57: Online Lead Generation Part 3: Pay Per Click

Danny Johnson

Listen / Watch

Show Notes

This is the third of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.

In this episode the focus is mainly on pay per click. We’re covering using Google Adwords as a real estate investor to generate awesome motivated seller leads…even within a week of setting up a new website.

Today, we’re talking about PPC (which stands for Pay Per Click) and generating leads the first week of having your website live.

Pay per click, not paperclip, is where you post ads online and pay for each click on those ads.  The main services for pay per click are Google’s Adwords and Bing Ads.

This is the absolute best way to start generating leads for your website immediately.  With adwords and bing ads, you pay money to have your ads displayed in the search results.  Based on several factors that we’ll cover shortly, you can have your ads displayed above ALL organic search results.  Basically at the top of the page for the best keywords out there.

Think about how awesome that is!  You can beat websites that have been online for years, your first week getting leads online.  Of course, you will have to pay for those leads, but these tend to be some of the best motivated seller leads available.

This is because these motivated sellers are seeking you out.  They are ready to sell and are looking for a buyer.

Be sure to listen to next week’s podcast where Danny will share with you how to rank your site faster and higher using SEO (search engine optimization) and content marketing for real estate investors.

For information about our managed (done-for-you) SEO and PPC management services, call Josh at LeadPropeller at 210-999-5187.

 

links

Online Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors Webinar

LeadPropeller Real Estate Investor Websites

Please Rate and Review

This is my simple request: If you enjoy the podcast and look forward to hearing a lot more episodes, I would be very grateful, happy, beholden and otherwise indebted to you to rate and review the podcast on iTunes.

It’s your choice and I do not want you to feel at all obligated. But I’d love it if you would subscribe and leave a rating and review.

Ratings and reviews allow the podcast to be seen by more people, which will help me achieve my goal of helping as many others as we can to get started in the house flipping business and change their lives.

Click here to rate and review our podcast! :)

Not sure how to leave a rating and review? Click here to view the instructions (it only takes 2 minutes)

How to Subscribe to the Podcast

There will be a brand new episode every single week, so be sure to subscribe and receive each episode as it’s released.

Subscribe on iTunes  Subscribe on Stitcher

Episode Transcription

Danny Johnson: This is Flipping Junkie podcast episode 57. [music] Welcome to the Flipping Junkie podcast. My name is Danny Johnson; former software developer turned house flipper, flipping hundreds of houses. Each week, we bring you interviews, strategies, stories, and motivation to help you get started flipping houses and on your way to becoming your own boss and achieving financial freedom. Thanks for spending time with me today. Now, let’s get to it.

All right. This week, we’ll be talking more about online lead generation specifically pay per click for real estate investors, and that’s Google AdWords and Bing Ads. The focus mainly is going to be on AdWords where people do Google AdWords and basically translates pretty much the same offer the other pay per click.

So in the first two podcasts where we’re covering online lead generation for real estate investors, we talked about what makes a high-converting real estate investor website and how to set up your website systems so you can make contact with motivated sellers immediately to help limit your competition. So motivated seller leads generated online are typically much better than what I get from direct mail and what most other people get because people are actively searching for you. They’ve already considered everything and are looking for somebody to make an offer on their house. So excellent leads and you’ve got to act quickly.

So the second episode, we covered website promotion. Don’t believe that just building a website will generate lots of traffic and leads like the “build it and they will come” mentality. It’s true even if your site is SEO optimized. You can’t just build a site even if it says SEO optimized and sit there and just wait for things to happen. You’ve got to promote it. You have to have website promotion.

So the first episode on this series was the talk about high-converting websites and then the second one was about promotion. So both great episodes. I highly recommend you go back and listen to those. They were episodes 55 and 56 of the Flipping Junkie podcast.

And today, we’re talking about PPC which stands for Pay Per Click and generating leads. The first week of having your website live is one thing that you can do with pay per click, so it’s incredible and I wanted to make this whole podcast episode about that because we’ve got a lot to talk about.

So to start with pay per click and not paperclip as I’ve heard some people say. It’s pay per click. It’s where you post ads online and pay for each click on those ads. So the main services for pay per click are Google AdWords and Bing Ads. It’s absolutely the best way to start generating leads for your website immediately. With Google AdWords and Bing Ads, you pay money to have your ads displayed in the search results. So based on several factors that we’ll cover shortly, you can have your ads displayed above all organic search results. So when you search something in Google, those first four placed ads are—those are ads. And so you can get your ads to show up there, and we’ll show you how to do that.

But basically at the top of the page for the best keywords out there is where you can get placement using these pay per click services from Google and Bing. So think about how awesome that is. You can beat websites that have been online for years your first week getting leads online. First week of having your website live, you can be beating the guys that have been in trench for years. So of course, you’re going to have to pay for those leads but they tend to be some of the best motivated seller leads out there that I talked about. It’s because the motivated sellers are seeking you out like I said. They’re ready to sell, and they’re looking for a buyer and so you can get yourself your website placed in front of them and have the website build rapport and show credibility, all that kind of stuff, for you. So it’s really awesome. It’s the best of all world really. It’s great.

So with that though, other people, this isn’t like some secret and nobody knows about, right? So it’s crazy competition. And being that these are some of the best leads available, it stands to reason that other investors are already competing for them. So while that’s true, there are still a lot of opportunity to get leads cheaper using AdWords and people are getting with direct mail.

As we’ll cover in a little bit, it’s not even all about what people are willing to pay for those positions in the search results. Google is smarter than that. They use an algorithm to determine where to place these ads, and that’s not based just on how much somebody is willing to pay. So we’ll get into that. It’s really not too difficult to compete on AdWords to get these leads right away. And I’m going to be sharing with you how to succeed at pay per click so you can generate deals that have the potential to make you tens of thousands of dollars, of course assuming you’re able to convert those leads into deals and not lose your butt on the rehab.

But with that said, basically, this is all about return on investment, right? So if you can flip a house and generate $30,000 of profit, what is that worth to you? What is that deal worth to you? If you’re going to make 30 grand on it, how much are you willing to pay for that lead to generate in that deal. And when you think about in those terms, it’s really awesome because you might hear, “Oh, somebody paid $200 for this lead”—and thank man, that’s kind of crazy. But if that lead generate a $30,000 profit, that was super cheap. So that’s the right way to look at it. We’ll talk a little bit more about mindset of doing motivated seller marketing also.

So how does PPC work? As a brief overview, PPC works by choosing keywords to match against searches made by search engine users, placing bids for positioning of those ads that you create in the search results. So when you’re ad is clicked on, you pay for the click. So even if people are searching for something and your ad show up, you’re not paying for that. The only thing you’re paying for is if they click on that ad and then go to your website.

So we’ve got keywords, bids for positioning of those ads that you have budgets. Ads and landing pages make up the whole process of doing PPCs. So let’s break it down one piece at a time and really drive deep down into each of these things so that you can get a good understanding of every one of them. So we’ll start with keywords and this is basically—keywords make or break your PPC strategy, and you specify keywords to match against what’s searched for by motivated sellers and there’s four match types that you can use to specify how to match what’s searched against your keywords. And the reason for that is because you can never really know all the possible things searched for, and we’ll examine and go over those match types in a minute.

Should you use a giant list of keywords? What about if they work for somebody else? Should you use them? And this is a question we get all the time. And really it boils down to intent. So the keywords need to show intent, right? So if you use a keyword, say “houses for sale”, it could just be somebody looking to buy a house or even if you think, “Well, why would I target that keyword if I’m looking to buy a house?” People start to think weird ways when they’d start trying to figure out what keywords to target and they start thinking, “Well, if they’re going to sell their house or if they’re going to look for a house for sale, maybe they’re selling their house?” And I think that’s getting a little bit too far at field because online what you want is the intent. You want people looking for you. You don’t want to be trying to get people to click on your ad and have your landing page convince them to something they haven’t even thought about. So you got to look at it that way.

So if you’re thinking in terms of that, then you think, “Well, what about intent like selling a house?” or “If they’re interested in selling their house, let’s target that—selling a house.” And that could just be somebody looking for a realtor or information on how someone goes about selling a house. And some of those probably do match with the intent that we want from motivated sellers. There’s ways to use this match types that we’re going to talk about to target those.

So usually, selling a house is accompanied by some other words and what those other words are, are the ones that give that intent that you want so you can kind of like narrow down what people are searching for and just kind of focus pinpoint laser precision—maybe not laser precision but real precise targeting of these keywords with this intent that you’re looking for. So if the keywords you use don’t have the right intent, you’re going to be paying for clicks from people that don’t have any interest at all in getting a cash offer from an investor. These are people you don’t want, so you should not target them. And using some giant list of keywords is going to end up doing that. You’re going to end up getting all these people clicking on your ads that have no interest in your service.

And even if they don’t click on your ads, Google looks at the click through right of your ads. If you’ve got a ton of words that don’t have any clicks going to them, it’s going to affect your account. So the big issue we think for these wasted clicks is that it eats up your daily budget so the ads stop showing midway through the day because you’ve already used up your budget because they’ve clicked on your ads and it cost you money. So you can miss out on the super motivated seller that wants to sell immediately later in the day.

So let’s talk about how you go about doing this right because now you know, you want to target intent, and you want to figure out the keywords to use to do that. And so, we’ve got to be careful about what keywords we’re going to match with constant adjustment of the keywords that we’re looking at using and that we’re using to make sure that we’re always tweaking it and getting the benefit. So let’s talk about how to make sure you’re targeting the right searcher intent with keywords. You have many options with keywords so they match all sorts of different phrases and things people are searching for. And you can never really guess exactly what people are going to search for as there are millions and millions of possible combinations of words even with the right intent, and that’s where match types become very useful. So using match types.

There’s four different match types that you can use to tell Google how to match, what to search for in the search engine with your keyword list. So each keyword that you have in your campaign, you can specify match types as a part of these keywords, so let’s discuss. There’s four of them. You’ve got broad, modified broad, phrase, and exact match.

So just four examples real quick. So broad would be something like “sell house fast,” and you just have those words with the spaces in between. And then, you have modified broad which you can do something like a plus sign in front of “sell,” a plus sign in front of “house,” and a plus sign in front of “fast.” So you still have “sell house fast” but you have plus signs in front those, and we’ll discuss what all these means in a minute. Phrase match is where you put your whole phrase within double quotes. So you can have a double quote “sell my house fast” and a double quote. And then, exact matches is where you put them in square brackets. So inside of two square brackets, you have sell my house fast as an exact match.

So let’s go back and discuss how that works. So broad match tells Google to match searches that contain those words in any order. So this is the one we had “sell house fast,” just the words with spaces in between them. And I’ll tell Google to match searches that contain those words in any order at all even alongside other words. And Google can even swap out your words with words that they see as being similar, so “house” and “home” and stuff like that. So using our example “sell house fast,” your ad might show up for searches like how to sell your house, selling your home, and sale house so SA-L-E house because they look at “sell” and “sale” and they may swap those out. So you can tell this can go pretty far field because you can match a ton of stuff, hundreds and thousands of combinations of words with that broad match.

So what they did was they said, “Well, let’s give them an option to do a modified broad match so that Google will only match with searches done and include the words with the plus sign in front of them or slight variations of those words. So the slight variations are things like “accepting home” and “place of house and sale” and “place of sell” like we talked about. So using our example with the plus signs in front of each of those words. So plus sign “sell” space plus sign “house” space plus sign “fast.” Those could match the following: “sell my house fast,” “sell my home quickly,” “sell a house fast,” “how to sell a house quick.” So by doing that plus sign, we’re forcing there to be a word like fast in there including “sell” and “house.”

So this is very powerful because you’re making sure now that there’s the intent. Now, you could still end up broad matching some phrases that maybe don’t work out and that’s why you’ve got to constantly tweak and be checking your account for that kind of thing. So this is great. This is much better than the whole broad match without the intent because there might not be the fast part in there. Some people might just be saying sell but not really looking for a fast sale which is what you want. So that’s modified broad match.

And then, you got phrase match that narrows it down even more so this puts the words in double quote. So our example with “sell my house fast” in double quotes, and this matches searches that include that phrase surrounded by quotes and the keywords. So only searches made that include those words and that order are the ones that are matched. So this kind of gets order to it. So using double quotes around the whole phrase of “sell my house fast,” you would match “how to sell my house fast,” “sell my house fast,” “sell my house fast in San Antonio” or wherever, or “how do I sell my house fast.” So basically, you’re telling me you want that phrase to match in there. So this is also going to drill down and get you even more and more focused because you’re going to be making sure that “sell my house fast” is in there in whatever they searched.

So the next one is the most targeted, exact match. It tells Google to match searches that are exactly what the keyword is, nothing else. This one obviously is the most strict. So using our example of the square brackets surrounding “sell my house fast,” you’ll only match for that exact search, “sell my house fast,” or the exact search with very similar word replacements. So even with exact match, they could do these word replacements but only with ones that they know are very, very similar. So the only thing that that’s going to match. So an exact match with the square brackets around “sell my house fast,” you’re not going to match “how do I sell my house fast” because the “how do I” is not part of the exact match. You’re only going to get it when people are searching exactly that.

So to sum up these AdWords match types and when to use which ones, basically you have two ends in the spectrum. You have the very broad, and it goes down to the very specific. So using broad match or modified broad match to find new keywords is the way to go, but beware that you will get more clicks from people with the wrong intent. So you’ve got to keep an eye on this. And these clicks are typically cheaper but are from mostly the wrong people which means lower conversion rate, so you’re not going to get as many leads. You might get more clicks, but you won’t get as many leads.

And so, the other side of it is using phrase match and exact match for great intent keywords like “we buy houses” and “sell my house fast.” Those are more expensive but are more likely to be better leads meaning that they convert better which means a higher conversion rate. You’re going to get more leads with these, but you won’t get as many.

And so obviously, you’re going to look at this in the way of having some kind of balance of these two, right? You’re going to want to definitely have these exact ones of that perfect exact keyword with the right intent, but then you’re going to do some researching to do this broad matching to find new ones that you didn’t think about. And choosing the right keywords and match types can make or break any AdWords strategies. It’s so important. You can quickly bust your budget and not get results if you end up matching too many of the wrong searches.

So, one huge mistake to avoid I’m going to cover right now because at LeadPropeller we manage other investors’ AdWords accounts and have learned a lot over the years. It’s been awesome to be able to see this data and all this over so many accounts. So one of the biggest mistakes that we’ve seen made deals with trying to start out with a huge list of keywords. Don’t start an AdWords campaign with a huge list of keywords that are all over the board. You’ve got to start with better intent keywords and work your way into including more, so this is what I talked about. If you start with too many keywords that result in low quality scores, you end up affecting your entire campaign as Google looks at quality scores across your entire campaign. So this is going to affect your ones that are working well. Because if you have the majority of your keywords with low click-through rates—and we’ll talk about exactly what a click-through rate is. But if you got an account with that in low quality scores, it’s going to affect your whole account and cost you more per click to get the higher positions for your ads. So basically, you’ve got to keep a tight ship. You’ve got to keep an eye on your account. Don’t set it and then go back a month later and say, “What happened?” You need to be looking at this every week, probably every couple of days if you’re going after some new broad match terms.

So let’s talk about with keywords. We’re still in the topic of keywords here. So it’s just so important. So how do you tell whether a keyword is performing well? Because you could pick one and say, “Well, I don’t know. What should I be looking for? If I’m keeping an eye and keeping tight ship here and I’m checking my account, what should I be looking for? So there’s several KPIs, which are Key Performance Indicators, we can use to determine whether a keyword is working out or not. Now, KPIs are determined by user actions. So these are numbers that come from what people are doing when they search for something and get your ad displayed and whether they click and go to your website and what they do.

So click through rate is the first one. That’s click through rate. That’s the percentage of time somebody saw your ad which is called an impression. So every time you have your ad displayed is an impression. So click through rate is when they see the ad and they click on it, and so that’s the percentage of people that clicked on it versus ones that didn’t. So if your ad gets displayed 100 times and you have five people click it, you’ve got a 5% click-through rate and that gives you an idea of how relevant your ad was for the searches that matched up for the keyword because the only thing driving them to click on it is your ad. So if they search for something and if your ad is the right match for what they were really looking for, they’re going to click on it.

Another KPI that you’ve got to be concerned with is conversions. So that’s the number of times that people visited your site after clicking your ad and filled out the form or they called you using the AdWords call extension which we’ll talk about. So this is basically where the visitors become a lead. So a conversion is basically when somebody visiting your site becomes a lead, and that gives you an idea whether the searches that matched your keyword had the right intent meaning that the searcher was looking for your service and then they reached out to you and became a lead to you.

So obviously, the click through rate—you could have a click-through rate for something but low conversion rate, and you got to dump those because they’re costing you money. Obviously, one lead can turn into a very awesome deal. It makes a lot of money, but you got to kind of temper that. So if you’ve got a huge click-through rate where you got tons of people costing you 500 bucks a week and not generating any conversions, you want to dump them for sure. You dump those keywords.

So some other KPIs determine by cost. So these are ones that you’re looking at as your cost per click and your cost per conversion. So you want to see what those cost are because it could be a high click-through rate and you’re getting some conversions but not many. And if the cost per click is low and therefore the cost per conversion is low, you still want to go for it. The keyword is still worth using. And so cost per click is the amount you actually paid for each click that you received, and that will give you an idea of how much your ad budget each keyword is eating up. And you set a budget for each day in your account. If you have keywords that are costing you too much per click and you don’t have enough conversions, you can be losing out because your budget is being spent before other keywords have a chance to be used because Google stopped showing your ads once your budget has been busted because you’ve told them you don’t want to pay more than that specific amount per day.

So the more cost per click, the more competition there is for the keyword generally. Because if the cost is more, you know that you’re competing with people paying more and usually there’s a reason they’re more. It’s because they’re getting conversions out of it. It’s not always the case. But most of the time if you’ve seen a high cost per click, it’s usually because that keyword is being competed for by somebody or by multiple people. So the more cost per click, usually there’s more competition.

So the way that they google the terms is cost per click because it’s a bidding process. It’s not just at a person with the highest max cost per click that they set. So if somebody says like a keyword “we buy houses Phoenix” sets a max cost per click for matching that keyword show their ad of something like 50 bucks. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to show that ad higher than somebody that bids $30 because they take into account some other factors. So this is where it gets a little bit complicated. So it’s the quality of the landing page and the click-through rate that you’re getting and some of these other factors, and it’s basically a very sophisticated algorithm.

So they want quality, right? The reason is they don’t want to just go off with who’s the most willing to pay the most because they want to provide a good user experience to the person doing the searching above everything else. That’s what Google does. If they’re not giving good search results even in their paid ads, people aren’t going to use them for very long. So if someone with a horrible website bids a lot and gets a top spot, most of the people searching wind up going to a horrible website which is something Google doesn’t want because they’re giving people what they want with their search results. So that’s why they use these other factors. It’s not just what you’re willing to bid and pay for those positions. You also have to take into account what’s happening on your website, where the people are going after they click the ad. So Google looks at all that. So you could spend less but be positioned higher than other people spending if you have these other factors taken care of. We’ll get to that in a little bit further.

So then we talk about cost per clicks. There’s also cost per conversion and this one really is pretty much the ultimate deciding factor whether to use the keyword and keep using it and the analytics and the Google AdWords and stuff like that where you see your dashboard in the stats. This is usually the CPA which is cost per acquisition, and this the amount paid for each conversion for the given keyword so basically cost per lead. Obviously, you want keywords that have lowest cost per conversion because you want leads at the lowest cost that you can get.

And so if you’re getting a lead, so you pay cost per click. Let’s say you’re paying a low cost per click of something like $30 or something for a really good keyword but they don’t submit the form or call you, so it takes maybe five of those before they submit to you their information. So that would then give you the cost per conversion of $150 because you had five clicks at $30 a piece before somebody submitted their information, so that lead then cost you $150. And if you turn that into a deal, you just got a deal for 150 bucks.

Now usually, investor are not getting one-to-one lead to deal ratios. That’d just be crazy if they were. But online marketing this motivated seller lead generation online generates some of the highest ratios though of lead to deals because of the fact like we mentioned. People are so—they’re ready. They’re ready to get somebody give them a cash off for most of the time. So you typically can convert more of your leads into deals with getting these leads online.

So let’s talk about the two common keyword scenarios that we’ve determined. So keyword scenario #1: You have a keyword that gets lots of clicks, but the cost per conversion is high because there are a lot of clicks but not a lot of people submit their information on your website. So it typically happens with broad match keywords as they match a lot of more searches; therefore, getting more impressions but you end up getting less conversions because you end up matching searches with the wrong intent. So this is where you’re paying a lot for clicks that are not converting.

So keyword scenario #2: You have a keyword that has awesome low cost per conversion but not a lot of conversions. It typically happens with exact match keywords that match searches with the right intent, so something like “sell my house fast at Atlanta.” An exact match on that. You’re probably going to get a lot more conversions. You’re going to get a lot more conversions out of that because obviously they’re looking for somebody like you. So the situation is here is that you don’t get a lot of people searching for that exact phrase though.

So you have these two situations: Broad match, you’re going to get more people searching. You’re going to get more impressions if your ad is showing more clicks but less conversion as a percentage. Exact match, more specific with the intent. Those are better and higher converting, but there’s not as many people searching or those exact things.

So the best keyword strategy based on real experience and these two scenarios, basically we found that those scenarios, two keywords, don’t generate as many leads. The leads are the best quality leads, so meaning they’re more often to end up as deals. So based on that hard-earned knowledge, we continue to gather basically through our managing so many real estate investors’ AdWords accounts at LeadPropeller. We recommend targeting these high-intent keywords over the broad match lower quality keywords. So obviously if you want volume, you’re going to need to incorporate more of the broad match over time though and test them out and pull from them keywords that you can turn into exact match high-intent keywords that you find using the broad match.

So here’s the beautiful thing about the way AdWords works because you might be thinking, “Well, if I’m going to test out broad match, I’m always going to be paying for these junk clicks that come through from things that get matched that don’t have the right intent. So how do I figure out the benefit of that? I don’t want to keep paying for broad match and paying all that money with the lower conversion rate.

So here’s the beautiful thing about the way AdWords works. You can see the entire search the user typed in when it matched one of your keywords and cost a conversion. So within AdWords, you can go in there and look at the conversions and look at the actual search phrase, the exact one that they searched for that led to that. And so if that matched one of your broad match keywords, you can then turn that phrase that they searched or into an exact match keyword in your account. So that’s the beautiful thing about it. So reviewing these, you can find the other high-intent exact match search phrases to create in your account. So that’s how you use it. You set up some couple broad match test. And then when you start getting conversions off of those matched broads, you look to see what was actually searched and turn those into exact match keywords. So this is incredible. This is the way to go about things to where you’re not spending a fortune and you’re keeping your cost per conversion, your cost really down.

All right. So imagine being able to see these exact [inaudible 00:29:24] across a lot of accounts. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s part of the benefit of having your AdWords account managed by us at LeadPropeller. When we find one of these search phrases that produces conversions against some of these broad terms, we turn those into exact match and we add them to all the accounts so you get the benefit of that being able to test and find these things out quicker across several accounts. And then we keep an eye on them because sometimes they work very well in a certain market but in another market they don’t work so well. People aren’t searching for them as much.

So knowing that poorly, performing keywords can drag down your entire account because, as I mentioned earlier, Google looks at the big picture of your account. It’s best to narrow down your account to the best keywords and slowly test and add in these broad match to find these more exact matched keywords to include based on the ones that match your broad match but generated conversions.

It sounds like I’m recapping over and over here, but I want to drill this home because it seems complicated but it’s really not. To get a better return on investment and better quality leads, use more exact match keywords. To get more leads put a higher cost, use more broad match keywords because you’ve got a bunch of great exact match keywords with the right intent. You’re going to max out on the number of leads that you’re going to be able to get with those. So you have to add in broad match to generate more and more. So if you want to be getting a lot more of these leads and deals online using AdWords, you’ve got to keep incorporating more broad match just to get that volume into your account.

So you’re probably asking yourself, “Why can’t he just give me the list of keywords that works best?” And the reason why I can’t just give you these keyword list that we found that works best is because of what I mentioned also, was that though a keyword may work very well in one market or city, it may do horribly in another and that goes against what I was talking about. You don’t just get this big list and put them into an AdWords account, set your bids to some great number and then walk away and think that everything is going to work out great because it’s not. You’re going to spend money, and it’s more like wasting money so that’s why I don’t do that. Now, AdWords is definitely something that needs to be adjusted per market. So you’ve got to constantly be keeping an eye and tweaking your bidding and keywords.

All right. So that was a lot about keywords since it’s the most important thing, but let’s talk about ads now. Because once your keyword gets matched by something somebody is searching, Google is going to display an ad for them and you’ve got to entice them based on that ad to click over onto your site. So there’s an art to getting these ads to convert better as well.

So when Google matches a keyword with searches, the searcher will see your ad if your bid for each click for your matching keyword is high enough. So the amount of your bid and the quality score of the page the user will go to determines what ad position your ad is displayed basically if you have a page that Google deems high quality usually based on time spent on the page and how many actions like clicks or form submissions take place and whether the page works well for the device the searched was performed on. Because basically they want to make sure that the landing page that you’re sending the searcher to if they’re on a mobile device is going to look good and work well on that mobile device, and we talked a whole lot about that on episode 55 with high-converting websites. So listen to that. Find out more about that. But you don’t have to have as high of a bid per click than someone else targeting a keyword that has a lower quality page as we talked about before. So ads play an important role in creating successful AdWords campaign because they’re key point of relevance between the keywords that you target and the landing page you’re using. It’s the point in between. So you got to convince that person to click to go over your page.

Google rewards high quality and highly relevant ads by both lowering the cost per click and the advertiser pays. So basically, Google is looking at the numbers, right? So obviously, they want more money. So if your ad being displayed is being clicked a lot, they’re going to like that ad and probably give you a little bit lower cost per click and keeping you displaying because they want that money. Because when your ad is displayed and nobody clicks, they don’t get money. So that’s why that works that way. So they want relevant and high quality ads, and they will reward you for that.

So how do you do that? So keyword use is the first way. So your ads need to be closely linked to the keywords you’re targeting within the ad group. So let’s say you’re targeting “sell my house fast Phoenix.” Well, your ad should say something like “sell my house fast Phoenix” or “sell your house fast Phoenix” as the title because it matches really well with what they were searching for.

So the best way to do it is you use some of your keywords in the ad copy both in the headline and the description. So if you have an existing campaign that has converted well, try using some of the ads or basing some of the ads on keywords that have converted already. So you might not be matching some of the keywords for the keyword that your ad is going to be displayed for, but you know that the keywords that other have converted very well for. You want to put those keywords into the ad.

So if you’re setting up a new campaign, use keywords that relate to high motivation. For example, you want to use “sell my house fast” or “sell house for cash” over just “sell house” because of the motivation shown in the first two keywords because it had that whole fast or cash that’s more enticing than just sell your house because that can just be a realtor or something. Anyway, so that’s keyword use. You want to use keywords that convert well in your ads.

All right. And then, we have call to action. So you’ve got to tell them to do something. So call to action phrase can be the difference between an ad that converts and one that just eats up your ad spend.

So Google doesn’t normally let users get away with using terms related to clicking like “click here for a cash offer.” So our best practice is using terms related to the conversion action. So in our case, that’s “call us today to get started” or “visit now for a cash offer.” So including these phrases is important for letting customers know that your urgency matches theirs and helps motivate them to take action immediately because you’re telling them what to do. You’re telling them to click there because you’re getting a cash offer.

All right. So you can also use ad extensions. Now, this one is very powerful because you can get more displayed on your ad using extensions. So creating an ad with great ad ranking is important for lowering cost per click and ad position, but ad extensions are an easy way to boost the quality of an ad. So they provide an additional information about your business, your website information, and contact information.

And the most important extension that we’ve used that have provided better results and better conversion rates and lower cost per conversion is the call extension. So that extension adds a phone number to your ads. So when your ad gets displayed, it’s actually going to show a phone number on there. So you’re giving customers on mobile devices and even on computers an easy way to contact you just by looking at the ad. They don’t even need to click on the ad. They can just call you directly from Google search results page. So we make sure that we include active ad extensions in 100% of the ad groups that we create. We always have more than one extension active. So Google will rotate what extensions are included or shown. You can’t tell them to include all of them. Well, you can but they won’t show all of them at the same. They’ll even use more than one at a time to increase the space that your ads take up on page sometimes, so activate as many as possible when you’re using these ad extensions.

And then landing page. So landing page use is just as important as the ad that leads to it. Because once you have an ad constructed, you got to use the information in your ads to optimize your landing. So this all has to match all the way through this process. You got to think about this from the searcher’s perspective. They’re looking for something, so they needed to think of a way to search for that in Google. And so they’re trying to think of “what should I search for.” They determine that. They search it. They see your ad. It relates to what they were looking for. They click on it. Now, your landing page also needs to relate to those things. So it flows. So you don’t want to target the keyword “sell my house fast” show an ad that says, “Sell your house fast. Get a cash offer in 24 hours.” And then, have them click on it and go to a page that says something like—I guess I should’ve thought about this beforehand—but something different. So you don’t want to have a page that says, “We can give you money for your old shoes,” or something but be real specific. You got to just reiterate that. So maybe the landing page says, “Get your cash offer in 24 hours.” So it’s what they saw in the ads that made them click. So when they go to your page, they’re then seeing what they wanted to see, what they were interested in — “Get my cash offer in 24 hours.” So make sure that the keywords that are included in the ad are also included in your landing page. If you’re using a callout or a product extension, make sure that the items and text used are listed on the landing page.

Now, typically with motivated sellers and things like that, you don’t really have these product extensions. So call to action on the page to closely match the one you’re using on your ad. And so we’re going to cover though more about landing pages in a minute. I just want to discuss how the relation of the ad and the landing page worked and how to best build those based on what you have in your ads.

So now, let’s talk about bids because your ads will be displayed based on several factors including what your max bid is for that keyword. So as mentioned, you won’t necessarily pay what your max bid is. You can have Google auto bid for you and you can manually set your maximum bid. So there’s two options. You can either let them do it to try to get the higher placement but you could end up spending a whole lot more than maybe you wanted or you can just do it manually to make sure you’re not spending more than you want, and they’ll tell you where your ad is showing up on average for each keyword. So if you do a manual max bid and you notice that they’re showing that your average position is like position 8 or 9, you’re probably going to want to up that budget because you’re not going to get a whole lot of clicks down in those low positions. You really want to be in the first four positions.

So budgets. Your bids also have to do with your budgets. So what should your daily budget be? It’s a very important question. It can be the difference between disappointment and a great working account AdWords strategy. And so, I’m going to get in the specifics here because I know people sometimes say, “You don’t want a low budget.” But what exactly is a low budget? So I don’t recommend anybody get involved in AdWords with a low budget unless you’re in a market with very little competition. By a low budget, I mean something like under $40 or $50 per day. And with cost per clicks varying from about 10 bucks to upwards of $75 each, your budget is going to be blown with just a few clicks because the cost per clicks are what eats up your budget, right? So if you’re getting about $25 per click and your budget was only 50 bucks, you’re only going to get two clicks and the rest of the day your ads aren’t going to show. And so what you want to do is have enough to where you have a better chance of actually getting those clicks to become leads because not every click is going to become a lead.

It’s not that you can get leads and deals with a small budget. It’s just going to take a lot longer, and you’re going to end up spending money without any results for a while so I always recommend higher budgets. So I’d recommend at least $100 per day. Some people whenever I say that immediately start calculating in their head, “OK. $100 per day. And let’s say 30 days typically in a month. That’s $3000. No way. I can’t afford 3 grand.” But that’s not the proper way to look at this because you got to consider how many leads can be generated by these budgets and what your typical lead to deal conversion rate is. That way you can determine whether the return on investment is worth because this is really all about return on investment, and I like this whole conversation because I think people struggle with this and investing in general with doing any kind of marketing from motivated sellers. They’re looking at their spending and the money that they’re spending on this marketing and being very cautious in keeping that amount so low that they never get attraction. Pause and think about that because if you think that you’re going to be able to send out 20 letters and get a deal, you’re crazy. It might happen but the chances are so slim. You’ve got to spend the money to make the money and understand that if you just do it willy-nilly and just do a little bit like the 20 letters or 100 letters, you’re not going to attraction, right? So you just sort of need to take that leap of faith sometimes and know that eventually you’re going to get that deal. It’s going to make you the money.

Let’s give an example here for AdWords in order to figure return on investment whether it’s worth it. So let’s say you typically buy a house for every one out of every 10 motivated seller leads that you get. So it takes you 10 leads; and of those, you’re going to buy one of those houses. That’s a 10% lead to deal conversion rate. So you’re basically getting 10% of the leads becoming ideal.

So now, let’s say that you end up averaging about $150 per lead. And that’s not per click but per person that submits the form or calls you and becomes a lead. So you need to 10 of those leads to land a deal because you have a 10% lead-to-deal conversion rate. So you’re looking at about 1500 bucks because that’s 10 leads, and $150 per lead is 1500 bucks. And I don’t know about you but I’ll take a deal at 1500 bucks all day long every day. Even if the numbers were not as good as that, you’re getting $200 per lead so that 10 leads cost you $2000. That’s still awesome because you’re getting a deal for 2000 bucks.

Now, let’s consider you’re making something like $6000 or $8000 or more per wholesale or 20 grand or more for flips. You’re return on investment is incredible. It’s great. There are some risks there, but generally people/investors around the country are paying this amount of money to get deals. They’re paying anywhere from 1000 bucks up to $3500, even $4500 per deal. And just because the return on investment though is so great, it’s worth it for them to do that. So you just have to determine what it’s worth for you, how much profit you’re likely making on these deals with your exit strategies to where it makes sense. Just keep track of those numbers and that’s how you know whether it’s worth doing or not. So that’s how you look at where your budget should be.

And many times, you won’t even spend that entire budget if you’re managing AdWords account correctly. But testing the keywords and generating the best leads at the best cost, so this is where that management, that coming in and keeping an eye on everything, trying to target mostly exact match and using broad to find new exact match is going to really help you out. So you’re going to pay less for clicks with high quality website and landing page than you will if you have a poor one. So with high quality scores, you actually pay less for higher placement search results and the clicks you receive. It’s what I was talking about earlier. It’s not just about your max budget. It’s about the experience that the searcher is going to have that Google determines how much you’re going to pay for stuff.

So at LeadPropeller, we understand the auction process for bidding or keywords and ad placement. We take advantage of it so that the managed AdWords accounts get better ads placement at lower cost. It’s just one of the things that we constantly strive because it’s so important.

So let’s get into landing pages now because that’s what’s going to help. If you got a great landing page, it’s going to help your quality scores to get lower cost per click and better ad placement. So landing page is the page on your website the searcher is taken to after they click on your ad. It can either be your homepage or any other page on your site. But I recommend a separate page for your homepage and that page could be more geared towards having them take action instead of providing tons of information for them to get bogged down. So it’s basically sort of like a simplified page that directs them to fill out a form or call you and that’s it. It’s going to have some key elements on it. We’re going to talk about that here in a second.

So what should your landing page have on it to make sure that it converts as many visitors as possible? Well, if searchers click on your ad and they go to your site and they don’t fill out the form or call you, they’re just costing you money without anything in return and obviously you want to avoid that.

So let’s talk about the landing page and the necessities, the things that all real estate investor AdWords landing pages, also known as “squeeze pages.” Absolutely a must-have. So #1: A prominent form that stands out on your page and draws your eye directly to it. Now, this is done primarily by having the form above the hold meaning that when they go to your page that they see it right there. They don’t have to scroll for it. They don’t have to scroll down and see it. It needs to be done in a contrasting color to the majority of the page so that it pops out. It’s really going to draw your eye. When you land on that page, your eye needs to be drawn to that form.

So the #2 thing for landing page is going to be a strong call to action. You’ve got to tell them exactly what to do, “Fill up the form to get your cash offer.” Your page should also have a large title that explains what it is you do as well that reinforces why they should do what you’re suggesting in your call to action. This could be “sell your house within seven days without the hassle” or something, stuff like that. “Fill out the form. Get a cash offer in 24 hours.”

So the credibility boosters is the third one. So when you have people click over, they could be motivated but they’re also going to be a little bit skeptical maybe. So you want to deal with that skepticism, and we talked a lot about that in episode 55 also. So if you want to hear more about this, definitely listen to that podcast. It’s at flippingjunkie.com/55 or just look for it in iTunes. But the credibility boosters are things like the Better Business Bureau accredited business badge. So it’s that Better Business Bureau (BBB) logo. Video testimonials are awesome as seen on type logos. And we talked about in the last episode, episode 56, about using press releases to be able to get these ads seen on logos. Because if you get a good press release out, these news websites pick them up then all of a sudden you can say that you were seen on NBC and stuff like that. You can listen to that episode at flippingjunkie.com/55.

All right. So just know that showing as much as possible about the person giving the testimonial is better. When you do testimonials, you’re going to have their full name and location. A picture is even better. And then, the video testimonial is the best that you can do because people really believe those because they’re seeing that. If it’s just the text one, it’s still but not as good because people might just think that it’s something that’s made up.

I’ll be showing some of the examples of these great landing pages during the webinar that I will be doing in November 15th, so be sure to register at leadpropeller.com/webinar to reserve your seat. That’s “webinar,” leadpropeller.com/webinar. So we do AdWords management for some of our LeadPropeller clients, and that management includes creating and testing these landing pages. Basically, it takes all the guest work in the work in general out of it so you don’t really have to do anything. We’ll do that for you with those managed account. So all of our AdWords management is done in office by Google-certified professionals. And if you want to find out more about it, you can simply just go to leadpropeller.com/adwords or even just give us a call. We provide phone support, but we also have a phone line for people looking for more information about the AdWords and stuff like that. So just give us a call at (210) 999-5187. So we definitely talk about those things because it’s pretty complicated and really LeadPropeller in the house moving business, everything pays the bills and keeps this podcast going and all that kind of stuff.

I know some people express some interest in what’s called retargeting and Facebook marketing. It’s basically where things are going, I think, with online lead generation. What it is, is you can install a pixel that isn’t seen by visitors on your websites but it keeps track of who visited your website. So those pixels will allow you to create audiences. So it kind of like has information about the person that went to your site within Facebook and Google AdWords that can be then used to retarget those people, and it’s very powerful. You can create ads that are going to be shown only to the people that have previously visited your website and you can literally show ads to people that went to your website but didn’t submit the form because—I don’t know—maybe they weren’t ready yet, maybe they wanted to do more research. And by doing this retargeting, basically you’re following them around the internet. You’re going to be more likely to be able to make contact with them and have them come back to your page or you could just end up freaking them out. So there’s an art to that as well. You don’t want to follow somebody around forever and piss them off. You can even make like look-alike audiences from the audiences that you get that basically matches the demographics and stuff of the people that did visit your page so you can target a bigger audience. I don’t currently recommend it though. But who knows? Maybe it will be something that works out well in the near future using those look-alike audiences. But we’re still collecting data on the effectiveness of these campaigns at LeadPropeller. So I don’t have much to share right now other than this is available for the technically savvy. If you’re interested, it’s definitely something to check out.

Be sure to register for the webinar to reserve your seat. We’ll be going all over a lot more of this in detail with more visuals so it’s a lot easier to understand. I know this audio talk about AdWords can be pretty confusing at points because it’s kind of hard to follow without a visual. So I’ll be having that webinar. Go to leadpropeller.com/webinar to reserve your seat. That’s going to be November 15th, and I’ll cover the key points from the podcast for online lead generation so you can see what I’m talking about.

And I know pay per click can be overwhelming. There are so many pieces of it that affect each other. And the best advice that I can really give is to start with smaller list of keywords with the high intent, those exact match keywords, and then grow slowly and take advantage of a managed service like what LeadPropeller offers. So I’ll be sharing some of those best intent keywords on the webinar. If you want to find out more about the LeadPropeller managed AdWords accounts, just go to leadpropeller.com/adwords or you can call and talk to us at (210) 999-5127. Thank you guys so much for listening to the podcast. I really do appreciate it.

On the next episode, we’re going to be talking about SEO. I know a lot of people want to hear about this and what’s working now, 2016 and beyond. And also, we’ll talk about basically content marketing to be able to help your site rank higher in the search engines and also for more keywords; this is another reason for that. So we’ll talk about that in great, great detail in the next episode.

Show notes for this one will be flippingjunkie.com/57. So everybody have a great weekend. We’ll see you on the next. I think this one actually splits the webinar from when this one gets released. So see you on the webinar. Go ahead and register your seat [music] if you didn’t reserve it at leadpropeller.com/webinar. All right, everybody. Have a great week.