The folks at The Short Sale Group came to us without a lot of confidence. They heard it was impossible to profitably generate real estate leads using Google AdWords. We managed to build a profitable campaign in less than a month.
Requirements
With the crash of the housing market, many homeowners are turning toward short sales in an effort to get out from beneath an upside down mortgage loan. Unfortunately, short sales can be incredibly complicated and homeowners need a good Realtor to help them through the process.
The folks at The Short Sale Group were just those types of Realtors. Over 20 years in the business and countless short sales under their belts, they had all but given up on generating business online because they had heard from colleagues who tried it themselves that it couldn’t be done profitably.
They came to us in a last ditch effort to see if their colleagues were wrong.
Due Diligence
Anytime we deal with real estate companies the due diligence phase lasts a bit longer than usual because of the stiff competition. Keywords in this niche can be very expensive and it’s important to focus resources in the proper place, and our thorough due diligence helps us make that happen.
First of all, they are a local company, so we narrowed our competitor research only to local companies. We identified 4 major players that we would be competing against for ad position in Google’s AdWords system. We tracked those competitors for several months and used the best ones as starting points to build our own campaign.
During our client interviews, we identified a number of potentially useful prospect characteristics that would help us target our ads and increase landing page conversion rates more effectively.
The Process
Initially, we built 4 different landing page variations; two variations of a mini-site and two single-pagers. We set up an A/B/C/D split test using Google’s excellent website optimizer and eventually identified one landing page as clearly more effective at converting visitors into leads.
The Results
The best-converting landing page has since evolved over time, tripling its original conversion rate to 9.8%. Ad click-through-rate reached 3.3% in that time.
