I get into discussions with folks all the time about "paid traffic" vs. "free traffic", and my contention is that free traffic is wonderful when you can get it, but the control you get with paid traffic can far outweigh any amount of free traffic that you might get. Much like why many people prefer the precise control of a manual transmission over automatic transmission, paid traffic can have the same benefits when you know what you're doing.
Here are 10 things you can do with Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN Pay-Per-Click marketing (PPC) that simply can't be done (or is very difficult to do) when you're at the mercy of the ever-changing organic search engine algorithms. Apologies in advance - this list is off the top of my head and in no particular order.
Track which keywords convert into leads, and which don't. In most cities, "[CITY] real estate" gets 3 to 10 times as much traffic as "[CITY] [ST] real estate" or "[CITY] [STATE] real estate", but in others, it can be the other way around. I've identified some cities where "[CITY] real estate" only gets 20% more traffic than "[CITY] [STATE] real estate" -- but "[CITY] [STATE] real estate" converts into a lead twice as often. While everyone else is battling it out to be on the first page of Google for "[CITY] real estate" because they assume it is the most searched for phrase, I own the #1, AND #2 spot for "[CITY] [STATE] real estate" and pull in 3 to 20 times as many leads as the other suckers optimizing their sites for the wrong phrase.
Market on other people's websites (including your competitors). Google has this wonderful thing called the Content Network that allows websites (both big and small) to advertise your site - when appropriate by using "Adsense". I'm not talking about going and adding valuable, non-spammy comments on someone elses blog... I'm talking about flat-out advertising where you're telling visitors exactly why they might want to come visit your site. Anytime they display your ad and someone clicks on it, they get paid a few cents, and you can end up getting traffic that simply can't be had elsewhere. I've received very qualified leads from legal blogs, local eateries, and even competitors' websites. In some cases, those leads have cost me as little as twelve cents!
A/B split testing. Wondering if you should offer a "7 deadly mistakes every seller should avoid" report or "7 tips to help sell your home fast, and for top dollar" report? One just might get twice as many signups as the other, but unless you test them side-by-side and track which report has a higher interest from your visitors, it's going to be difficult to tell. With Adwords, all you have to do is have Google drive half of your traffic to one offer, and the other half to the other offer and within a few days, you'll know which offer gets you more leads. (In fact, as long as you are using their tracking code -- they'll tell you which version is better.) If you're not good at math, you can use a tool like splittester.com or Google's own "optimizer tool" that is built into adwords to make the decision for you.
Target two different audiences searching for the exact same term. A person who lives in Dallas Texas searching for "Dallas real estate" can be directed to a page that caters to someone with local knowledge who might also have a home to sell and wants a free market analysis on their home. Throw in a "buy & sell through me and I'll move you for free" type coupon, and you're likely to get a double-header. However, someone living in California searching for "Dallas Real Estate" is most likely considering relocating & you'll be more likely to convert them into a lead if you direct them to a page that offers a free relocation package. Send local sellers to one page directed at sellers, and send people relocating from another state to a different page that offers a free relocation package. This can be done by using the "geotargeting" feature built into Google Adwords.
Get traffic from people searching for your competitors. If "XYZ Realty" has a strong presence in your area, there will be a lot of people looking for "XYZ Realty in [CITY]". Funny thing is that they are usually just looking for real estate information. With the exception of a couple major franchises, there is nothing saying you can't happen to have an ad for your website displayed when someone searches for that term. It doesn't have to make any mention of their company -- just mantioning "[CITY] real estate" in your ad will get enough of those visitors coming to your site. (This traffic, BTW, can be 50% to 75% less expensive than bidding on "CITY real estate.", and it usually converts into leads at a higher rate. Granted - this could be done organically, but you have to optimize your landing page for that company's name, and that can be hard to do when mentioning a company that you are not affiliated with.
Drive traffic to the highest converting page - not just your home page. It's a proven fact that most websites' lowest converting page on their website is their homepage. This is because visitors are usually required to search for what they are looking for, and the more hoops your visitors have to jump through, the less leads you'll get. However, many search engines display the homepage of your website even though there might be another page within your site that would convert a higher percentage of visitors into leads/sales.
Rank for hundreds of long-tail phrases instantly. Are you a hyper-local marketer? Great. What if instead of spending hundreds of hours writing hyper-local posts, you could simply bid a nickel per click on hundreds of those phrases, and determine which of them get the highest search volume. Then, after spending $5 or $10 on hundreds of visits (and thousands of impressions), write posts based on the phrases that get the most traffic. That way, instead of hundreds of hours writing content for phrases that might, or might not get traffic, you can focus on the phrases that will get you the most traffic possible.
Get exposure 5 minutes from now - even for highly competitive phrases. Again - free traffic is great, but it can take time before the search engines find you and decide that you're "worthy" of being displayed on the first page of the SERPS for the phrases you'd like to get found for. After you take the 10 or 15 minutes required to set up an Adwords account, you pick what keywords you want to rank for, and bid on them. You'd be surprised -- A budget as small as $50 a month could get you a lot of leads if you're smart about what phrases you bid on. The beauty is that you never pay for a click unless your visitors actually click on your ad.
Get the most bang for your buck out of classified ads/postcards. Do you canvas mail neighborhoods, or still run classified ads for your listings? Before you spend who knows how much on such a campaign, test a headline or two via adwords. In a matter of minutes, you could write two or three ads on adwords, and test which ad gets the highest clickthrough rate. After spending $25 to $50 on Adwords, you might find that one ad "pulls" 3 to 5 times as often as the others. The same will likely happen if you use similar language in your newspaper ad or postcard mailing. (This could be done via thousands of postcard mailers, multiple phone lines, and direct response tracking methods, but why bother? It's way cheaper to do via Adwords.)
Switch websites or overhaul your old site, and never worry about losing your hard-earned search engine traffic because Google or Yahoo don't like your new site as much and drop your site from the search terms you were ranking for before. With Adwords, you can change the page you're driving traffic to in about 2 minutes.
If you're among the 1% to 2% of Realtors who have a knack for getting respectable volumes of organic traffic, these 10 tips might be of no use to you, but for the rest of us - Adwords can either be a great way of getting additional traffic otherwise not obtainable, or it can be a tool that can be used to increase the efficiency of your SEO efforts.
59 Comments on 10 Things You Can Do With Adwords That You Can't Do Organically
APR
28
2009
I currently use pay per click through google and love it. You have given me some useful information that could increase my ranking even more. Thanks. Michelle Cappabianca
My site is quite new but I've sort of been set against PPC - though I'm open to changing my mind. You've got some great ideas here so I've bookmarked it to save for future reference.
By the way - what are "respectable volumes of organic traffic" in your opinion?
Hi Joel -- Great advice. I've tried AdWords in the past after extensively evaluating everything related to having an effective campaign and came up bust.
well put Joel. We found that a good adwords campaign really helped us understand the important organic keyowrds for us. Your #7 above is great for learning about #1.
One thing we learned is that the long-tail might drive traffic for us, but it does not drive leads or business. Because of adwords we now know the four key phrases that people search the most for for us. Would never have figured it out without paid search.
Your article is very interesting to me because this past weekend I just canceled all my Google Adword advertising. Why? Because I always show up #1 organically for the search term "Winnetka Real Estate." I figured I didn't need to pay anything.
But your article makes me see that I need to do a little more investigating into the pay-per-click process.
Joel, I am a huge advocate for pay per click campaigns if done correctly and with the right web-site to drive the traffic to. Of course you still have to be prepared to follow them up or it is a waste of money. Ok 44% of all my closings last year came from my PPC campaigns, but I don't manage them too much time.
Adwords is the most brilliant advertising that I have ever used. Specifically the A/B split testing. Where else can you find out what type of ad will be successful for less than $20?
What if instead of spending hundreds of hours writing hyper-local posts, you could simply bid a nickel per click on hundreds of those phrases, and determine which of them get the highest search volume.
Hi Joel,
This sounds like a great idea! Can I really bid a nickel? I'm incurably curious. Now I'm very tempted to try out a few things.
This sounds quite good. I'm afraid to say that I don't know the difference between manual and organic.
I did have a website that ranked number 1 in a local area (a neighbourhood) but I didn't receive one single phone call from it over a one year period.
My regular website produces about 30 people per week, but unfortunately they are not all buying or selling at this time. However, I do add them to my -mail list.
We Used to use adwords (do not need anymore) one successful method is to geographically choose all states except your own. You get more serious relo's and eliminate the locals that hit you over and over. Cuts cost per sale by about 60%. Locally we targeted only specific area. We had 2 seperate ad campaigns...
Good stuff Joel. We're doing some of them and didn't even think about he other ones. I can't wait to share this with our admin and IT guy..........fun stuff! We've had some pretty good success and we're just babies at the whole game. I can't wait to really start fine-tuning it. Information like yours is soooooooo helpful to babies like us!
Joel, What a great post! I've used Adwords but now that I've read your post, I'm going to REALLY use it. I've not only bookmarked this but am printing it so I can refer to it until I get this thing right.
Liz - I should have chosen a different word than "Respectable" because it is such an ambiguous term. ie: A Realtor with a good lead-capture and follow up system could do quite well with 1000 unique visitors a month, whereas someone with a "billboard" of a website with no lead capture other than a phone number and an email link might need 10,000 visitors.
Similarly, a website ranking #1 for a couple dozen neighborhood search phrases might do very well with several hundred unique visitors because those visitors are farther along in the buying process.
I guess the short answer is that "respectable" is whatever amount of visitors yields enough leads to generate the volume of closings you need to be successful.
Chris - I'd be dollars to donuts your adwords offer didn't align well enough with your lead capture mechanism. It's amazing what subtle changes in either the capture system, or the ad itself can do. I too learned the hard way when I got started and spent tons of money using the wrong message, but got lucky & was able to make it work after enough testing.
Mike - since you're "kindof a big deal" you get your own response ;-)
Next time we get together, we'll have to disucss long tail vs short tail more since I *know* you've done extensive research. I agree that any one long-tail phrase by itself hardly seems like the effort, but my experience with long tail is that a lot oof it can add up to more conversions with less traffic.
Margaret - I'd be interested to see what impact dropping your adwords had on traffic. In some cases we've seen that it is somewhat "cannibalistic" when we're already ranking for a certain phrase, but in others, we've still seen a measurable increase - especially when we custom tailor the message depending on where the visitor is located.
Russell - Thanks for the comments! Jason Crouch speaks very highly of you & I'd love to get together if I'm ever in Austin. (I very well may be there for a training session sometime this summer.)
Chanda - There is no better way of testing for which phrases will get the most bang for the buck than Adwords. The key is using Google's conversion tracker, and looking at your Adwords investment as "Market Research" that will make your SEO efforts far more effective.
Missy - It sounds like we have really similar metrics. I don't spend much time on adwords either. With the exception of this month (which was a 6 month overhaul), I spend about 30 minutes a month maintaining our accounts. I STILL can't believe we didn't hang out more at RetechSouth in Atlanta!
Mark - You sound like a Perry Marshall Student. Are you?
Sally - Heh - it can seem easy to feel overwhelmed, but all of those metrics are optional. If you're not on Adwords, you can do so in about 10 minutes and it doesn't have to break the bank.
1) sign up for an account
2) Bid on the words [CITY real estate] (replace "CITY with your city" but include the brackets. That means you will only get traffic when people search for that exact phrase.
3) Pick a max budget of $5 or $10 a day so you don't get slaughtered in a day or two (I once spent $850 while out at a movie because I forgot to cap my daily budget & was slammed with followup for the next 3 days.)
4) Write a compelling ad & send them to your website.
Stuart - I'm a fan of both too. I hope to meet you at one of the #DenverTweetups one of these days!
Bruce - Nickel bids that make the first page are rare, but they're out there. Bottom line is that it costs you nothing to try & see what happens. Adwords sometimes requires you to raise your bid to $.10 or $.20 to get displayed for low-volume phrases, but it can be done . I just got a lead yesterday that cost me $.07 (a LEAD - not a click!). Granted, it usually takes a lot more clicks than that, but I'll take 'em where I can get em ;-)
Mary - See my note to Sally above. It really is easy & doesn't have to be compicated at all.
Brian - We also use "drip" followup somewhat like newsletters, along with property updats as appropriate. There are a lot more tire-kickers out there for sure, but it's those of us who consistently follow up with them who are going to weather this storm. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Frank & Jodi - It's amazing how different markets can be. I find that local traffic converts at a higher rate than relo traffic, and the best part is that the local traffic quite often has a home to sell in addition to needing to buy. Thanks for the tip though! It just goes to reinforce that there is no "one size fits all" formula. It's those of us that test, test, and test who will excel in their marketplace.
Anna - I'm honored to have written something worthy of printing & passing along to your IT department! (This might seem complicated to non adwords folks, but to anyone who does marketing for a living, it should be a piece of cake. After they implement these tips, it could very well cut your budget in half, and still get the same traffic. (I've taken over some Adwords campaigns, and doubled traffic, while cutting overall budgets in half with nothing other than tactics like what I described in this post.) Good luck!
Kathy T - Analytics is an entirely differnt monster, but when paired with organic and PPC - it can be amazing! I look forward to reading posts from you about how to make the most of Analytics ;-)
Aaron - You're absolutely right. Just remember - 90% of it is just showing up, and that applies to the search engine world too ;-) See my reply to Sally above & I hope to hear about your first lead tomorrow! ;-)
Kathy S & Ritu - I'm honored to have made your "bookmarked" list. Thank you.
Roland - I've heard great things about Growth Leader, but one thing I do know is that the majority of their leads are generated via PPC, and from the quotes I received, you're paying as much as a 100% if not 200% markup for that traffic. (Granted, that's compared to what I get traffic for, but even if you set up the most basic Adwords account, I'd be willing to bet you could generate traffic for 20% to 40% less than what you're paying them.)
Steve - I certainly don't envy you because you have to compete with the "Lending Trees" & other franchises that can operate in 50 states. Real Estate agents don't have that because franchises operate more independently. I still think it can be done but you really have to be smart about it.
Bo - To each his/her own. I know free is 10,000% to 100,000% better ROI, but if everyone used that logic, we'd all be cutting our lawns with with pruning shears instead of lawn mowers. ;-)
Sandy - Keller Williams tried to buy my company a few years ago, and I almost went for it! One of the more attractive features was that each of my agents would have a pretty nice website with some good lead capture mechanisms in place. I'm sure if you put some of these tips into practice with your website you'll do very well with it.
Joel- I just love your tips for adwords even though I am not even doing adwords. I want to but we are swamped with getting listings from just this Active Rain blog we have. We are listing agents and I love to write. When I married the two- wow- our inventory soared. We have 52 listings- 12 are under contract with CTG so they don't show up in our mls ( that is another vent for another day) and 8 are not in the mls yet, still putting together their short sale packages.( we don't put them in mls til the package is ready to go to the lender). 60% of all of our listings for over a year now are just from Active Rain. 30% from our Expired marketing program ( direct mail) and 10% are referrals. All organic traffic.
I don't want to mess with a good thing.
But we do have a website and of course that was just a place to put the listings. But then we started to get buyers. We referred the buyers out until Missy talked us into hiring a buyers agent. Now we want to feed our buyers agent and get some more buyer agents. Now I don't have time to blog on that website to get the buyers organically. And my SEO there is good enough to keep one buyer agent busy enough that she does not have time to do anything else, that is a good thing. So needless to say, I keep wanting to start my adwords campaign. I read and studied all of Perry Marshall's books and courses on adwords. I love the stuff because I am a born marketer. Love marketing.
One thing that I picked up that is just like direct mail is that you should always be testing two ads, throw out the one doing the worst, keep the one doing the best and keep doing this over and over again. Always throwing out one for the better one. So now, to clone myself and we will be square) Katerina
Nestor & Katerina - Wow! 60% of your business from Active Rain?!?! I can't say I blame you! As you say - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Of course that just means you shouldn't pull yourself away from your blogging efforts. Nothing that says you couldn't spend a few hours setting it up & letting it run, or hiring a professional to maintain it for you.
Great tips. Even if you have great organic results it pays to know how to do the PPC just in case things change.
If you can master PPC and get conversion, then you have the potential for creating money machines. It's just a equation that you can figure out how much you can bid and get a good return on investment
On item 7, aren't there places where you can see the numbers for long-tail keywords. I could swear I've seen that tool before...but it was on a consultant's site. Surely it's out there somewhere for free...nearly everything else is.
Vickie - Google has a great tool, although I usually prefer gathering my own data myself because I've found that my metrics can be wildly different from what the free tools say in terms of search traffic. The other disadvantage is that most long tail terms don't get enough traffic to show up at all with the free traffic estimators. Here is a link to Google's Keyword Traffic Estimator. (Be sure to search for "Exact match only" to get estimates as accurate as possible.)
Keep in mind that the more important factor than search volume is what percentage of that traffic you can actually convert. That's where no search volume tools will help at all, and the only thing to do is to actually do the work required to rank for that phrase, or just fork out the $$ to test via Adwords. Often, a small investment in the latter will help you focus your efforts on the former.
Tim - I couldn't agree more. Even if you can just break even initially with a PPC campaign, and then shut it down - the metrics you can get from that testing period can be invaluable when it comes to going out and getting free traffic.
Jason - I'm glad it was helpful & thanks for the kudos! It was great talking with you today too!
I've seen it through Google, thought about it, and now I'm seriously considering it! I love the idea of using the adwords for other specific agencies. We have a couple here at the Lake that are pretty strong...and that is a great idea! Thank you so much! You really have me thinking now :) Peggy
Very well said. Your are 100% correct and most people I suspect fall into the PPC category over an organic one. People just need to realize the data mining potential to leverage this information.
Interesting insights on paid advertising. What are your thoughts on eyetracking, where people don't really look at paid results? Do you still see good returns?
Rich - Eye tracking is great, but beware of who is sending the message. The people who say the "right side" of google doesn't convert as well as the "left side" are probably trying to sell you their SEO consulting services. Years ago, when 100% of our traffic came from paid advertising, I decided to learn about SEO to offset our advertising expenses, and once I learned to get that "free" traffic, it wasn't any better or worse than paid traffic - it was just more traffic. I'm a huge believer in getting as much traffic as you can handle, and that means being in both places on the search engines.
I've literally had millions of visitors to my websites and tested conversion rates on all of them. I get a mix of free traffic (the left side of Google's SERPS) and paid traffic (the right side), and I can confidently say that they both convert very well. (I would actually argue that people clicking on the paid ads are more serious buyers.)
As the owner of a Colorado real estate company, I hope to be able to share my 15 years of real estate marketing advice with anyone who is interested. I also look forward to interacting with the rest of you in the AR community who have so much to share.
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I currently use pay per click through google and love it. You have given me some useful information that could increase my ranking even more. Thanks. Michelle Cappabianca