How much will my Adwords marketing campaign cost me?

This week, I am showing you how to set up a Google Adwords pay-per-click campaign for your estate agency. On Monday, we looked at why the Google results page layout means you can't afford not to use Adwords for marketing and reminded ourselves of the sorts of keywords estate agents should use.

Yesterday, we broke our audience down into visitor profiles that we could target with closely tailored adverts in order to maximise the number of visitors we get by achieving the best possible click-through rates (CTR).

This screenshot shows the point we have now reached.

We have our two CPC campaigns (set to 'Google search only' - we're not interested in the content network yet) along with a number of Ad Groups, populated with relevant keywords. We've also got at least a couple of adverts in each advert group, with good strong headlines and two lines of text to sell the sizzle.

Today, it's time to talk money.

Adwords allows you to set limits on the amount you are willing to spend per click (you don't pay for your ad unless it is clicked) and an overall daily budget. As the majority of the keywords you're likely to be looking at are very locally targeted, they will have a relatively low level of competition and you will be able to set a low maximum cost per click (CPC) - perhaps £0.10. Often the price you pay will be lower than that.

Compare that cost with the leads you generate from property portals.

You can set the CPC at the campaign level, the ad group level or the keyword level. This allows you to tailor your bids to the specific competition and value of each search phrase, but for the moment I recommend that you stick with a flat rate.

For the daily budget, it's worth setting a low limit initially. You can do this for each campaign on the 'Campaigns' tab of the Adwords Editor software. It's reasonable to start at £1 or £2 per day per campaign while you're still learning the ropes.

Now we need to decide where to send visitors.

Each of the adverts you created allows you to specify a display URL (your website address) and a destination URL (the page of the website you want to send people to when they click the advert).

At the most basic level, while you're just getting started, you might get away with sending all adverts to the home page. However, for the best results, your website should setup with several 'landing pages' - each being relevant to one of your different ad groups.

People who searched for "flats to rent near Three Bridges" should go to a page on the website where those flats are listed. Why make life complicated for them by displaying all of your properties? Or sending them to your home page and making them do the rest of the work?

The harder it is for people to find what they expected, the more likely they are to leave, never to return.

People who searched for "letting agents in Crawley" want the first page they see to tell them why they should appoint you, not another agent. Within the blink of an eye, the page title, first paragraph and graphics used will all play an important part in convincing your visitor that they've come to the right place.

Page content is also one of the factors used by Google's 'quality score' metric to decide how well your advert ranks and the price you pay for the click.

Having a well thought out strategy will pay off in higher visitor numbers and a lower cost per click.

All sounding too much like hard work? PropertyADD offers a managed Adwords marketing package!