https://youtu.be/4G2FxXKMtEg

👈  Considering Google Search?

Truth be told, we try to talk Agents out of this most times. Watch this video to get our take on Google Search ads for Agents.

<aside> ✋ Reasons to Avoid Google Search

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We’re often asked about running Google Search campaigns by Agents that want to take advantage of its targeting capabilities (“I know exactly what someone Google’d, so I know they’re qualified”). Here’s 5 reasons we try to talk them out of it:

  1. It’s expensive. Judging its cost-effectiveness by cost-per-click (CPC), an Agent will pay 7X more money per click with Google Search than by running an image ad that will appear across the web. We often find CPCs in the $5-$8 range.
  2. It’s text-only. I can’t tell you the amount of times we’ve had an Agent ask, “but where’s the photo?” Although Google might be experimenting with images appearing in Google search ads, 99% of its traffic will see ads appear as text only.
  3. You’re competing against folks with million-dollar budgets. There are 10-person teams that sit at Zillow, Realtor.com and Redfin that spend every waking minute focused on getting the highest amount of consumer traffic to their portals for the lowest CPC possible. And then you add in new home builders, brokerages and individual Agents to the mix.
  4. Your landing page isn’t that good. Google rewards advertisers with low CPCs when they create a tight fit between search query, ad and landing page. That creates a great user experience and that user will keep wanting to use Google as their search engine. Google actually measures and tracks the number of people that hit the back button (and how quickly they clicked it) to determine the relevancy of your page to the user. So when someone searches for Beverly Hills homes for sale and we send them to an Agent’s homepage, it’s no surprise those CPCs start going up and up.
  5. It’s cheaper to target search behavior than real-time search. You could pay $8 to reach 1 person who is actively searching Beverly Hills homes for sale or you could pay $0.50 to reach someone with a search history of Beverly Hills homes for sale and show them a photo of a great listing and send them to a collection of Beverly Hills homes. That’s because Google added the ability last Fall to target people with image ads based on the specific Google queries they’ve made in the recent past. We can tailor any of our campaigns to basically dive into consumer’s search history and show them ads we know they’ll love.

All that said, there are a few instances where it does make sense to run ads on Google Search: targeting specific addresses of comps, targeting names of competing buildings, targeting people searching for an area that’s known to locals but would never appear on Google Maps because it isn’t an official city or neighborhood (that means Zillow/Realtor.com doesn’t know to compete for it), and surfacing an Agent’s site as an ad because they have a common name and don’t rank well for it.