To Pay Per Click, Or Not To Pay Per Click, That Is The Question

I asked a question yesterday on our Facebook page that got some interesting responses. The question was a fairly straight forward one, “If I gave you $1,000,000 and you had to use it to market a single property, what would you spend the money on?” We’d love to have you weigh in on our Facebook page here.

Here are some of the responses we got:

Errol Flynn: A superbowl ad just to show off, lol

Ann Grant: With $1,000,000 I could spread that money out over a few venues. Internet, radio, TV, skywriting ads, billboards, etc. I would try to be as many places as possible.

Phil Zimbardi: Featured online

Rachel Minihan: Tearing out a horrible driveway and redoing it!

Jacklyn Tobin, Realtor: I would use the money to throw a huge catered Open House at the property for sale. I’d include a couple of celebrity chefs to draw in a crowd, and I’d also make it a fundraiser for a charity. People would get a free meal, a chance to donate some money to charity and the chance to see a celeb chef. This would be sure to garner national attention and thus more potential buyers.

Karen Nobleman West: Here in Miami top agents charter yachts to entertain clients and showcase shoreline homes… I’m just saying …..

Some really great, creative answers, but conspicuously missing was Pay Per Click advertising. REALTORS® spend a lot of time and money to market their properties and today, a whole lot of that money goes into featured listings on top real estate search sites. This can be a good use of money, but what if, for the same amount of money, sometimes even less money, you could reach thousands of people in the market for CT real estate before they even make it to those search sites.

This is the promise of Pay Per Click advertising.

Google gets 68% of all search traffic online. That means it gets a tremendous share of the real estate searches done on a daily basis. If you could capture a minuscule fraction of the search traffic going through Google each day, your leads would shoot through the roof. People that click on your ads would go directly to your website and would then enter your funnel instead of the funnel for major real estate search channels. You would get the lead. You would get the opportunity to turn that lead into a client.

Just a couple of things to remember when thinking about Pay Per Click though.

1.) Set a reasonable budget – you can go wild with keywords and blow your entire marketing budget in one month.

2.) Target your keywords – if you try to purchase “real estate” as your keyword your budget will likely be blown after one click. Instead, try to target “Your town, CT real estate.” This will give you a much smaller group of people searching for that term, but they will be qualified leads.

3.) TEST TEST TEST – don’t just start a campaign and let it run. Start a campaign, keep tabs on it weekly and make tweaks as you go to find out which keywords are converting into clients the best.

So, to pay per click, or not to pay per click, what is your answer?