Real estate, like all other markets, is turning digital — meaning if you don’t have a digital strategy in place, you’re falling behind. Today, 50% of all buyers begin their search for a property on the internet. In recent years, the marketing world has changed drastically, and Google Ads is one platform that has been at the forefront of this development.
Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is a pay-per-click (PPC) platform that allows business owners and marketers to advertise on the internet via Google’s partner networks. There’s no doubting that advertising on a platform with over 259 million unique visitors, 4.8 billion daily interactions, and over 5 billion search queries a day may help you achieve your objectives.
Google has been gradually moving away from manual ads and toward more automated ad generation, optimization, and bidding. Although Google’s Dynamic Search and Dynamic Display advertisements already include automation, Performance Max takes it a step further. Performance Max is a new campaign option from Google that completely automates ad production and optimization across all of your company’s campaigns using machine learning.
In terms of real estate advertising, this can be useful when you have lots of different touchpoints across the web and want to maximize the performance of your campaigns.
Let’s take a look at how the Performance max campaign can boost your real estate advertising in more detail.
What Are Performance Max Campaigns?
Performance Max is a new goal-based campaign type that allows performance marketers to use a single campaign to access all of their Google Ads inventory. It’s meant to work in collaboration with your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you identify more customers who convert across all of Google’s channels, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.
By improving performance in real-time and across channels with Smart Bidding, Performance Max helps you drive performance based on your stated conversion goals, delivering more conversions and value. Performance Max combines Google’s automation technologies across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more, all fueled by your specific advertising objective (for example, if you’re looking to generate more registrations) and the creative assets, audience signals, and optional data feeds you provide.
Benefits of Performance Max Campaigns For Real Estate Marketing
1. Improve your goal-achieving performance
The goal-oriented nature of campaigns is a major advantage of Performance Max. Google’s campaign optimizations are focused on achieving the objective you set at the start of the campaign through automated bidding and targeting. Performance Max campaigns are a great way to drive conversion if you have a very specific goal in mind — such as acquiring registrations.
2. Gain more data insights
Performance Max campaigns, a new addition to GA4’s Insights page, will help you better understand how Google’s algorithm is managing your campaign. It also allows you to discover which audience groups and image combinations are most effective in reaching users, allowing you to fine-tune current and future campaigns. Furthermore, GA4’s Insights tool keeps you up to date on search trends and demand estimates, preventing your ad campaign from becoming stale.
3. Reach new audiences through Google’s channels and networks
Performance max uses Google’s search engine in real-time paired with your input in ‘Audience Signals’ where you can indicate high-converting audiences as a starting point. This allows Google to determine a customer’s intent, preference, and other behavioral aspects across all their channels, helping unlock new audience segments and capabilities. You can make sure that the correct people see your advertising at the right time when they’re shopping for items or services like yours.
4. Streamline campaign management and make ad optimization simple
By automatically optimizing your budget and bids across all of Google’s ad platforms, Performance Max advertisements can enhance your online leads and conversions. As a result, you’ll be able to increase your campaign goals at a far faster rate than with a standard search campaign.
Does this mean you should ditch your siloed campaigns?
Absolutely not!
Performance Max campaigns were designed to work in tandem with other campaigns like Search, Discovery, and Display to help you identify the highest-converting combinations of variables to then push to these campaigns. Even if you have a low budget, this test is meant to be relatively low-risk. Monitor the results as you go and you can scale over time.
How to launch a Performance Max Campaign
Step 1: Choose your objective
Click the ‘new campaign’ button on the backend of your Google Ads account. Then, you’ll be asked to choose an objective. Select either Sales, Leads, Website traffic, Local store visits and promotions, or Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance. You can then choose an existing conversion goal or create one.
Step 2: Set your budget & bidding
Choose how much you want to spend each day, then whether you want Google to optimize for conversions or a set conversion value.
Step 3: Add location, language, and URL expansion settings
Choose countries, cities, or regions to target as well as languages. NOTE: just like any real estate ads on Google and Facebook, Performance Max ads have limited targeting options due to restrictions pertaining to reducing discrimination. You won’t be able to target by postal code.
Performance Max has a special setting called ‘URL Expansion’ which automatically selects the pages on your website most likely to convert. You can exclude certain pages, or if you prefer, direct traffic only to pages which you specify.
Here is also where you can set the ad schedule, start and end dates, and provide campaign URL options.
Step 4: Add assets
Here comes the fun part for all the creatives out there. Add up to 15 images with a mix of landscape, square, and portrait orientations. Add your logos, and videos if you have them. Write up to five 30-character headlines and five 90-character long headlines. One 60-character description and up to four 90-character descriptions. You can choose your call to action to be automated or select one from the picklist. Add your business name and display URL. Your possible combinations will appear in the preview screen on the right, with examples of how they might look on each platform.
Here is also where you can determine audience signals, a new feature of Performance Max campaigns. Audience signals are a starting point for Google to determine similar audiences that convert based on initial parameters you set. You can select a custom audience (now called custom segment), your own first-party data, interests, or demographics. NOTE: for any real estate campaigns, Google limits targeting options to eliminate discriminatory targeting practices — your ads won’t be approved if you create audience signals for age, gender, parental or marital status.
Step 5: Add extensions
Extensions can help your ad stand out by listing benefits, amenities, location, lead forms, or even links to other pages on your site. We’d strongly recommend adding these as they are a great way to add more information to your ad for no extra charge. Don’t just add them for the sake of it though, ensure they align with your goals — for example, if your goal is brand awareness, you probably don’t need a lead form extension.
Step 6: Publish!
Review all of your configurations to ensure you are happy with them, and go ahead and push it live! Remember, since we are living in a digital world, you can always adjust and optimize as you go, so don’t stress too much about getting it absolutely perfect. It’s often difficult to know until you test it out!
Is Performance Max right for you?
Performance Max campaigns are currently in beta, with Google gradually allowing more advertisers to participate. When determining whether or not to use Performance Max campaigns for your real estate marketing, keep in mind that this campaign type works best when you have clear goals in mind, alongside your regular Search, Display, and Discovery campaigns. Pmax could be suitable for you if you want to reach individuals across a variety of Google channels with a single campaign and gain additional reach for keyword-based search efforts.
One more thing…
If you’re looking to get the absolute best ROI possible for your real estate advertising dollars in English as well as Chinese, it’s worth looking into working with a strategic partner like Periphery Digital who is very familiar with the landscape. We strategize, execute, and report on end-to-end real estate project marketing initiatives for developers, project marketing companies, and brokerages. If you aren’t ready just yet, no worries, you can book a free real estate marketing consult to boost your marketing efforts with zero commitment.
