Home Builder advertising is the fastest and easiest way to start generating new home-build leads. When compared to running ads on Google, marketing for home-building clients through other methods such as social media, print, and even SEO pales in comparison to the immediate power of Google Ads.
The ability to drive relevant traffic to an optimized landing page at the click of a button allows you to test keywords in real time, generate leads in under a week, and control exactly who views your site.
Keep reading to see exactly how we set up, run and optimize home builder ad campaigns.
See the Byrd Home Builder Case Study Here
It All Starts With a Good Landing Page
There is no secret hack to running Google ads for home builders. At the end of the day, you’re simply paying to show up when a potential customer searches for a keyword.
What makes or breaks an ad campaign is the quality of the landing page. How fast it loads, how relevant it is to the search term, and how well it’s optimized for conversions. By focusing on those three aspects, you can ensure that you are making the most of your homebuilder advertising campaign.
A Fast Landing Page Is A Good Landing Page
As people’s attention spans are lower than ever, the longer a page takes to load, the worse your conversion rates will be. Studies show that even a 100-millisecond delay can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%; for reference, that’s the same as the blink of an eye.
Everything you can do to make sure your landing page loads as fast as possible will ensure that you’re minimizing lost conversions.
Here are some best practices to ensure you have a fast page load time:
Compress Images: Use tools like TinyPNG or JPEGmini to reduce image file sizes without sacrificing quality.
Choose the Right Format: Use JPEGs for photos, PNGs for graphics with transparency, and SVGs for icons and simple graphics.
Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading so images load only when they enter the viewport.
Minimize HTTP Requests:
Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content: Inline the CSS required for above-the-fold content to ensure it loads quickly.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN):Use a CDN to distribute your site’s static resources across multiple geographically dispersed servers, ensuring faster delivery to users.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to minimizing page loading time, there are many more tactics that can and should be implemented by those responsible for your website.
If you’re interested to see how your landing pages perform, use PageSpeed Insights to get realtime feedback on the performance of your site!
Relevant Landing Pages Help Users
Imagine you’re looking to build a new home in Cincinnati; you go to Google and type in “Home Builders In Cincinnati”. An ad pops up that seems interesting so you click on it only for it to take you to a landing page for “Home Additions in Cincinnati”. You click away, confused and disgruntled to have your time wasted.
Now the advertiser has spent money on that irrelevant click and the user bounced away, showing Google your landing page is no good.
Not only has the advertiser wasted money, but they’ve also lowered their ad rank, making it less likely for Google to show their ad to potential real customers.
This may seem obvious, but many times, advertisers will try to bid on hundreds of keywords with the mentality that “more is better” when in reality, if they stuck to 5-10 relevant keywords they would find much more success.
Always ensure that the keywords you bid on match what your landing page is for.
Keep Your Landing Pages Simple
Keeping your landing pages simple is crucial for several reasons, particularly in the home building industry, where clarity and trust are key factors in converting visitors into leads. Here’s why simplicity matters.
Hold The Users Attention
As stated above, user attention spans are at all-time lows. By keeping your page simple and straight to the point you are able to get across your message in the least amount of time possible.
Avoid Choice Overload
Removing all navigation and making it so that the only decision a user can make is to contact you ensures a higher conversion rate. Having multiple different calls to action or navigation items, the user can browse through means more opportunities for them to drop off the page or get distracted. You should have one main call to action to facilitate the highest conversion rate possible.
Faster Load Times
The more simple a page is, the faster it will load. Keep in mind that load times are a key factor when it comes to conversion rates.
Use Social Proof
The second element below you call to action should always be social proof. The easiest way to do this is to use Google reviews. Google is a trusted source for reviews as it is much harder to manipulate them than testimonials written down on your website. Social proof also comes in the form of video testimonials and actual portfolio evidence of the homes you’ve built!
How To Set Up Your Home Builder Advertising For Success
Aside from setting up the landing page, building the actual ad campaign is relatively straightforward. The main tenets of a successful Google ad campaign are solid keyword selection, strong ad assets, and conversion tracking.
Selecting Home Builder Keywords
Keyword selection for home builders is extremely simple. What most people search for when looking for a home builder is: “Custom Home Builder in *location*” “Home Builder near me” “Design Build Firm in *location*, etc. If appropriate, you can also use your competitor’s name as a targeted keyword.
Use a keyword research tool like Semrush to see the search volume for these keywords and pick 5-10 of the best keywords to run your ads on.
We like to run these keywords as “broad match” in the beginning to see if there are any additional keywords we may have missed out on in our initial research. Later we will switch to phrase match to avoid irrelevant clicks.
Building Your Home Builder Ad Copy
Google provides you with headlines, descriptions, pictures, and a number of other assets that you can use to increase the click-through rate on your ad campaign. Although you may have many options for headlines its best practice to only use a few that make sense in any combination.
Here is an example of headlines and descriptions that might be used in a home builder advertising campaign:
Headline: Top Custom Home Builders In *location*
Headline: Call For A Free Consultation
Headline: Inhouse Architect & Design Team
Headline: Award-Winning Build And Design Firm
Description: Build and Design Firm A has been building new homes in *location* for over 20 years. Call now to talk to our award-winning design team.
Your best bet is to keep your ad headlines and description on target and inline with the selected keywords.
Use pictures when appropriate to showcase your past work and team members.
Tracking Home Builder Conversions
Conversion tracking is an integral component of your home builder advertising campaign. Conversion tracking is setting up code on your website to track phone calls, form submissions or any action you want a user to take.
By tracking these conversions through Google ads you are informing the ad system which clicks and keywords lead to a desired action. The system sees this and then will optimize to bid for clicks more likely to lead to a conversion.
This also allows us to effectively track the return on investment from an ad campaign to see if its worth running and where we should allocate funds in then future.
Running an ad campaign without proper conversion tracking set up is like trying to hit a target with your eyes blindfolded, you will just end up spending alot of money and getting nowhere.
If you take one thing away from this article it should be the importance of proper conversion tracking inside ad campaigns.
Takeaway
A strong home builder ad campaign will combine a well designed landing page with properly set up ad traffic to drive more leads for the least amount of cost possible. We have done this successfully with many clients inside the home building space like Byrd Design and Build who saw an increase of 70% in new home build leads year over year.
If you’re interested in learning more about how 7ten can help you, click here to set up a call!
Related Posts
What are the Differences Between B2B SEO and B2C SEO?
Learn More
