What Does PPC Mean in Real Estate Marketing?

This is one of the questions frequently asked by Realtors and real estate investors who are new to the world of online advertising.

PPC is one of the most cost-effective way of advertising your services as a real estate agent or investor. As a PPC management agency for real estate professionals, we’ve no hesitation in saying that PPC advertising beats almost all other methods of promoting a real estate business.

In this guide, I am going to explain what PPC means in real estate marketing and how you can leverage this wonderful advertising method. I will also share the most popular Realty Crux articles on the topic of real estate PPC (there are quite a few). These detailed guides will help you learn all the basic as well as advanced PPC strategies.

What does PPC mean and how does it work?

PPC stands for Pay-per-Click. In a PPC campaign, you advertise your services in search engines such as Google and when someone clicks your ad, you are charged. It means that you pay for clicks on your ads.

The concept of PPC advertising is vastly different from print and other traditional advertising methods. When you run an ad in a newspaper or magazine, you have no way of knowing exactly how many people saw your ad or what was your return on your investment. However, PPC ads offer you the ability to determine the return on your investment. You will know how many people saw your ads (ad impressions), clicked your ad, how much each click cost you and how many people converted or took the desired action. It means that everything in a PPC campaign is measurable.

There are many different types of real estate PPC campaigns you can run, but the most popular one is search engine advertising.

You place your ads in search engine results on Google, Bing or other PPC networks. Your ads are trigged when someone looks for information, services, or products. By using PPC keywords, you tell search engines which search terms should trigger your ads.

So let’s say for example you want your PPC ad to show in Google when someone searches for ‘homes for sale in California’. You can ask Google to show your ad for this search phrase. Your ads will appear in search engine results when someone performs a search as shown in the screenshot below:

As you can see, the top results in the screenshot above are labeled as ‘Ad’. Below these ads, you will find organic results.

Google Ads for real estate

There are many PPC advertising platforms that offer you the opportunity to advertise with the Pay-per-Click method. However, the most popular option is Google Ads.

The reason why Google Ads is the best platform is obvious: Google is the most popular search engine and almost everybody in world turn to Google when he or she is looking for information, products, and services in any industry – real estate included. Just take a look at the screenshot below to get an idea how popular Google is specifically among home buyers and sellers:

Nearly 1.5M ‘homes for sale’ and ‘houses for sale’ searches are performed on Google in the United States alone every month on average. Anybody who is starting their home buying journey will get on Google. His or her first search will probably be ‘homes for sale’ in a particular neighborhood or city.

When you advertising with Google Ads, you bid for keywords. What each click will cost you depend on the competition for that keyword. If a lot of advertisers are bidding for a particular keyword, it will be considered a keyword with high competition and you will pay to get clicks for that keyword.

Check out this article to know the average cost for real estate PPC campaign.

Though it seems like the more you bid on keywords, the higher position you will get in search engine results, but this is now how it works when it comes to Google Ads.

There are a few other factors that determine how much you will pay for each click such as:

The relevancy of your ad to the search performed by a user
The quality of your ad
The landing page (if it’s relevant to the ad)

There are some of the factors that determine the quality score of your ad. The quality score and your bid amount determine the position of your ad in search results.

This is why it’s extremely important that you optimize your ads and improve their quality score. You can’t do it on your own, it makes sense to hire a real estate PPC expert.

To learn more about real estate PPC advertising, check out the following Realty Crux articles:

The Proven Method to Using Google Adwords for Real Estate Leads

Killer Google PPC Ads for Real Estate Investors in 11 Easy Steps

Definitive Guide to Lowering Real Estate PPC Cost in 2022

Definitive Guide to Researching Real Estate PPC Keywords

Ultimate Guide to Real Estate Google Ads Extensions [Examples]

Guide to Negative Keywords List for Real Estate Google Ads

Let me know in comments if you have any questions about real estate PPC marketing. I will be more than happy to help you succeed with this great advertising method for real estate agents and investors.