CPC Advertising for More Clients

CPC advertising is likely not a term that many small business professionals are familiar with, but it can be a lucrative source for more exposure, traffic, and clients when executed properly. Getting started can be intimidating at first, but once you follow a few basic tips you’ll find it’s not that hard as it seems.

CPC advertising, also commonly known as PPC advertising, stands for Cost-Per-Click advertising or Pay-Per-Click advertising. You as the advertiser pay a set amount for anytime someone clicks on your link. You can set up a budget and daily spending limit, which can help to control the cost.

There are many different websites that offer this form of marketing, but naturally the most well loved are the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You see these ads constantly anytime you do a search on any of the search engines, appearing at the top of the search results as “Sponsored Listings” or “Sponsored Results”.

To real estate agents and small business owners, becoming a sponsored result can save you hours, weeks, and months of struggling to become #1 in Google or other search engines for your main keywords. It can also deliver highly targeted visitors to your site if you take some time to do careful keyword research.

It works like this: let’s say Suzy homebuyer is looking for a house. Specifically, she wants a three bedroom house. So she goes to her favorite search engine Google and types in “3 Bedroom house in Smalltown”. A bunch of things come up, mostly IDX fed listings on broker websites or others. And so she’s on the search of different houses and properties.

But what if, instead of seeing all those IDX listings on a site she instead saw you as the #1 result? And she clicked on your ad, and after checking out some of your inventory and your experience decides to call you. You set up an appointment with her, tour properties for a weekend, and write up a sales contract. She’s pleased because she didn’t waste hours looking online for that elusive perfect house, and you’re pleased because you just got a new client to work with and will hopefully get a paycheck.

Obviously, not every single person who clicks on your website ad at the top of Google is going to convert. This is where it requires a small plotting and strategy. Below are a few tips to help you maximize your CPC advertising campaign:

1. Choose the Keywords Carefully: Most of the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN offer suggested keywords you can choose to bid on, or you can enter your own. The more specific your keywords, the less expensive it will be per click, and the more likely you will get targeted converting customers. You can bid on “three bedroom house in Las Vegas” for between 5-10 cents per click, while “real estate las vegas” is over $5.00. Obviously, more people search for generalized terms, which makes them much more competitive and therefore more expensive.

2. Geo-Target:: If you are a real estate agent in Ohio, you would not want people looking to buy houses in San Fransisco wasting your CPC budget and visiting your site only to quickly realize you’re in Ohio and hit their back button. This has happened to me a few times where I was looking for something, thought I saw a company I needed, only to realize they were on the other side of the country. While sure you could try to capture referrals this way, it’s unlikely it would pay off as well as finding those in your local market.

3. Have a Strong Landing Page: The worst thing that can happen is that someone clicks on your ad and can’t navigate your site or doesn’t find what they are looking for. Many people use one generic landing page for all of their ads because it is simpler, but having one specific for different listings, buyers, relocation leads, or potential sellers will greatly help you see better results. The goal of your landing page is to get them to go to the next step of action which is to call or email you – so make it enticing for them to do both.

4. Write Excellent Ad Copy: When there is a lot of competition for a certain keyword, you’re going to want excellent ad copy that attracts people to see what you have. The title should be descriptive but also attention getting. Less words are usually more, since people will not read anything too long, not to mention there are character limits. This is another one you can experiment with over a few weeks.

5. Track Your Progress: There are many different things you can do to track your progress. Many people will experiment one week at a time to see what has worked and what has not. If using Adwords, make sure you’ve set up your site for Google Analytics to help you track and analyze the effectiveness of your PPC campaign.

It can often be costly before finding the perfect combination of keywords, traffic, budget, and landing page. Keeping your bidding low at the beginning can be a safe way to see what works the best. But, once you get that “sweet spot” that brings you the most business for the least cost you’ll be amazed at how much simpler marketing online has become.

If all of this seems too confusing or hard, there are also many different CPC managers that can undertake the task for you. Be sure if using a third party to manage your advertising that you are clear on their promises, the cost, experience, testimonials, and the effectiveness of their proposed campaign.

Do you use CPC advertising for more clients? Have any tips or experiences to share? Tell us about it in the comments below!