Advanced Pay Per Click

Results Summary

According to a Wordstream industry benchmark study from 2020, Here is how Curaytor stacks up against the Real Estate industry averages:

PLEASE NOTE: 

Conversion Rate is defined as the percentage of visitors from ad clicks that take a registration action on your website. This is NOT the same as deal conversions - the percentage of leads that end up converting into a deal.

Clients often conflate these two metrics, but they are definitely not the same. Real Estate Webmasters wrote a great article about the ROI of PPC. In it, they use 2% as the lead-to-sale conversion rate.

“Based on past client performance, we consider 2% to be a reasonable conversion rate for agents who practice diligent lead follow-up. Most agents fall within a 1-3% lead-to-sale conversion rate.”

- Quote from the above linked REW article

This 2% lead-to-sale conversion rate is on par with what we have seen in our own research, including the results of 12 Days of Conversion and Seller Sprint.

If clients claim that other providers are promising lead-to-sale conversion rates well above 2 or 3%, they are likely misunderstanding the other provider’s promise.

Client Success

Since testing began in July 2020, we have had 24 clients come through the program over the last 9 months, 19 are still active.

Overall, feedback has been very positive.

Bob Engel turned off Zillow in favor of Accelerator & PPC. We rushed his PPC build because he was on the waitlist with Accelerator. Within the first week, we received this email:

Debbie Kirkland 

As a longtime Curaytor client (of 6+ years), Debbie has utilized many of our services in the past — including executing our Marketing Plan and sales strategies on her own. It wasn’t until her recent investment in Curaytor’s PPC program, however, that she noticed near-immediate results both in her lead generation and overall team success. According to her assessment, the PPC leads are more serious, vetted, and quick-to-act than any other internet lead she’s contacted in the past. Having a pipeline of those high-quality leads at-the-ready for her agents has taken pressure off of her to personally call all prospects and has allowed her to bring on agents, and even an ISA, so that her team can effectively follow-up without her. When asked to provide feedback on the service, Debbie exclaimed “I think it’s been the best thing we’ve done for our business!”

She also went to the mastermind group in mid-February and posted about how she closed $3.1M in sales directly tied to PPC:

Justine Mathieu and her team — the Mathieu Newton Team — have reaped the benefits of Curaytor’s PPC program for nearly 8 months now and they are loving every second of it. As the team’s CFO and someone who regularly manages her agents’ lead pipelines and follow-up processes, Justine has done nothing but praise PPC leads from the start. Utilizing the PPC service has allowed her team to have a steady stream of prospects that are actively looking for real estate “without having to pay for Zillow or Realtor.com leads.” And on top of that, Justine shared, “When I go to Google and I see our team pop up, I’m really glad to see that. The exposure allows us to compete with Zillow.” They are in love with Curaytor’s PPC service! 

Value Proposition Summary

If you’re looking to fill a pipeline of high quality, transaction-ready leads then Google Ads is where you should start. Google is unique in the digital advertising marketplace because they truly provide demand fulfillment, rather than demand generation. It’s the only channel that allows you to serve an ad to a consumer, only when they are looking for your services. It’s unique and it’s powerful.

Curaytor’s Advanced PPC program combines a deep understanding of the Google Ads ecosystem with the expert, localized knowledge that our clients bring to the table to create complex, hyper-local accounts that truly deliver on the promise of “higher quality leads that are easier to convert”.

Service Details

Keyword Strategy

Curaytor believes in long-tail keyword management. This means that we build and maintain thousands of keywords, targeting very specific searches that users type into Google.

• “houses for sale” is good - we know that they’re actively looking for a service our clients provide.

• “houses for sale in Salem MA” is better - we know the exact area they’re looking for.

• “1 bedroom condos for sale in Salem MA” is best - we know exactly what they’re looking for and that type of searcher is typically further along in their purchasing journey.

Our keyword strategy allows us to serve ads on any (or all!) of these types of searches. 

Geographic Targeting Strategy

We pair this with sophisticated geo targeting - essentially, the more broad the keyword is, the more tightly controlled the geographic targeting is (and vice versa).

If someone is looking for “houses for sale in Salem MA”, it doesn’t really matter where they are geographically. Their intent is clear, so we can confidently say that they would be a relevant lead.

On the other hand, if someone searches for “houses for sale” - you have no idea where they want to buy. So it’s very important to control the geographic targeting to ensure that the only people that see our more generic ads are local to the agent’s market.

Ad Strategy

The most important factor for Google Ads copy is relevancy. You need to ensure that you’re speaking directly to that individual user's needs. In other words, if they tell you they’re looking for “condos for sale in Salem MA”, your ad better talk about “condos” and “Salem MA”.

Our strategy capitalizes on this, grouping keywords into adgroups that have a very tightly correlated theme. That allows us to write highly relevant ad copy using what we know about the user from the keyword.

This is how we end up with thousands of ad variations.

Landing Page Strategy

Once you’ve captured the click, it’s incredibly important that you deliver on your promise. If the keyword talked about “condos” in “Salem MA”, and your ad talked about “condos” in “Salem MA", your landing page better show “condos” in “Salem MA".

The more customized the landing page feels, the more likely you are to keep the user on the site and get an opportunity to capture their information through a lead registration form.

We create dozens of landing pages to deliver a customized experience for every user.

The combination of Targeting, Ad Copy and Landing Page is what we call the “trifecta”. Nailing this combination is critical to driving great ROI out of PPC.

Bidding Strategy

It is not our primary goal to get the client’s ad to the top of page 1. Page 1 on Google has an allure that it’s a great branding opportunity. While that’s true, it can be an incredibly expensive branding play.

Clicks at the top of page 1 are typically 2-3x the cost of clicks lower down on the page. Additionally, you get more “window shopper” clicks - people that are just clicking on the first result simply because it’s first. This leads to lower conversion rates. So you end up paying more for clicks that are less likely to convert.

The goal of the campaigns are to maximize leads - get as many leads as possible for the allocated budget. The two primary metrics that impact leads are Cost Per Click (CPC) and Lead Conversion Rate (CVR).

CPC / CVR = CPL

Instead, our goal is to drive Cost Per Click (CPC) as low as we possibly can. Naturally, that means that most of the time, we will NOT be at the top of Page 1. But as long as we are spending the full budget and converting at expected rates, we are getting plenty of exposure.

FAQ

What kind of performance can I expect?

Typical Cost Per Lead hovers between $7 and $17, depending on market, which yields 55 to 150 leads per month (based on a $1000 budget).

What kind of keywords are you using?

We build out the entire spectrum of keywords - from very broad to very specific. We then monitor performance and will allocate budget based on what is working best for your business, so the types of keywords that are driving the most high quality leads will get the most budget.

What keywords am I showing up on?

Keywords are the behind-the-scenes tool that we use to point Google in the right direction. Keywords tell Google - “we want our ad to show up when someone types in something like this phrase”. What really matters is what kind of search terms are we showing up on? What are people typing into Google that are triggering our ad to show up?

We do not share our keywords with clients because our strategy is proprietary. However, we are more than happy to show them a search term report to give them a sense of the types of searches that they’re matching to.

Do you run seller ads through PPC? / Most of the leads are buyer leads - why aren’t we getting seller leads?

The majority of the leads that you’ll receive out of PPC will be buyer leads. Seller-centric keywords are incredibly expensive in Google ($8-10 per CLICK - not per lead) and have very poor conversion rates. That will eat up our advertising budget very quickly and will actually net out with far fewer leads from the program. It’s simply not a cost-effective way to get seller leads. 

We use a more cost-effective approach of qualifying seller intent through questions on the lead form. We ask additional questions (beyond contact information) to add friction to the process, eliminate low quality leads, and identify buyer leads who also need to sell. 

On average, we see ~20% of PPC leads that identify themselves as “needing to sell first”.

When someone clicks on my ad, where do they go?

We utilize Chime landing pages for all buyer leads. We create dozens of landing pages to make the on-page experience as tailored as possible to each individual user. This boosts quality score and conversion rate. We regularly test and iterate on the landing page functionality to increase conversion rate.

Will my ad display at the top of the Google search results?

Maybe. Every time someone does a search in Google, it kicks off an instantaneous, dynamic auction behind the scenes. Where you rank on the search results page is determined by your relevance to that specific user and how much you’re willing to pay (your bid). Because we use limited budgets, we intentionally do not bid to the top of page 1. Sometimes we will show up in the #1 spot, but sometimes it will be too expensive. Our goal is to maximize the number of conversions coming out of the advertising budget. So we need to closely monitor our cost per click (CPC) in order to squeeze as much out of the budget as possible.

How do I know a lead came from Google?

Any lead that has interacted with a PPC ad will have a “google_ppc” tag on the lead profile.

Where does my ad show up?

Your ad is eligible to show up when someone searches for a relevant search term on google.com. Most often, it will show up in the search results at the top/bottom of the page on page 1 or 2.

If you have a Google My Business account (GMB), we set up a Location Extension for you, which makes you eligible to serve in the ad spot in the “local pack”/”map pack” as well. We cannot specifically target this ad location.