I recently started using adwords- my ad even shows up on the first page, but no clicks as of yet. Curious to know if anyone here has a budget for an adwords campaign, what they pay per click in a particular market, etc.

Different marketing works for different people. IMHO it is better to do some SEO and get your site ranked organically.

yea there is a lot better options that adwords.

Do SEO - with adwords once your budget is gone its gone - with SEO once your budget is gone you should still have some decent rankings for a while

maybe you are bidding on words with no traffic? or you are not bidding enough per click

I have to take the other side of the fence from Vacationguy.

Although I agree Organic Traffic is FANTASTIC if it converts, it's entirely possible to work for months or years to get decent rankings for a phrase - only to find out it doesn't convert well (if at all).

The advantage of Adwords is that you can test to make sure your phrase converts visitors into leads/sales BEFORE wasting any time optimizing for a phrase that might not convert as well as you think.

SEO is the best way to do it. Do pay somebody to keep it on the top or you do it yourself?

Organic?? PPC traffic?? It depends on how you set each one of those up and what your goal is for each visitor. If your talking about conversions and real estate I've seen organic traffic to work better. How good or bad your organic traffic is really depends on how you set up your local search rankings.

I could see how it PPC would work really well if you had an amazing ad with a really nice landing page.

A good PPC campaign will have a lot of details about target market and does not include keywords that won't convert. If you have a large advertising budget and are just looking for exposure, then it doesn't really matter, might as well get the impressions.



Joel: I can see your point. Depending on your competition a lot of time and dedication can be required to have rank on the top for keywords. But there are other ways to pull in traffic now. A lot of how successful and fast your seo efforts are lie within your articles and article promotion, staying active on forums, and user generated blogs.

I find one of the problems of PPC is that competitors often click on your PPC ads giving you inaccurate results.

I still think the right way is to do proper keyword research and start working on the SEO.

If you choose the right keywords you should be able to convert those people into leads. If not, you may have to tweak your site as it isn't offering the people what they are looking for.

If anyone is interested in a great PPC campaign and your only cost is the actual charges by Google let me now, as I have PPC training coming out my ears and have set up a site with my training and its doing pretty well... I eat sleep and breathe the subject and instead of listening to the radio when driveing I listen to Webinars on Pay Per click.
A good PPC campaign is a science.. I have the tools to spy on any other successful PPCer and see exactly what keywords he uses and what converts.. You would not believe how competitive PPC is... earlier someone said they made the firt page of google.. hell all you need to do that is pay the min amt for first page..
Split testing shows that line one is not best line 2 or 3 is actually better.
You have to set it up and test...test...test.... day and night... if you can work your quality score up to an 8/10 or 9/10 you can pay 50 cents for the same keyphrase others pay 2 bucks for and you will show up more than they will even though you pay 50 cent and they offer 2 bucks... for google its all about the quality score and the landing page.... NEVER..Never drive a visitor to you index page...from ppc... NeVER...
If anyone is interested in pointers, or to have me set up a full campaign for freee... let me know..
If you have PPC questions.. I doubt you can come up with one I don't know the answer to...
Why would I offer this free service: Just crazy I guess... No really I am a retired Naval Officer after 33 years and went from E1-E9, W2-W4, 02-O6 and just could not find a challenge... so here I am retired and don't do anything unless I love it and I love PPC.... so I don't need money, I just love to do challenging things.. and building a PPC campaign that pumps out 100 leads per month is my current goal... and you only need to pay the actual google charges.... and how cna you be sure I am not making it up... I will put the account in your name and google willl bill you direct so there is no middle (markup) man.

Just remember Google quality score, quality score, quality score is the way to lower costs and increase conversions... you can't take clicks to the bank ... you need conversions... google takes clicks to bank not you..

Oh one more thing, I will only have time to work a total of 5 adword campains at once, and I have 2 already.. and each must be in a different area.. don't want to compete with myself..
The first person that signed up was using this for the AD.

Mary Olson Real Estate
Color Photos of ALL MLS
Homes in the Allengy Area
www.mywebsite.com

Worst title line ever.. google would give that add a 1/10 and shut it down immedately and even if you offered 20 bucks google would never show that ad.. Why... quality score demands that the keyphrase match the landing page and the title line...

Va Beach Foreclosures
Color Photos of Foreclosed
And Short Sale homes in Color
www.mywebsite.com\Foreclosures

More better... landing page must have color photos of foreclosed homes, look at the added word after the domain name.. is ok even if you have no page named Foreclosures... since that is the display url which can say anything but the real url might be www.mysite.com/repo-home.htm
Remember the doman displayed and real doman must be same but rest can be different...
THe rules go on and on forever.. and every rule affects your quality score and how much you pay per click...

<quote>
I find one of the problems of PPC is that competitors often click on your PPC ads giving you inaccurate results.

Good point Jeff, but google knows that and they will not let any IP hit you more than once in 24 hours... but that is very rare for a competitor to do that... very rare...
Now if they really go pissed with you and they had dialup, they could hit you then restart the dial up and hit you again and do it every 5 min... what an ahole that would be..

And worse yet for example the phrase "Virginia Beach Real Estate" normally costs the average person $2.25 per click but with a good quality score you can get it down to a dollar.
And better yet.. I can prove google will show the dollar on 10 times more than they will show the 2 dollar one.. its critical to get an ad that gets clicked when it shows... else the price goes up fast...

Google looks at it this way... if the dollar add gets clicked on evey other time they show it, and the two dollar add only gets clicks each 6th time it shows... does not take a genius for google to the dollar add 6 times and make 3 bucks rather than show the two dollar add 6 times and make two dollars... even I can figure that out... he he..

<quote>
I could see how it PPC would work really well if you had an amazing ad with a really nice landing page.

Great point Brainard, and that is the way google sees it also... to get the [censored] hot quality score to allow you to pay 50 cents a click when othere pay 2.25.. involves directing every single keyphrase to a different landing page. But you say... hell i got 1500 keyphrases... how the hell can i have a landing page tuned to each keyword... I have an automator that instantly builds alanding page on the fly.. if your keyword is "jackass" it presnts a page full of donkey photos and the title of the page is jackass.htm and the keyword in the meta is jackass and the description is "See all my jackasses for sale.." get the idea.. google shits all over themselves and gives all 1,500 pages high quality scores and lower clicks.... and tons of other secrets are available to apply to your campaing at Zero cost to you..

PPC is actually a really effective way to generate leads. You can control PPC more then you can organic, and if you target your ad's correctly, your conversions will be better then anything you can get with organic. I know some people that are converting between 16-20% of their visitors into leads with PPC. I would also recommend, if you don't know what you're doing, hire a professional to do it.

Great info, Tom!!!! I am sending you a PM to discuss more...

I was going to add my 2¢, but Tom Tiger did a good job explaining adwords.

Something that I would add, and hopefully not confuse people further, but each keyword in a campaign, should be the only keyword in the ad group.

A targeted keyword, pointing to a tightly target, keyword specific landing page will really help with the quality score, thus providing a lower cost per click and a higher ranking!

Gotta love those Google engineers for complicating the process!

I tried an adword campaign got good results.

Here's my landing page: http://njretoday.com/whats-my-house-worth/

I got one good lead out of 8 clicks for $35 targeting property values ________, NJ.

I know that on average to get good results with adwords, you have to weed through some clicks that may never convert. I like the ability to test, tweak and test again.

If you have a decent budget for internet marketing as a individual sales agent, I would place 20% of that budget or a small portion of my budget in general into adwords. Then I would pool the rest of my money into other sources of internet lead generation.

I even had success with facebook ads, which allows me to target specific demographics (people), which I like just the same as adwords.

For a new agent launching a new site, what percentage of the marketing budget would you allocate to ppc (if any)??? input from experts would be appreciated...

I've been doing tons of corporate SEO as well as PPC , social advertising and the like.

Real estate is so local , in my mind it makes PPC worthless because the markets are so limited. For about 1/5th the price of a PPC campaign you should be able to get a good organic SEO campaign rolling and do much better. PPC ads only get about 20% of total clicks, compared to the #1 result which gets around 40%, and #2 which gets around 20%.

[quote=Joel McDonald]I have to take the other side of the fence from Vacationguy.

Although I agree Organic Traffic is FANTASTIC if it converts, it's entirely possible to work for months or years to get decent rankings for a phrase - only to find out it doesn't convert well (if at all).

The advantage of Adwords is that you can test to make sure your phrase converts visitors into leads/sales BEFORE wasting any time optimizing for a phrase that might not convert as well as you think. [/quote]

Agree. Adwords is a great avenue to narrow down your keywords and optimize from there. Adwords gives you great info beyond just paid clicks, like how many times it is being seen as well. So you can then compare the two together to help strategize a plan.