Home Builder PPC Agency

What is PPC Management for Home Builders?

The act of creating and optimizing PPC advertising campaigns for home builders is known as home builder PPC management. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

A paid ads company for home builders often begins by getting to know you and your needs before providing premium PPC ads management. You can use this information to determine the next steps, since paid advertising for a nearby home builder differs from paid advertising for an ecommerce-focused home builder.

Local home builders, for example, are often only looking for contact form submissions or calls. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that improves traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, we recommend you start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

Alternatively, ecommerce-focused home builders are most often interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that builds traffic to an optimized product page or category page. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense to include for some online businesses. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

The next step in home builder PPC ads management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some home builders, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

Your home builder should use a variety of advertising tactics and marketing tools to be successful with paid ads. Pay-per-click campaigns for home builders should include strategies like:

• Promote your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc.) via search engines, social channels, and third parties.
• Increase conversions for your home builder through qualified leads or online sales.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.

Tips for Managing PPC for Home Builders

We are a team of paid ads experts with extensive knowledge in the latest paid ads trends for home builders and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

Keyword research for home builders is mostly used for Google Ads and Bing Ads search network campaigns. After all, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for that your home builder is targeting.

For example, a person searching for a home builder nearby might search "local home builder" on a search engine. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

However, what if that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the home builder needed to increase their advertising reach? The solution would require keyword research.

Typically, the paid advertising manager will discuss with the home builder about what types of products / services to target more often. A broader keyword targeting strategy than exact matches might also be necessary.

For instance, the PPC manager might discover high search volume for "nearby home builders" or even "home builder services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. The second phrase is targeting a service, which might result in a more lucrative conversion.

Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. You can use negative keywords to prevent your PPC advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more homeowners.

For example, an individual searching for "free services from home builders" or "when to advertise to home builders" is unlikely to convert. However, they might see your paid ads if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

When you hear audience research talked about for home builder paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

In years past, home builder-focused PPC advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. After all, one of the most appealing features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which home builders lined up to exploit.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

Apple's iOS 14.5 update included a pop-up message that lets users opt out of personalized ad tracking. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad firms for home builders. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

While there will still be plenty of home builder paid advertising companies relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting.

It's not to say audience research and targeting are going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within home builder ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your home builder paid ads campaigns.

Our first step when managing paid advertising campaigns for home builders involves reviewing the landing pages for best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Do you have a headline that emphasizes benefits?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• How fast does the page load?
• Is social proof present?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! You should never consider your landing page complete. For continuous improvement, run A/B testing every few months.

4.) Conversion Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their website advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. These are some of the funnels we made:

• To increase awareness and capture email addresses, we used squeeze pages.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your home builder isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) CRO Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your site you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid ads, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most home builders, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising agency to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid ads.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for home builders, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out attractive ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Home Builder PPC Management

Our paid ads management service fees are determined by the amount of time you wish us to spend on your campaigns every month. Our PPC management packages start at the price listed below, however, we are open to discussing an increased budget if your ad spend or service requirements are higher.

Types of Paid Ads for Home Builders

There are numerous ways to run PPC advertising for your home builder. Let's discuss some of the most common paid advertising being run for home builders.

1.) Local Ads

If you have a home builder, you can run local ads on almost any advertising platform. One platform may be more effective for your nearby home builder than another. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Let's talk about a few local advertising choices.

There are going to be two options from Google.

The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals. Even local area stores use this campaign type.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in the area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. Local Facebook Ads are often used by home builders of all types.

2.) Social Media Ads

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social ad.

The trick to social ads is keeping the ad creatives fresh. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative changes for campaigns with higher spending.

One of the best things about social media ads is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. When running search advertising, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively looking for what your home builder offers.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Marketing

You should invest in search advertising if you know people are looking online for your products or services.

In some circles, this is referred to as home builder Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

If you've been running search engine ads on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.

Google Ads and Bing Ads commonly offer these campaign types.

With display ads, all you need are a few different sizes of ad creatives. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your home builder website, landing page, or sales funnel.

Retargeting ads are almost always recommended to help bring people back to your website after they have weighed their options.

You can run retargeting ads on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your home builder.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

Social networking websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram allow you to advertise with video.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. Video ads are frequently used to showcase product launches, custom services, and personal introductions.

You should consider incorporating video ads into your paid ads campaigns if you have the budget to do so.