Property management companies can face a number of problems when they are running their own AdWords campaigns. Today, we are talking about some of those challenges.
Tenant Versus Owner Searches
One of the biggest challenges for property managers is that most of the online searches on the topic of property management are done by tenants. Tenants often search the term “property management” when they are looking for an apartment or rental property, and it gets difficult to weed out tenant searches in favor of owner searches. When 90 percent of online searches are done by tenants, it can be hard to capture that 10 percent you want to reach – owners.
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are specific search terms that you don’t want to pay for. It can be difficult to come up with a good negative keyword list; you have to know what terms you definitely want to exclude versus terms that get tenant clicks, but also are good providers of owner clicks. AdWords’ program is very specific, and you don’t want to accidentally prevent your ad from showing up for honest owner searches. Terms such as “rental management” or “looking for rental” could be successful terms for you, even if in some other areas they are dominated by tenant searches.
However, if you don’t use the right negative keywords and exclude the majority of tenant searches, you’ll waste money. You will not be able to completely prevent paying for tenant searches, but you want to spend as little money as possible on tenants, when what you want are owners.
Unfortunately, there is no simple way, apart from experience, to know what keywords are more searched by tenants or owners. One of the benefits of going with a company that specializes in your industry is that experience. If you do it on your own, it will take a number of months of trial and error to get this information and get the best return on your AdWords investment.
Knowing the Competition and the Market
It’s critical to know your market and your competition. You need to understand what your competition spends on their AdWords campaigns. If you spend $10 a day and your competition spends $100 a day, it’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight. With a smaller budget, your competition will be eating a full meal, while you’re getting the scraps. You need to decide if you’re willing to commit an adequate budget and aim to be competitive, or you might as well not even try, and give all those searches and leads to your competition.
Where Are You Targeting?
You need to know how to tell Google where to target your campaign. For example, if you are a property manager in Miami, Ohio, and you don’t specifically exclude Miami, Florida, you will waste a lot of time and money because you will be getting clicks from outside your market. It’s a waste of your money and very frustrating to attract owner clicks from the wrong state.
As another example, there could be a town or neighborhood near you where you do not wish to do business. For instance, you may not wish to service a low income town in a more affluent region. You need to know how to exclude this town from your AdWords campaign.
Tracking Your Leads
Finally, you have to track your leads. If you don’t know what terms, areas, and spend schedules are the best return on your investment, you’re wasting your time and your marketing dollars. You need to be able to identify the most successful marketing strategies and the least successful marketing strategies, so you can optimize your campaign and spend money in the right places. That’s the best way to grow your company.
If you’re running into these challenges with your own AdWords campaign, contact us at Fourandhalf and we’d be happy to help you engage in a more successful AdWords marketing plan.
