategies for luxury real estate are a good fit for you? Sign up for a demo and we will come up with a customized plan specific to your market.

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Josh Keeton

Digital Marketing Specialist with over 10 years of experience in SaaS and Real Estate.

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