Real Estate PPC: How and Why You Must Use Negative Keywords to Boost PPC Ads Performance

In this piece, we shed light on how you can use negative keywords in your PPC advertisements to boost their performance. Stick around and learn the how and why of negative keywords blended with PPC ad campaigns.

Introduction

When we talk about paid marketing tools, PPC comes at the top. Many businesses and brands focus on using PPC campaigns interlinked with negative keywords to drive refined traffic to their websites.

So, what are negative keywords?

Negative keywords are keywords that are purposely used to avoid showing your ads to an audience that is not related to your products or services. Especially for the real estate industry, this is quite a clever marketing tactic that effectively safeguards your website from unnecessary traffic and unrelated audience.

By using negative keywords for your PPC campaign, you are opening bridges that seamlessly facilitate your target audience exclusively. While organic marketing strategies are still relevant today, you direly need PPC to make your real estate ads business show up on the top. This will help you in gaining more visibility and have a higher chance of having potential leads.

If you are confused about how to use negative keywords to boost the performance of your PPC ads, no need to ransack through tons of questions online. Stick around as we present you with a comprehensive guide below on the how and why.

How to Find Negative Keywords to Boost PPC Ads Performance

Before we dive into the usage of negative keywords for your PPC ad campaign, first let’s see how you can identify the negative keywords according to your real estate business.

You can search for negative keywords through various means. It depends upon your preferred tactic. You can use manual google searches or any search term report analysis to find the negative keywords.

The main objective here is that you want your potential customers to be able to see your PPC ad. Identifying the negative keywords will ensure that you are not wasting your time, money, whole PPC campaign, and ad on an irrelevant audience.

A salient concept to understand here is acute knowledge regarding your target audience and the relevant keywords. Before doing anything, you should know the relevant keywords and phrases by which people are searching for your real estate business.

This research will not only help you in finding the relevant keywords but will also save you time by showing you the negative keywords. This way, you are shooting two birds with one stone.

Below, we have thoroughly explained the process of identifying negative keywords by various modes:

• Google Ads Search Term Report

It is crucial here that you find search term reports on Google ads that can tell you the negative keywords in your business you need to target. Find the search term reports in your Google ads account. You need to filter a particular date range to find accurate and more relevant results and download them.

You can personalize your results by setting different columns and tracking a particular performance, metrics, or conversion. After you are done with the research, you can add the identified negative keywords to your account.

The results you find here, need to be frequently monitored and tracked so you do not deviate from your right audience. These search term reports can become a bit hard to track if they are not tracked regularly.

Finding negative keywords for google ads becomes an issue if your research is weak. So, focus on researching thoroughly by exhausting every means necessary.

• Manual Searches

This is a very common and one of the most used methods of identifying negative keywords for your PPC campaign. Start your search by making a Google search of any relevant keyword regarding your business. This will effectively tell you any negative keywords that you should avoid.

By searching for relevant keywords, you will be able to see terms or keywords that are irrelevant to your product or service. Add them to the list of your negative keywords.

For example, if you search the term, ‘iPhone 14 pro max’, you may see varying ranges of results that are not related to your search query if you are looking to sell an iPhone.

Here, you should evade any term that is related to purchasing an iPhone since you want to sell not buy.

Now that you are familiar with how you can find negative keywords to use to boost PPC campaigns for your real estate, let’s jump into how you can use them accurately.

How to Use Negative Keywords to Boost PPC Ads Performance

Real estate is quite a local business that needs more exposure and tireless hard work to reach and target potential buyers. Why do we call real estate a local business? Because for a real estate business to be successful, it needs potential customers that live or plan to live in the future in the same location so they can buy or even visit the property.

Keeping this in mind, there are three ways you can use negative keywords in your PPC campaign.

                                                                          source: Hubspot

Broad

This is a keyword match type that shows your ads when related keywords are searched that do not necessarily contain your exact keywords.

You can include your negative keywords here. By using this, you have a good chance of hiding your PPC ad from a broad audience. Since broad keywords are used for attracting a wider audience, negative broad keywords can do their job by averting irrelevant traffic from your PPC ad.

Phrase

This is a keyword match type that shows your ads when users are searching for queries that include extra words before or after the keywords that you used.

You can use your negative keywords in phrase keywords to avoid appearing in searches that are more or less related to your ads.

By using negative phrase keywords, you can try to make your PPC ad appear in a quite selected target area of the audience.

Exact

This is a keyword match type that shows your ads when the search query is the exact as the keywords that you used. By using negative keywords here, you have a greater chance of attracting relevant traffic to your PPC ad only.

You can use negative keywords in any of the aforementioned keyword match types. It depends upon your need for the relevance of your target audience. The more you want a refined audience to see your PPC ad, the more focus you should put into using your negative keywords with the relevant keyword match type.

Since real estate businesses heavily focus on targeting audiences according to locations, it will be very beneficial if you rule out some bigger portions of the audience that is not your target audience.

• Renters: your PPC ad campaign will not be boosted if your focus is on targeting renters. The biggest reason behind it is that renters are tied down with at least a 6-month contract. It would be a waste of time to consider them a potential customer since they cannot buy your property. Use renters, renters’ rights, and renters tax credit as negative keywords to avoid displaying your PPC ad to unrelated audiences.
• Homeowners: if a person already owns a home, it is highly improbable that they want to buy your property. For this, you want to exclude any homeowner who currently owns a home as they would not be interested in your property. Negative keywords like homeowner assistance fund, homeowner insurance, etc can simply make your PPC ad exclusive to only potential customers that can be converted into buyers.

Till now we have told you the various benefits of negative keywords in your PPC ad campaign in bits and pieces. Following is a comprehensive list that clearly states the importance of negative keywords to boost your PPC ad performance.

Why You Should Use Negative Keywords to Boost PPC Ads Performance

There are many advantages that PPC ads can gain by using negative keywords correctly. But in light of how the performance of the PPC ad is affected, we will take a thorough look at some notable benefits below.

• Use Keywords of your Brand

This may come as a surprise to many but using your brand keywords can greatly benefit a business in targeting its audience. The real estate industry is extremely distinct and complicated from any other industry. It requires something entirely new and exclusive to cater to its needs.

It is more difficult for real estate businesses to be discovered by potential customers and that poses a problem in creating paid marketing campaigns. The many ways real estate businesses have to market themselves include but are not limited to listing aggregator websites, physical signs, apartments catalog, etc.

By using your brand name as your keywords, you are minimizing the chances of your competitors using them and making your leads their clients. This way, your competitors will appear at the top of organic search results.

Additionally, any real estate aggregator website would have no qualms about using your brand name, among others to appear at the top of search results. This website will now receive all your target audience. From here, it will become harder to convince your potential clients to view your website or business.

You must use your brand terms to ensure only you are at the top of search results whenever your audience is searching for your products or services.

• Geotargeting is Vital

Your real estate business is nothing without accurate and specific locations. It is all a game of locations whenever anything is concerned with real estate. You need to make accurate use of the ‘locations’ options. Focus on ‘people in’, ‘regularly in’ etc to guarantee that your real estate business is visible to relevant target audiences.

These settings will help you in narrowing down your target market by effectively displaying your PPC ad to people who are not located in your area but are interested in your brand.

You can further narrow down your target audience within cities too. It is very common for people to move from one area to another in the city only. You want to target these people especially since they have a high potential to acquire your services.

By using negative keywords, you will not only be able to eliminate the extra and unnecessary traffic but also will be able to drive a more refined target audience.

1. Eliminate Low-Intent Searchers

Another beneficial feature to use here is to enable the elimination of low-intent searchers. Low-intent keywords mean that the user is still in pursuit of complete knowledge about a certain search. This is the research stage of the user that will not benefit you if you want to lock the deal.

By using negative keywords, you can eliminate the chances of any low-intent searches seeing your ad and contribute to the overbearing traffic to your PPC ad.

This way, your PPC campaign ad will be boosted a lot and you will get a more exclusive traffic audience.

Conclusion

PPC ads are a terrific way to earn an onslaught of relevant traffic that includes potential customers. By using negative keywords constructively, you can increase the chances of driving traffic that has the prospect of converting.

With how diversified and complex PPC ads are, they need constant monitoring to warrant their relevance and effectiveness. Likewise, PPC for real estate requires more focus and regular tracking to ensure that you are not deviating from your target market.

In the all-inclusive guide we have provided above, you should not have any trouble using negative keywords to boost the performance of your PPC ads.

FAQs

• What is meant by PPC in the real estate industry?

PPC or more commonly known as pay-per-click advertising is an online advertising model in which advertisers have to pay a certain amount of money every time a user clicks on their ads. By using PPC ads in real estate, advertisers can promote their properties or real estate services, etc.

• How negative keywords will benefit real estate PPC campaigns?

Negative keywords optimize relevant traffic to your PPC ads by excluding irrelevant search terms. By using negative keywords, you can improve the performance of your PPC ads.

• How often should you track your real estate PPC campaigns?

It is advisable to monitor and evaluate your negative keywords regularly to warrant that your PPC ad is effective and performing well.