PPC Campaign vs. Online Lead Services

[Eli Rose]

Any insight into cost per customer acquisition from a PPC Google Adwords campaign vs. online lead services? If we go the Adwords route, I would likely manage the campaign. My sister-in-law works for a prominent SEM company and she was gracious enough to help with the campaign setup; however, optimization would be my responsibility. I am not a PPC expert nor do I have the desire to become one. I am not opposed to outsourcing the campaign management/optimization, but this would eat into my shoestring PPC budget of $1,000 per month. I see the main benefit of a PPC campaign being lead exclusivity. On the other hand, the online lead services are competing for the same leads with a much bigger budget and they likely understand their keyword optimization and bid structuring much better than me. The leads would not be exclusive; however, the lead gen process would be truly automated. The online lead services we are considering are REDX, zBuyer and FastHomeOffer.com. We wholesale in Cobb County, GA and Cherokee County, GA which are North Metro burbs of Atlanta; specifically Woodstock, GA; Kennesaw, GA; Canton, GA; Acworth, GA and Marietta, GA. For those not familiar with Metro Atlanta, these are a very competitive markets. One of the main PPC research challenges we have faced is determining long-tailed keyword bid amounts. For example, "Sell My House Fast Kennesaw", Sell My House Quickly Woodstock", etc. Thanks for the comments and advice in advance!

[Sean Dolan]

As I'm sure you know, PPC is going to be expensive, and the learning curve will be steep for you to self-manage, but it's doable. With a 1,000 budget, it's going to be hard to find someone that's good at PPC charging under $500/month for the management fee alone. You get what you pay for with PPC management, like you would with a lawyer. Good lawyer gets you more money, bad lawyer gets you less money.

Finding those 'hidden' long-tail PPC keywords is harder than it used to be. With modified broad match-type, we can target any phrase with the keyword: +sell +house +fast, and enter the auction on any long-tail you find that contains those words (in any order). But, there may be some phrases with traffic, that are outside of the obvious guesses, and maybe pick up some leads that way.

Whatever you do, make sure you have conversion tracking in place, as well as call tracking (dynamic, so the number changes based on the user's source). No point in spending a lot of money, getting a lead, and having no idea what settings in the account brought you that lead. Your sister-in-law can probably set those up for you.

If you're going to learn it yourself, I recommend "Advanced Google Adwords" Third Edition by Brad Geddes.

As for the long-tail keywords you mentioned, the reason you're having trouble identifying bid estimates is because there's very little traffic for these phrases. See below.

In the term "Sell My House Fast Kennesaw" you're defining the geography in the search term. People are more likely to type in "sell my house fast" without the geographical specifier. As an advertiser, you can limit where your ads geographically show up, so you can target the term "sell my house fast" limited to the geographical area (maybe a radius of 20 miles) around Kennesaw. 

As for the bid price, you'll probably be in the $10-$20 per click range, depending on where you want to show up on the search results page. Google doesn't have that specific information for Kennesaw, but that's what I'm seeing across Georgia in general for "sell my house" terms. Either way, you can start low, and keep bidding higher until you start getting traffic. 

Good luck!