Three Costly Google Adwords Lessons

Thinking about playing the Google Adwords game? Avoid these three costly lessons.

Google Adwords is a solid tool to find motivated home sellers. The ads show at the top of the Search Engine Results Page – above organic results. Generating leads based on queries like “sell my house fast” or “need to sell my house” draws from a motivated audience. I’ve sourced my highest profit deals from Google Adwords.

New investors don’t have huge budgets. Adwords “gurus” pitch their service in some cases for over a thousand per month with the marketing ploy they want to work with “closers.” Putting aside the issue of whether to pay a specialist to manage your Adwords, it’s not feasible if you are on a shoe string budget. Google actually allows you to conference with their Adwords team for free. Although they don't understand the industry, they can walk you through the tools and functionality. Simply put: it doesn’t make sense to pay hundreds for management if that’s your entire budget.

To that end, I figured I’d provide some lessons I learned the hard way so you can save a few clicks:

Negative Keywords: Google Adwords without a solid negative keyword base is a huge waste of money. According to Google, a negative keyword “prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase.” Google takes serious liberties in making your ads show for Search Terms loosely related to your Keyword. I pulled my Search Term list (i.e. the queries made before clicking my ad) from my first few weeks in February 2016. “Sell house Florida” Keyword was triggered by the query “craigslist florida”. I paid $6.18 for someone that Googled “realtor com Miami”: this triggered keyword “sell house Miami.” Research negative keywords before turning on your campaign. Closely monitor Search Terms for queries that should be excluded.

Understanding “Location Targeting”: As real estate investors in a specific geography, we don’t want to limit our ads to people living in that geography. Our best deals are often out-of-area owners. Still, we do want our ads to show for people living in the area – as that’s where most homeowners reside. The logical location targeting option is “People in, searching for, or who show interest in my targeted location.” One problem here is people in your geography searching about property outside your geography. For example, query “need to sell my house fast in Australia” would trigger Keyword “need to sell my house fast”. For my business, I’m only interested in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach County – so I created a massive negative keyword list of every major City, State, County, Country. This resolved the issue of queries containing outside-my-market terms.

Keyword Modifiers: Learn the details of Google’s Broad Match, Broad Match Modifier, Phrase Match, Exact Match, and Negative Match. I lean towards Broad Match Modifier (“Ads may show on searches that contain the modified term (or close variations, but not synonyms)”) on the Keyword “sell” accompanied by unmodified house. This allows for queries like sell my house, selling house, house for sale, apartment for sale, etc. Test being even more specific with Phrase Match on a Keyword like “need to sell my house”. When I began with unmodified term “sell” – Google greatly expanded the synonyms (even to include the term ‘buy’ which has a distinctively different implication).

Google Adwords is a profitable endeavor – but make sure you are getting bang for your buck.