You also can keep costs down by limiting the geographic region where your ads will appear—few builders need national reach. Plus, you can limit your ads to specific days and times. If you’ve noticed a lot of traffic on your Web site in the evenings and on weekends, you can target those times for your ads to appear.
AD COPY MATTERS
The next step in the process is to write descriptive ads to match your keywords. Mike Lyon, author of Browsers to Buyers: Proven Strategies for Selling New Homes Online, says he’s seen builders goof in this area by making their ads too generic. For example, for the search term “new homes Dallas,” they might have an ad that says, “XYZ Homes, building quality homes that fit your lifestyle.”
“While it might produce more click-throughs, they may not be the buyers the builder is looking for,” Lyon explains. “Be very specific and incorporate the search term.” So, XYZ Homes’ ad would look like: “New homes in Dallas, brand-new Energy Star homes starting in the low 100s.” “This tells the consumer exactly what they will find,” Lyon says.
Once a prospect clicks on an ad, most companies send them to the home page of their Web site. To the extent that it’s feasible, it’s better to have landing pages that relate to the ad. That way, the customer gets a result that matches what he was searching for.
TRACK RESULTS
The final element of PPC is tracking to make sure your keywords are generating the right kinds of traffic. That’s the beauty of search engine marketing; the amount of detailed information it generates is enormous.
Jeffrey Nichols, manager of search engine optimization for Atlanta-based McRae, an interactive advertising firm that works with builders, cites the case of Bowen Family Homes. Bowen has been using PPC marketing for nearly five years. In 2008, it accounted for more than 10 percent of the builder’s Web site traffic. Eighty percent of the traffic arriving via PPC were first-time visitors to the site who spent more than 3 1/2 minutes on the site and viewed an average of eight pages. They also were 50 percent more likely to convert from traffic to a lead when compared to all other traffic sources.
“Measurable results is one of the things that got me really excited about PPC,” Nichols says. “You can see exactly what happens when people hit your Web site.”