Back in March of 2018, Google announced the mainstream roll-out of mobile-first indexing. This meant that the mobile/responsive version of your website would take priority when Google is determining how to evaluate it for organic rankings.

Sites that followed Google’s best practices for mobile were the first to be migrated to this form of indexing. Those sites saw an added benefit in search results, and enjoyed a clear advantage compared to sites that didn’t have a good mobile experience.

With Google’s most recent announcement, be prepared for mobile-first indexing to become the standard moving forward. As of July 1, mobile-first indexing will be enabled for all new websites.

What does this mean? If you plan on launching a new website after July 1, make sure you are following Google’s best practices for mobile experience. Having a responsive site is a start, but not alone good enough to achieve page-one rankings.

Here are somethings that new websites should consider:

How do you do this? There are a couple of small tweaks you can make to ad campaigns:

• If you’re redesigning a current site, pay close attention to your current site’s mobile performance. Look for pages with high bounce rates and exits. Identify areas for improvement, and make the appropriate changes
• For your new site, responsive is considered best practice, as opposed to mobile-specific URLs and redirects
• Follow these 12 Best Practices for the Mobile-First Era
• Once your site is launched, pay close attention to its mobile performance. It also helps to heat map the mobile version of your site to see how users are interacting with it

Current websites will be treated by Google the way they have been since last year: continuous evaluation of your mobile experience until ultimately being included in mobile-first indexing.

How’s your site’s mobile performance? Are you launching a new site, and concerned about mobile-first indexing? Reach out to us today, and let us help you through some of the questions you may have.

Traditionally, the summer season can be one of the slowest times for builders & developers. Families are on vacation, kids are out of school, and people are generally more distracted than they are throughout other times of the year. This is when builders & developers tend to scale back their marketing campaigns. While this is a perfectly reasonable strategy, a common mistake is scaling back your marketing campaigns without also adjusting the strategy to prepare for the summer months.

If you’re advertising on Facebook, the summer months can offer long days and idle time, which provides developers the perfect opportunity to get in front of their prospects. The challenge is breaking through all the distractions summer has to offer and making meaningful connections through your advertising campaigns.

Challenge accepted. Here are some ways you can make the most of your summer Facebook ad campaigns.

1. Evaluate Current & Past Facebook Campaigns

If you’ve been running Facebook ad campaigns for a few months, then you already have a delicious buffet of data to dive head-first into. Before you begin to build your marketing strategy for the summer, it is important that you evaluate your campaigns to see what worked and what didn’t.

When evaluating your past Facebook campaigns, be sure to ask critical questions that will help you form your summer marketing program:

  • What were my original campaign objectives?
  • What metrics was I tracking, and how did they perform over time?
  • Did the changes I make to those campaigns positively effect campaign results?
  • Is my ad creative still effective? Does it need to be changed?
  • How does a shift in seasonality change the way I approach my advertising?

Answering questions like these should give your campaign a much better opportunity to drive the traffic and leads, allowing you to get the best possible return for your advertising dollars.

2. Personalize Your Messaging

Imagine how difficult it would be to have a private conversation with a friend in the front row of a Metallica concert. Then imagine that same friend has the attention span of a goldfish. That’s what online advertising is like.

It’s more difficult than ever to reach your target customer in a meaningful way. Your prospective buyer is being bombarded with digital ads every time they open their browser. On Facebook, you’re competing against other ads from other companies, cute pictures of babies, endless articles, and memes that have been shared over a million times.

One way to break through the noise is to be hyper-specific and personal in your advertising. By now, you should have a pretty good idea of what speaks to your target buyer. Use that knowledge to proactively address what matters to them in your ad creative. If you already have some buyers in your community, find out what made them choose you, and use that to find more buyers like them.

Personalization doesn’t end with the individual. The story of your community is naturally going to have something to do with where you’re located. Are you in a tranquil locale surrounded by nature? Make that a part of your advertising story. Just blocks away from the newest downtown scene? Appeal to a buyer who is looking for that lifestyle. All of these things speak to people beyond just the houses your sell and the options they have for kitchen countertops.

3. Reengage Your Current Leads

One of the biggest mistakes developers make with their advertising is only focusing on collecting brand new leads and the leads that become appointments. However, the others leads you’ve already collected, the ones who exist in between those two worlds, are invaluable to make the most out of your overall campaign strategy.

Facebook allows you to upload an email list you’ve legally obtained, and as long as those individuals use that same email address for their Facebook accounts, you can target those individuals with remarketing ads. Remarketing ads can be a powerful tool with a number of different applications:

  • Remind your prospects of upcoming events and progress made within your developing community
  • Feature new home buyers who were once prospects, just like themselves
  • Reinforce your community benefits and information
  • Stay top-of-mind during a summer that is bound to be full of distractions

If you have good tracking in place (more on that later), you’ll realize the benefits of remarketing ads. They can go a long way to generating the on-site traffic and sales you’re looking for.

Make This Summer Season Your Best One

Keeping your current leads engaged, combined with a well-thought out strategy to acquire new ones, will go a long way to maximizing your ad spend and getting the most out of the summer season.

Spring has sprung, which means a lot for builders and developers. Better weather means new construction is accelerated, landscaping becomes a priority, and most importantly, your prospects are planning their visits to your community.

While all of those changes are happening onsite, let’s not forget the changes that should be made online. Your campaigns also need some tweaks to capture the increased demand and attention.

Here are three ways you can tweak your ad campaigns to be ready this spring.

Considering Changing Your Campaign Focus From Online Leads to Offline Visits

This is especially important if you are opening a brand-new sales center. Spring weather means your prospects are poised to break out of their winter hibernation and visit the communities they are most interested in.

As marketers, we love online conversions because they are more easily measured and attributed to individual ads and keywords. However, it is important to capture the interest of potential buyers who are ready to see what your development as to offer. This means that shifting your digital ad campaign focus away from online lead generation and towards offline engagement will be more impactful now that the weather has improved.

How do you do this? There are a couple of small tweaks you can make to ad campaigns:

• Change ad copy to encourage visits and tours instead of sign-ups
• Incorporate more on-site photography and information like an address and directions
• Work with the sales team to measure the on-site impact of your online campaigns
• Use geofencing ads that promote the proximity the community is to local amenities your prospective buyers use everyday

Use Images and Copy That Reflect The Times

Seasonal changes can be an emotionally impactful time for people. Think about when you wake up on a cold, dark winter morning. You hardly want to get out of bed! Then the first hint of truly warm weather comes, and you feel noticeably better than you did just a few weeks ago.

This effect on our moods should also translate to your ads. The ads should feature more sunshine, brighter colors, and promote all of the outdoor activities your audience loves to do. Take some new onsite photography to capture the blossoming flowers and the life coming back to the trees. Show people enjoying their time outdoors, and your prospects will connect it to the emotional high they’re experiencing with spring’s arrival.

Perform Some Spring Cleaning On Your Ads

While most marketers will tweak their ads, bids, and targeting throughout the month, it is a good idea to make some bigger adjustments every couple of months. This spring-cleaning approach to your ad accounts can go a long way to helping foster new ideas, set new performance standards, and set new goals for the upcoming season.

Some of the things you can do include:

• Work with your sales team to find out what feedback people are giving them at the community. Their interests & talking points can be used in ad copy to attract more prospects like themselves
• Review important demographic information about your prospects and adjust your targeting accordingly
• Test some new features your ad platforms have released
• Review market trends and adjust your campaigns wherever you see fit
• Shift budgets around if you notice one channel performing better than others

Spring is one of the most valuable times of year for builders and developers. Are your ad campaigns ready for the challenge? Reach out to us today, and let us help you through some of the questions you may have.

Remember when you used to search for “homes in Arlington” and just got a list of results from Zillow, Trulia, and other websites selling homes in Arlington? Weren’t those the good old days?

When I run that search now, this is what I get:

 

Google is serving up an answer for pretty much any possible intent I may have had behind my search query. Maybe I’m looking for the latest news on homes in the area. Maybe I’m looking for homes in relation to where I currently live. Maybe I’m looking for a listing site that I can browse through.

Let me tell you what happens next…

Google will measure what link I click on. They’ll measure how many clicks I made, how long I spent on certain sites before coming back to these search results, and how many pages deep I go before moving on to something else. Google will take that information and store it in their massive user data storage closet.

The next time I search for “homes in Arlington” (say, in a week), I will get different results. Using the information Google has from the last time I searched for that, and information from millions of other people who use Google every day, Google will make adjustments according to where they think I am in my buying journey.

It’s this concept of “context & intent” that is killing exact-match keyword targeting. Google announced that it is moving away from exact-match keyword targeting, and focusing more on “close variant” keywords, with the intent that may be behind the user’s search query. This is an example of the ever-evolving way that Google is trying to deliver the best results to the user, in as few clicks as possible.

What does this mean? From an advertising perspective, it means that relying on exact-match keywords in your Google Ads Search campaign is going to become much more complicated. Traditionally, exact-match terms would prevent your ads from showing for search queries that you did not believe were relevant to your product. Now, Google may still show your ad if it believes it meets the intent behind the user’s search. Negative keywords used to be a way mitigate some of the risk of generating low-quality impressions, but this shift by Google will make even those less effective.

What can we do? Negative keywords are still important to have, and will filter out some of the low-quality impressions. Aside from that, there isn’t much you can do right now. Trust the machine-learning will deliver your ads when they are most relevant to the user, and I anticipate conversions and traffic will normalize over time.

Still confused? Reach out to us today, and let us help you through some of the questions you may have.

As you many have heard by now, Facebook has agreed to overhaul its advertising platform in order to settle disputes over alleged discriminatory targeting practices. This settlement will fundamentally change the targeting options available to advertisers in lending, job opportunities, and most importantly for our clients, housing.

This is a story the Washington Post, and many other outlets have already written about. They provide great detail on the announcement. Here we’ll focus on the potential impact.

What We Know

Facebook has not made an official statement yet, but we do know a few things. By the end of the year, Facebook will eliminate the ability to target by detailed demographic information like age, gender, and zip code. They will likely eliminate other targeting options, but we do not know the full depth of these changes just yet. Facebook is also building a tool so users can search for and view all current housing ads in the US targeted to different places across the country, regardless of whether the ads are shown to them.

How This Impacts You

This currently has no impact on your Facebook campaigns. Facebook has an end-of-year deadline to make these changes and will likely announce more specific changes in the next coming weeks. However, this will have a long-term impact on the quality and effectiveness of Facebook ad campaigns. If we have less options to target your prospects on Facebook, it may be more difficult to reach your ideal buyer on that platform.

What We’re Doing About This

There are still many ways we can effectively reach your target buyer through paid advertising:

– We can still reach your target audience on Facebook using broader behavioral targeting, remarketing, audience lists, and other targeting strategies.

– We have a number of other channels to advertise on, including Google Search & Display, Bing, Zillow, and other ad networks, all of which are currently generating high-quality traffic and leads for our clients.

What’s Next

As more information is made available, we will have more specific strategies to best use paid advertising to your advantage. We already have the tools and information to help mitigate any potential impact from this.

When Google changed its Ads interface, there was one noticeable difference anyone familiar with Google Ads immediately realized: they had eliminated “Average Position” as a default column view. Us advertisers didn’t panic though, because we were able to still add the column by editing the view. Problem solved.

…Or so we thought.

Soon after, Google announced it was eliminating Average Position, while simultaneously crushing all of the spirits of people who leaned on this metric as a way of measuring keyword performance.

What Is Average Position?

For those unfamiliar with the metric, average position is pretty self-explanatory. Keyword average position measured where your ad keyword was displayed on search engine results pages (at least in the ad section). For example, if your average position score was 2.3, it means your ads for that keyword were most often seen as the 2nd or 3rd ad on that page.

This metric was fairly useful for advertisers, because it was a measure of how they should be handling their keyword bids. If you had a keyword that was generating conversions at a low cost per lead, but the average position was only 3.1, then you would increase your keyword bid in order to gain more visibility for this well-performing keyword. If your keyword was generating a lot of leads but at a high cost per lead, then you may reduce the bid and sacrifice some average position to obtain better value.

If It Was Valuable, Why Is It Going Away?

As Google continues to make updates to how and when ads are displayed, average position has become a poor way of measuring the effectiveness of your ad. It has become more important to know where your ad is shown, as opposed to what rank you are in a list. In conjunction with more advanced metrics like ad rank and search impression share, average position seems like a relic of advertising past.

Do people often buy new homes online?

Your gut response to that question is mostly likely “no”. When you think of buying online, you think of shopping for clothes on Macys.com. You might think of shopping for, well, anything on Amazon. Purchasing flowers for Mother’s Day. Ordering a book your kid needs for school. These are the very simple, easy things we have grown accustomed to shopping for and buying online.

Then, there are things in life you are just unlikely to buy online without actually experiencing it in some physical way. Buying a home fits into that category. You may start your research online. You may talk to a real estate agent first. You may drive through nearby neighborhoods. However, there usually comes a point where you’ve narrowed your search, and you’re ready to visit those homes & communities for that in-person experience.

As David Brooks thoughtfully opines in a New York Times article, the decision on which home to buy is “more emotional than coldly rational”. It’s a lot like online dating. You can flip through a number of different options, but ultimately, you need that emotional spark that an in-person meeting can ignite. Somethings simply cannot be easily replicated through online research alone.

How do real estate marketing agencies help builders communicate all of the emotion, amenities, and benefits of their new community to prospective home buyers when they are doing online research? How do they encourage prospects to come visit for that in-person experience?

There is nothing about home buying that is strictly digital, yet digital marketing for many agencies is largely confined to digital processes. For L&S, the difference between a GOOD online marketing campaign and a GREAT one is the amount of offline work we do before the campaign generates its first click. Our digital process begins with some very foundational strategies. To better understand what story you’re trying to tell, and see your community through the eyes of your first (of many) home buyers.

We Ask Extensive Questions

“No one has ever asked me that before.” – this is a response we often get from our clients.

What is your story? What animates you?

For us, here is where the work begins. Far too often, other agencies believe in fitting your business goals into a cookie-cutter model for digital advertising. That’s never been good enough for our clients. We believe delivering superior results means creating a custom-made digital strategy formed from the answers to questions like “what are the top 3 things you do best, that are important to your buyer”. Our initial conversations with you inform a direction that will ultimately become the foundation for your online marketing campaign. Each community is unique, so each campaign should be unique.

What makes your property exclusive, and better, then your competition?

The feedback we get from you effects every piece of the ad campaign, including the copy we write, the images we use, and the way we target your potential customers.

According to data from Integral Ad Science, the majority of digital display ads are only viewable for one second. Click-through rates for search ads are greatly affected by your ad copy. We take the time to learn about every detail of your homes, community, and your target audience, so we can effectively communicate your important differentiators.

Who is your target home buyer?

First-time home buyers in their early 30’s use the web differently than empty-nesters in their late 50’s looking to downsize. Understanding who your target home buyer is and what they’re looking for allows us to build campaigns that will both reach AND resonate with them.

Every Place Has A Love Story to Tell

One of the biggest challenges in real estate digital marketing is to convey the emotion, impression, and experience that often comes with seeing your new home for the first time. For us, conveying what it’s like to walk the streets of your new community starts with actually walking the streets of the community. The breathtaking view of the nearby river cannot be put into words unless it takes our breath away. The true essence of the bustling urban streets outside a home need to be experienced to be appreciated, and then communicated to others.

Every piece of land has a story. Though the inspiration for the stories we tell for our clients comes from many different places, they simply would not be as effective without experiencing the community the way your prospective buyers will.

Once buyers start moving in, we’ve made a point to set up coffee and other events with them and gather as much feedback as possible. What were they looking for in their new home? Where did they go to find your community? What types of impressions did they get before and then after they visited the models for the first time? Talking to the residents provides a first-hand account of what made them fall in love with your community. Very often we get brand-new insights that can then be used to attract others to your project.

Our Own Meticulous, Hyper-Local Approach to Research

A large portion of marketing is knowing and changing opinions. The information we glean from focus groups and other research methods help us do just that.

A client of ours was redeveloping a parcel behind some big-box retail and wanted input as to the street feelings and architecture. We solicited feedback from four local demographic groups: realtors, military and their significant others, residents, and renters of a nearby community. The idea was to get a strong sampling of the local community, and the people who would be most interested in the coming development. The sessions were filmed, and notes were taken. The insights were compiled into a report, that the client later used to re-examine and refine the development’s plans and architecture.

This part of storytelling unlocks things numbers alone simply cannot. Sure, we estimate keyword search volumes and look at the target audience size within a given location and demographic, but that data alone isn’t enough to determine what story to tell. Taking the time out to listen during the planning phases of your community and marketing campaign narrows the focus. It lowers the number of variables you need to test to get to the most effective digital campaign possible. The better your planning, the quicker you’ll reach your goals.

What’s Your Story? We’re Ready to Tell It

From business models to decorated models, our knowledge and the offline steps we take enable us to create and optimize great online marketing campaigns that tell your story and accomplish your goals at the same time. Tell us your story, and let us do the meticulous planning and execution it takes to deliver buyers from their online research to that in-person experience, and ultimately, a new home purchase.

If you aren’t advertising on Facebook yet, you’re missing out.

Facebook has 1.13 billion daily active users. On average, active users spend 50 minutes on Facebook per day.

This is where your home buyers are, and their Facebook profiles & behaviors offer many ways to find them. To start, Facebook can identify potential prospects by self-reported demographic information like age, marital status, and location. To further define potential prospects, Facebook can also identify what they are interested in with data about their browsing behavior.

Facebook knows your prospects have been searching for a home, and it gives you the tools to keep your community or development front and center while they are on their search.

How To Get The Most For Your Budget

  1. Set Some Goals

Facebook offers several different advertising options according to your goals:

  • Are you looking to generate some buzz for your new community?
    • A Brand Awareness campaign can help you reach people who are likely to be interested in your project.
  • Are you looking to build your lead list before you even launch a landing page or website?
    • A Lead Generation campaign can capture names and email addresses, without ever leaving the Facebook app.
  • Want more sign-ups from a form on your website or landing page?
    • A campaign driven by Conversions will focus on finding people not only interested in your business, but also likely to fill out your form.

Having clear objectives and understanding your goals will ensure that you spend your money on a campaign that’s most beneficial to you.

  1. Identify Your Target Audience(s)

Think of your advertising campaign as a short pitch you’re giving to your prospects. Before you even say a single word, isn’t it important to know who you’re speaking to?

Targeting one or more customer personas will dramatically increase the likelihood that your message will be heard and understood by a home buyer. If you understand who your ideal customers are, you can craft messaging that will resonate with them.

Here are some things to consider when building your audience:

  • Age
  • Parental status
  • Household income
  • Location
  • Interests
  • Employment

Facebook has an infinite amount of combinations when it comes to demographics and interests targeting. Heading into a campaign with a game plan gives you the most bang for your buck.

  1. Set Up All Tracking Available

How else are you going to know what’s working and what’s not?

Facebook’s tracking pixel is more important than you may think. Sure, you can (and should) set up custom tracking parameters in Google Analytics to measure what people do on your website or landing page when they get there. However, Facebook’s pixel will allow you to then optimize your ads for the actions you want (mentioned in point #1).

Facebook’s pixel generally has one segment for tracking hits to your website or page, and another component for tracking specific events (form submissions, purchases, etc.). Once these are set up, improving your campaign performance over time becomes much easier.

  1. Test, Review, & Adjust

It is highly unlikely that your campaign is going to be perfect over the first couple of weeks of launch. That’s OK! Making adjustments is the key to any campaign’s performance. In doing so, don’t solely measure the initial campaign goals. Review some secondary performance indicators, like how users are engaging with your ads, and what they are doing on your website once they get there. From your findings, test different things like messaging, audience size, and ad creative, until you find the combination that best helps you sell homes.

Interested in learning more about how Facebook can help you succeed faster? Contact us today.

For builders and developers, Google Maps is one of the most important digital tools one can use to promote their community. Google Map listings allow your prospective buyers to know exactly where your homes are so they can come visit, discover the local amenities, and get vital operating information about your community (sales center hours, phone number, etc).

Google announced it is rolling out some new features for Google Maps that make it easier for your target audience to engage with your business in meaningful ways. Being prepared for these updates and developing a plan for how to best utilize them will give you a head start on your competition.

Google Maps “Follow” Button

Google is taking some ques from how people engage with social media and integrating it into their Google My Business and Google Maps tools. Google Posts allows businesses to share content in a very similar way that you can on Facebook and other social media platforms. In the coming weeks, Google will make it easier for your audience to receive those updates by adding a “Follow” button to your map listing. Once a user follows your business, all the content you share will be easily accessible in their “For You” tab. The “For You” section is in area in their Google Maps interface that will curate personalized content and recommendations.

All of your updates about events, special pricing, tours, etc. will all be delivered directly to your audience in ways like never before.

Pre-Opened Map Listing

The way Google My Business and Google Maps are currently set-up, a business must have a physical address and be open for users to see their listing on Google Maps. Google is about to change that. Businesses will soon be able to have a Google Maps listing up for 3 months prior to their actual opening. This gives businesses an opportunity to promote themselves long before they actually open.

These pre-opened listings will have the same functionality as traditional Google Maps listings. The key advantage of this is to build a following and anticipation for your community’s development. All of the time spent list building & prospecting can be now enhanced with an actual Google Maps listing.

How Much Does This Matter?

These updates will roll out in the next few weeks, so their impact remains to be seen. However, if you are already using Google Maps, you know the value it brings by connecting your audience with your physical community. These updates will only enhance that value.

Whether you’re a seasoned Google Ads veteran or completely clueless to how it all works, it can be difficult to keep up with all of the updates Google Ads makes over time. While some updates won’t help you reach your goals, there are a few recent ones that we believe every pay per click advertiser should be using. If your goal is to reach more prospective buyers so you can sell more homes, these two Google Ads enhancements will surely help you get there.

Responsive Display Ads

Google introduced a new display ad format that allows you seemingly endless opportunities to reach your target audience. These new responsive display ads allow you to upload up to 15 marketing images and 5 logos, providing multiple ways to show off your homes. You also have the ability to write up to 5 headlines, 1 long description, and up to 5 shorts descriptions. Google will rotate different combinations of images & copy, while using machine learning to determine which combination is driving the best results for your business.

This is one of the most impactful enhancements from Google Ads that we’ve seen in a long time. These new ads allow you to save time, broaden your reach, and determine which marketing assets and copy resonate the most with your target audience. From there, you can build future display ads around that central theme.

Smart Campaigns

The process of creating a Google Ad from scratch can be a very long, meticulous one. With keyword research, structuring campaigns, creating ad groups, and writing ad copy, the time it takes from start to beginning really adds up. With the new Smart Campaigns enhancement, Google uses machine learning to help cut that time down significantly.

With Smart Campaigns, Google scans your website/landing page for assets, search themes, and user behavior, to create a campaign that automatically creates the initial targeting for you. Combined with an effective bid strategy, like cost per acquisition (CPA) bidding, you can create a campaign that targets the individuals most likely to be interested in your homes, at a target cost per lead that you set.

Admittedly, using this type of campaign can be hit or miss. The results are dependent on how much conversion history your account has and how optimized your website is for a specific theme. However, if you have a mature account that has accumulated a lot of activity over time, we’ve seen this type of campaign generate a great return for many accounts.

While these enhancements give marketers more tools to reach their goals, they are by no means a golden ticket to success. Being successful using Google Ads still requires clearly defined goals, expert optimization, and continuous care. However, each improvement made to Google Ads makes everyone’s job just a tab bit easier.

Interested in learning more about how to make Google Ads successful for you? Reach out to us today and we’ll be happy to talk about your PPC campaigns.