New Google Ads Rules For Real Estate Wholesalers
Google Ads is changing its rules. How is it affecting real estate wholesalers, other investors and agents and lenders?
Google has announced new advertising and ad targeting rules which will kick in over the next few weeks. This could shut down any existing ads and PPC or CPM ad campaigns you are running and impact your plans for future campaigns. What do you need to know? What are the alternatives? How can you still run effective and profitable Google Ads campaigns with these changes?
The New Rules for Advertising Online
Google issued new policies for advertising on August 18th 2020 which go into effect by October.
The rule changes are heralded as a step towards decreasing the chances of discrimination. Though they may also make online advertising more expensive and prohibitive for small businesses and individual advertisers.
These changes specifically target those advertising anything to do with housing, employment and credit.
The bottom line is that you will no longer be able to use ad targeting filters to reach customers and prospects by:
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Geographic zip code
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Parental status
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Marital status
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Gender
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Age
Facebook and Google have also already been limiting other features, such as filtering and targeting by income levels.
How These New Rules Impact You
As of October 2020 any current ads and campaigns with these targeting features will be shut down by Google.
You can still run ads for buying houses, selling houses, private lending, owner financing and renting. You will just be very limited on targeting. Which means you’ll have to run much broader campaigns which run to many irrelevant viewers and consumers. Total ad cost and cost per lead could then skyrocket. Especially when you consider that 25% of your PPC budget can already be eaten up by click fraud.
One day in the future these new rules may actually be deemed discriminatory in themselves due to turning the tables only in favor of the largest advertisers who can afford to lose millions of dollars, and of course for Google who stands to benefit from higher ad revenues while delivering less results.
The alternatives are to turn to other forms of marketing, such as inbound Search Engine Marketing (SEO), affiliate and referral marketing and in person networking.
The Keys To Creating Effective Google Ad Campaigns
On the bright side, these top of the funnel ad targeting issues are only a small part of running a successful and profitable Google Ad campaign.
You can still relatively easily and inexpensively drive plenty of traffic to your real estate website. Where the difference is all made in actually getting real leads, deals and dollars is in:
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A mobile first website designed to both look great and maximize conversions
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Instant engagement and strong follow up
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Consistency
As you adjust to keep those wholesale deals flowing, make sure you take advantage of our Verification Of Deposit service to get your offers accepted.
