We believe search ads are becoming increasingly a must-have item in your ad campaigns, and that’s why we’ve built the automation so you can add search ads for as little as about $100 to any campaign – and quite a few of our products have them ‘baked in’.
Thanks to our friends at Google, we get insights that help us help our clients. So how is this for an interesting fact? The use of Google Search by people looking for property and agents is growing rapidly and is now one of the best sources of leads for users of our AIM solution. Whilst the traditional property portals might want you to think that everyone jumps into their apps when they want to research something, the reality is most people just use search because it’s more convenient. Having done the search, you see the results and generally click on the links towards the top of the list. This is where ads become so powerful, because ads appear BEFORE the other search results, meaning they are more likely to be clicked on. And since the ad appears in response to the words (known as ‘search terms’) you entered, they are generally very relevant and likely to be of interest to those searching.
Why does this matter to a real estate agent? Because you can have search ads as part of your property and agent campaigns too! Wouldn’t you prefer if people clicked on your ad, landing on your listing or agent site, before going to a generic website with all your competitors?
If you look at the graph of search activity with a real estate focus, again thanks to Google – you can see that there are an extraordinarily large number of searches every month and that volume of searches is going up every month. In Australia alone, this is surpassing 80 Million searches every month! In New Zealand, this number is proportionately similar. But why? It’s all about convenience. Social media sites like Facebook aren’t really built for searching, rather they observe what you do and serve things like ads and content up they think are relevant. There are so many apps and websites, that it’s daunting to know where to start and even which sites may have what you are after. But search… everyone knows and trusts it, and more so now than ever. It’s not a fad, it’s a trend and you should be taking it seriously.
From a technical standpoint, you can use a solution like AIM that completely automates everything – or you can do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you. Search ads can be complex to implement unless you have the right tools and knowledge. Why is it complex to do manually? Well, think about how many different ways you might enter your search inquiry words. Everyone is different. Some might search for ‘4 bedroom house for sale in manly’, others might search for ‘For sale in Smith Street’, or ‘for sale 4 bedroom house with pool’. There are so many combinations, and catering for as wide a range of options as possible is essential. AIM takes care of this by automatically making ad campaigns with hundreds of tailored keyword combinations for every property and agent, called a longtail campaign. Doing this manually would take you hours, even if you were a Google expert. But that’s not all… An ad needs to have content, so when it displays it contains enough information for people to decide if they want to click on it. Again, this is not so simple because Google ads that have a number of headings, descriptions, and links, tend to be more appealing. This is why we’ve automated this aspect of search ad creation as well.
We believe search ads are becoming increasingly a must-have item in your ad campaigns, and that’s why we’ve built the automation so you can add search ads for as little as about $100 to any campaign – and quite a few of our products have them ‘baked in’.
One final thought.. Please also consider the branding power of search ads. AIM Search ads show your name and office, which is another way of getting exposure and credibility at just the time when people are looking. Remember that except for first-home-buyers and investors, every single buyer is also a seller and they all start off doing tons of research with Google Search, a key tool.
So for your next AIM campaign, or perhaps your first (if you haven’t used AIM yet), consider Google Search ads. They’re a great investment, inexpensive, and work a treat.
