Effective Google Ads Management for Rental Property Management Companies

You own a property management company (or handle the marketing for one) and you want to get better results from your online marketing.

 

If that’s the case, you’re in the right place.

 

In this article, we’re going to discuss some of the most effective strategies and variables to be aware of when it comes to marketing for your property management company.

 

Specifically, we’ll be focusing specifically on the role Google Ads plays for your property management company.

 

Before ever starting a Google Ads strategy, a property management company should really figure out its lifetime value of a customer (LTV). Figuring out this number will help determine the return on investment (ROI) of a marketing campaign.

 

To get your LTV of a customer, use this formula:

 

Find the monthly revenue per unit (don’t forget to include all annual fee income: lease, inspection, renewal, application, etc.). This is so heavily dependent on the market you operate in, but let’s just assume you come up with $3,000. Divide by 12. So we get $250.

 

Get the average months managed. We’ve seen numbers such as 18 to 42 months. Let’s assume a 24 month average for the sake of this example.

 

Most customers have multiple units under management with you. Let’s get the number of units managed by customer and work it into this equation. We’ll assume the average customer has 10 units with.

 

And we get…

 

$250 * 24 * 10 = $60,000

 

Based on this example, the LTV of a customer is $60,000!

 

Obviously this $60k isn’t pure profit and there is actual cost that you incur, but at least now you have a clearer idea of what kind of revenue the average customer brings in. Knowing this number, you will now be able to better assist your marketing company.

 

Google Ads for Property Management Company

As a marketing company that specializes in marketing for property management companies, I can tell you first hand the effectiveness of a well-built and well-managed Google Ads campaign for your property management company.

 

I’ve put together some tips for marketing your property management company based on my experience, industry trends and best practices. The strategies and thought-process outlined below are the same strategies and thought-process we use to get more results for our existing property management company clients.

 

How well your Google Ads campaigns perform for your property management company boil down to how well you can execute the principles I outline below.

 

Let’s quickly look at a real life Google Ads scenario.

 

I’m going to make some assumptions. Some may be true, some are just estimates. 

 

You own a property management company.

 

Keywords in your market average at $3 per click. Let’s assume your average LTV of a customer is $60,000 (based on the example above).

 

1 in every 8 clicks converts into a lead. That’s means each lead costs you $24. Let’s assume 1 in 4 leads signs on as a client with your property management company. That’s a $96 cost per acquisition (CPA).

 

In other words, it literally cost you $96 to bring on a client that you may book $60,000 in revenue from.

 

This is just one part of the equation, because the happier you make your client (all things equal), the more units he/she will invest in and in turn, you’ll manage.

Cool, right?

 

 

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Let’s take a look at some important principles related to your advertising with Google Ads.

 

Conversion Tracking

This is something that you must properly configure before ever spending money with Google Ads.

 

I have audited countless rental property management Google Ads accounts who have dropped the ball with proper conversion tracking and attribution.

 

Imagine blindly spending your hard-earned advertising dollars. Never knowing what is actually working or not working.

 

Disclaimer: This article assumes you have some basic knowledge of Google Ads. With that being said, I try not to use too many technical terms, but if you do have a question on any part of this, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

 

Conversion tracking is something that must be setup for all lead types that your website is setup for – whether it be phone calls, form fills, appointments schedule, etc.

 

Account Structure

Account structure is another very important principle when it comes to advertising your rental property management company on Google Ads.

 

Some important factors to consider when building out your campaigns include:

 

• Specific budget requirements
  • You cannot allocate budget to an ad group, because budgets are set and managed at the campaign level. So to effectively set a budget for a specific offering or set of keywords, it’s important that you group those into their own campaign and set the specified budget within that campaign. You can also group a handful of campaigns together and create a shared budget within the shared library.
• Location targeting requirements
  • Location targeting happens at the campaign level. It’s important to be mindful of this when structuring your account build.

Some important questions to keep in mind in accordance with a sound account build are:

• Is the account currently structured in a neat and orderly fashion?
• Is the current account structure limiting any high-performing campaigns/ad groups/keywords from getting traffic?
• Are any keywords cannibalizing?
• Does the structure make sense for the overall account goals?

Remember, this article assumes that you do have some knowledge of Google Ads and how it works. If any of this has confused you so far, let’s hop on the phone and I’ll try to explain better!

 

Budgets and Bidding

We sort of touched on budgets and bidding above, just slightly, but there is certainly more to them. I’ll explain a bit more below. Some key questions and items to consider when thinking about budgets and bidding are:

• Are budgets shared and limiting performance in any campaigns? One of the quickest and most effective solutions to handle this would be to move the campaign in question to an individual budget (and out of the shared group).
• Are smart bidding strategies being utilized? Smart bidding strategies are automated bid strategies that optimize for conversions or conversion value. Smart bidding uses Google machine learning to optimize your bids to maximize conversions and conversion value across your campaign or bidding portfolio. Google has a wide range of signals that tailor bids to someone’s unique context — we (the advertiser) cannot always see these signals! Some include: device used, location searched from, time of day, remarketing list, browser use (search history) and much more. If you’re not using Target CPA, Target ROAS, Max Conversions or Enhanced CPC then you are missing out on the magic of smart bidding.
• Have you implemented bid adjustments? You can bid up or bid down on specific locations, devices, times of day, days of the week, demographics, audiences and other factors. These settings often go forgotten, don’t be one of those people who forgets to use these. If you have the data to back-up your thought process to increase or decrease bids for any of those factors, then please do so!

Keyword Targeting

Keyword choice is an important aspect of building a well-performing Google Ads account.

 

Many rental property management company Google Ads accounts that we audit are made up of only a few keywords that are driving conversions. Most of the keywords they’re targeting are doing nothing but eating up their precious advertising budget.

 

Imagine running low-performing keywords for an extended period of time. Keywords that have had thousands of dollars in spend, yet haven’t driven even one lead. We’ve seen it!

 

Some keyword specific questions or items I look at when auditing a Google Ads account:

• Are all match types being utilized?
• Sort for broad match only and analyze metrics. Is the negative keyword list robust enough to support broad match keywords with no modifier?
• In general, how good does the negative keyword list look to be?
• Are new keywords (and negative keywords) being added from the search terms report?
• Are geo-appended keywords being used?
• Are the keywords relevant (or too general)?

It’s important that you focus on the structure of your account and group similarly themed keywords within the same ad groups. Doing this will help you achieve a lower cost per click (all things equal) by increasing your quality score.

 

Location Targeting

Location targeting isn’t too complex, but shouldn’t be ignored as it still makes up a hugely important part of your advertising strategy on Google Ads.

 

If you don’t service a specific town/city/zip/county, etc. then make sure you are excluding that town/city/zip/county, etc.

 

Remember, location targeting is set at the campaign level!

 

Audience Targeting

It’s important to utilize audience targeting within Google Ads. At the very least you should build a remarketing list and target that audience in its own set of campaigns (search, display and even video).

 

From Google’s website: Remarketing is a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. It allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites, thus helping you increase your brand awareness or remind those audiences to make a purchase.

 

As a local business advertiser you can benefit greatly from remarketing lists. You can use them to increase call volume, drive appointment scheduling activity, boost submissions or promote awareness of your company.

 

Traffic from a remarketing campaign is “warm” traffic, meaning they have landed on your site, but haven’t converted yet. They may have no interest in converting and in that case they will automatically be removed from your remarketing list after X days that you specified when setting up the list.

 

Commitment

Managing your rental property management company Google Ads account is a serious commitment.

 

Not only is it a financial commitment, but it is also a huge time commitment.

 

If you want to run an effective Google Ads campaign for your rental property management company, then you have to spend the right amount of time in the account. You must be committed to the success of the advertising channel. Give it the time it deserves, because if you can master it, your business will thrive.

 

Ready to get more customers from Google Ads, but not interested in managing it on your own? No problem. Contact us here and let’s figure out what your next steps are.