How I ended up visiting a Meth House - My PPC Experiment!

[Richie Choy]

A few weeks ago, I shook hands with a motivated seller-slumlord and visited a D-class property. He was actually in the middle of moving in a new tenant (with no teeth and probably no credit score). I tallied up: a gut-rehab, multiple evictions, and a rental strategy that I had no stomach for. This was the first lesson of my Pay-Per-Click lead gen experiment... define specific buying criteria and filter Google Ads location. 

PPC Experiment

My goal this year is to achieve healthy deal-flow via heavy investments in scalable marketing funnels in order to acquire some residential properties in Metro Atlanta. 

Budget: $1,000/mo Google Ads, $200 logo, $15/mo hosting, $0 site creation (my own sweat)

Google Ads: 4 ad "groups" (Hassles, Generic, Seller Financing, Evictions, MFH)

Lessons and Improvements

- Location: Initially started with a huge net, which lead me to a Crack Den. So I did a double-take at my buying criteria, converted it into CONCRETE standards in a document, and translated into 7 mi radius around 6 major towns around Atlanta. I also had for forcibly exclude non-US countries for some reason.

- Demographics: the age distribution clearly leaned to 34+ but I went ahead and forced to 45+ because I've seen a lot of older mom-n-pops starting to dump their portfolios on Zillow.

- Ad "groups": I tried to target people that were specifically interested in selling with seller financing, but most searches were BUYERS looking to acquire with seller financing. This siphoned off valuable click dollars, which I eventually had to disable. 

- Negative search keywords: With all the craziness going on I created a group around Evictions, but it generated a lot of traffic from tenants that were looking to avoid getting evicted. I quickly clamped down on generic phrases like "evictions in georgia"

Metrics/Results
- 3.6k Impressions, 178 Clicks, 12 calls/contacts, 2 property visits, 2 offers, 0 accepts

- $1200 total marketing dollars invested, $8.87 avg CPC (lower due to cheaper, unproductive search phrases)

- 50/50 male/female, 50/50 mobile/desktop, lot of traffic at lunch and after dinner

- Most successful ad group were super generic e.g. "sell my house fast", "we buy houses" at ~4% CTR

Moving Forward

I'm looking at the costs and metrics here as tuition money. I'm fully expecting all following months to be far more successful. The most crucial piece is demonstrating extreme ownership over the results and converting the data into improvements on the ad campaign parameters AND on the site content/aesthetics.

Cheers, and don't do drugs!

[Josh McRay]

Hey @Richie Choy!

Very solid experiment! You can also use the advanced location settings section at the campaign level to show ads only in your target area to continue to narrow down your results. In campaigns that I manage and run I also add every state and state abbreviation to my running negative keywords list. I just leave off the ones that I'm targeting inside of. You could probably check your "searched terms" section of your campaign to see if something like that would help (see how much of your traffic is using out of state terms in their searches). Hope this helps!