PPC 101 for housebuilders

Back to basics’ is a term often used when times get tough, and Google Adwords is bread and butter these days when it comes to generating targeted traffic to your website, enquiries, brochure downloads and email newsletter signups. From talking to many housebuilders it’s still sometimes seen as a mysterious black art, so this month it’s your chance to find out more, starting with the basics.

To define Pay Per Click (or PPC or Paid Search), it is a type of internet advertising which allows you to display a small three-line advert when someone searches on a relevant keyword. They type “new homes London”, your advert based around new homes for sale in London can appear in the top two or three positions, or down the right hand side (“1” in the image below, 2 is the local search listings and 3 is natural search), and there is no charge for this. The only cost from the search engine comes when the person clicks your advert and comes through to your website, which can range from just a few pence to a few pounds – the average cost per click (CPC) is around 60p for a regional phrase.

Let’s be clear, when it comes to the UK search market there is pretty much only Google these days. Surging ahead in recent years, it is now used for nine in every ten of the 29,000 searches a minute that we make (and, for the record, in CO2 terms that’s the equivalent of boiling nearly one million kettles every hour!) Yahoo and MSN plough on with their search engine offering, and do have some niches that perform well, but their traffic is now so small in comparison it is hardly worth the additional management time of running campaigns on them.

Search engines (and the internet in general) are all about relevancy – this is Google’s main aim, so it stands to reason that they want to display adverts relevant to the person’s search, and they reward this financially. Google is clever enough to read the text on the page you send the visitor to (the “landing page”) and if it’s a close match to the keywords used in the search your “quality score” will increase. This is one of the factors that determine where your ad will appear and also the actual cost per click you are charged (not just setting a higher maximum bid price as many think). Being a free market – i.e. you versus your competitors bidding on the keywords – the price you pay will vary and fluctuate with the amount of competition in the market.

There are many ways of optimising your PPC campaign to get better value for money, and it does need constant attention through the month, hence why most companies use an experienced agency. One of those ways is to monitor is the “click through rate” (CTR) of your campaign and keywords. For example, if your ad is shown 100 times and three people come to your site it is a CTR of three per cent. A range of 1.5 per cent to three per cent is ideal, which demonstrates the text in your adverts is appealing enough to attract searchers to click the ad.

As in traditional advertising, the copy used in your advert is critical, and if the exact words used in the search appear in your advert they are put in bold which draws the eye, and again increases click through. High CTR will boost your quality score and help you pay less for your advertising.

When testing the perfect ad copy, you can “split test” different versions – Google serves them up to different people and records which one proves more successful (i.e. draws more clicks to the site). It can then automatically continue to display this version and hence deliver you better value for money.

I mentioned landing pages earlier, and the importance of relevant text to improve your quality score, well it goes further when you start thinking about relevancy. Your aim must be to minimise the number of clicks the visitor has to make to get to the desired information – and you know what that info is, as they’ve told you in the search keywords used! If they want to see your “new homes in Bournemouth”, don’t dump them at the home page, take them straight to a page listing your property in that area, or at least the nearest ones if none exist. Using Google Analytics or similar, you can monitor the conversion rate of how many people go on to enquire from a certain keyword – more on this another month.

When choosing which keywords to select for the campaign, if using an agency you should only have to indicate the geographical areas and other campaign objectives – they can use keyword tools to see which words people actually search on and set the campaign up accordingly. To ensure spend is only going in the right place, negative keywords should be used. For example, if you bid on “new home” as a “broad match” (which means as long as the words new and home appear anywhere in the search phrase it will show the ad) and you don’t want it to appear for “rent new home you can add a negative of “rent” and it will not show. This can save significant wastage.

Do remember that you can run PPC around short term campaigns – if Gordon Brown tries to mop up his mess with more interest rate cuts, why not rush out a new PPC ad and dedicated landing page the same day around “low interest rates”? Do always remember however to remove adverts that are no longer relevant, such as on developments that have now sold out (remember that feeling?)

More factual than opinion in this month’s blog, and for some it may seem a little basic, but I’ve had so many in the industry ask me about the fundamentals of this revolutionary change in the way we sell property. In future months I’ll be looking at the impact of creative in websites and more advanced topics including how to increase your website conversion rate and the benefits of data integration.