Multifamily Google Ads are a powerful marketing tool.
Imagine that you're running a lease up campaign, trying to turn some newly renovated units, or you are taking over a distressed property. In any of these situations, odds are that you need to put a lot of heads in beds, fast -- and to do that your leasing team needs a LOT of leads. You know you can get some leads inbound through your ILS systems, like Apartments.com and Zillow, but that's not always enough. You need additional volume to ensure you don't have inventory sitting vacant costing your company money.
Content marketing, SEO, and social media marketing are all viable distribution methods, but there’s no quick, easy way to roll these channels out - they take time to cultivate.
So what’s the best apartment marketing channel for quick visibility, relative affordability, and longevity in effectiveness?
The answer is Google Ads.
Google ads are one of the most effective lead generation channels for apartments. So good, that even Apartments.com and Zillow rely heavily on them in their own lead generation efforts. In fact, Google ads are so effective for our clients, that leads coming from google are over twice as likely to turn into tenants compared to leads from the most common online apartment listing services.
In this article, I cover the fundamentals of Google Ads for apartment marketers. You’ll learn:
By the end, you’ll know how to deploy Google Ads quickly to start generating clicks, visits, leads, and signed leases.
Read on for more.
Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an online advertising platform developed by Google. It enables businesses to display ads on Google's search engine and partner websites through a pay-per-click model. Advertisers can choose from various ad formats and target specific audiences based on keywords, demographics, and interests. Google Ads provides tools for performance tracking and measurement, helping businesses optimize their campaigns and increase brand visibility.
Unsure about using Google Ads for apartment marketing campaigns or as part of a multifamily lease-up strategy? Here are five reasons why it works.
Billions of searches take place on Google every day. Google Ads makes it possible to tap into this vast search volume almost instantly. This makes Google ads one of the best ways to reach people that are actively searching for apartments or related information.
Google Ads offers robust targeting options. This ensures ads get shown to the most relevant audience.
You can target specific demographics such as:
While fair housing regulations prevent the use of age, gender, and income level targeting -- location targeting is a huge draw for google ads.
You can also utilize more advanced targeting features like interests and behaviors via certain campaign types on Google.
Google advertising is all about capturing "Intent". Bidding on search terms like those shown below ensures that your audience needs what you have to offer -- why else would they be searching for it?
By combining geographic and keyword level targeting, you can create targeted campaigns for people in different situations. At Lease Engine, we typically layer our campaigns to include "In Town", "Out of Town", and "Out of State" audiences. Each of these will have different keyword layers, ranging from broad focused keyword targets at the local level, and highly specific keywords for the out of state level. I.e. "Apartments in Downtown Austin".
Google Ads offers a range of ad formats to suit your different marketing and audience engagement goals. I discuss the four main ad formats below (Search, Display, P-Max, and Video).
Why is it important to have various ad formats? You can match the right audience with the most suitable ad format, or better yet, reach your target audience multiple times per person.
The more relevant your ad is, and the more often it's seen by a potential buyer, the more likely you are to get clicks and generate leads.
Google Ads provides robust tracking and measurement tools. This makes it relatively easy to monitor the performance of your PPC campaigns and get feedback fast.
For example, you can track metrics like:
This data-driven approach enables you to optimize your ad campaigns. It's easier to identify high-performing keywords and ad variations in conjunction with new targeting strategies.
Having this kind of continuous monitoring and optimization can help you:
Ever get locked into a long term advertising contract for your apartment? That's not going to happen with Google Ads, especially if you opt to work with an agency like Lease Engine (we don't lock people in to long term contracts, and always add flexibility into our engagements).
Google Ads operates primarily on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. In most cases, this means you only pay when someone clicks on your ads.
Having this kind of budget flexibility allows you to set and control your budgets effectively. It also means that you can crank campaigns up when you have a lot of expected turn, or back down to conserve cash when you don't need the lead volume.
Managing and optimizing your ad spend ultimately helps you maximize the impact of your apartment marketing.
I’ve covered what Google Ads is and why it works for apartment marketing.
Google's extensive reach and popularity means you can effectively reach targeted audiences that are actively searching or browsing for apartments.
But how does Google Ads actually work? What kinds of ads and formats are available for apartment marketing?
Google Ads offers various ad formats and targeting options to help you effectively reach your desired audience. Here's an explanation of the four main ad formats and targeting options available:
Search ads appear on Google's search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for specific keywords. These text ads display above or below the organic search results.
These ad formats are highly effective for capturing user intent and driving a direct response. This is because they target people who are actively searching for specific products, services, or information.
These are also the most common form of Google advertising, and are the biggest driver of leads for most of our apartment and multifamily clients.
Display ads are visually engaging and appear on a wide network of community websites. This “display network” includes news sites, blogs, and other content platforms.
Display ads render on webpages as image banners, rich media, or interactive ads. These types of ads are effective for building brand awareness, generating interest, and reaching a broader audience.
Note: Display ad billing is often driven by impressions or views as opposed to clicks.
Video ads are displayed on YouTube and other video partner sites. They can appear before, during, or after videos.
Video ads allow you to engage prospective lessees with compelling visual content, storytelling, and virtual tours. They’re ideal for showcasing apartments in an engaging and memorable way, and building your brand. We recommend video ads like these for larger luxury apartments and high-rises where brand is most important.
Google's newest ad campaign type is commonly known as a P-Max campaign -- this campaign type allows advertisers to tap in to all of Google's inventory such as YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.
Google will guide advertisers to input a variety of audience "Signals" which will then be used to establish targeting. These signals include searcher traits, like "In Market for An Apartment" or "College Students", along with Keywords that potential audience members might be searching.
Because P-Max ads show up in so many formats, these campaigns require a lot of creative. We recommend adding as many headlines, descriptions, videos, and images as you can to help the Google algorithm to best optimize for the best creative combination.
While P-Max can get a little bit too broad in audience targeting if you aren't careful -- if you keep your audience signals and location targeting tight, these ads are a very effective driver for both awareness and conversions when properly set up.
Recently (as of Spring 2024) these have been a cornerstone element for all of our campaigns, often driving our cheapest leads.
The above ad formats give you flexibility in reaching your target audience, and allow you to choose the ad format that best aligns with your objectives. This can be driving direct response, increasing brand visibility, or engaging users with compelling video content. At Lease Engine, our most common use case for Google ads is to drive leads, and lots of them, but having options is one thing that really helps the platform shine.
You can use the following targeting options to refine your audience reach. This ensures your ads get displayed to the right people at the right time.
You can target specific keywords relevant to what people are searching. When people search for those keywords, your ads will appear.
Keyword targeting ensures ads show to people actively searching for related information.
In the apartment space, relevant searches will include phrases like
When people type these terms into Google, an ad on Google will allow you to show up at the top of the results page.
You can also select negative keywords. These are words and phrases that you don’t want to appear for when someone searches. For example, if you have luxury apartments, you may want to create an exclude list of phrases like "Cheap, Affordable, Section 8, etc".
Google Ads offers interest-based targeting as well. This is where ads show to people with specific interests or affinities for particular topics.
This targeting method allows you to reach people who have demonstrated an interest in relevant subjects.
Remarketing or retargeting is a more advanced strategy. It allows you to target users who have previously visited your community website or interacted with an ad.
By displaying ads to people who have already shown interest, remarketing helps re-engage potential lessees and increase conversions.
Suggested Article: How to Leverage Retargeting In Your Apartment Marketing Playbook
P-Max campaigns, as discussed earlier in this post, rely on Signals for audience creation. These signals include "In Market" signals, Traits, Interests, and of course Keywords.
With the rise of Generative Search Experience (the use of AI in search), we expect to see an increasing weight on the use of signals in audience selection going forward.
While for many industries are allowed to bring in demographics targeting to their campaigns, it's different for Multifamily Google Ads campaigns. Due to legal intervention, Google no longer allows advertisers in the housing space to use demographics in their targeting. These include traits like income, age, gender, race, parental status, etc. Fortunately, keyword targeting is so powerful for this industry that lack of demographic options shouldn't slow you down.
The final component of how Google Ads work is the Google Ads auction system. This is a fundamental component of how PPC for apartments works.
The Google Ads auction system’s job is to determine the placement and cost of your ads.
Essentially, Google wants to optimize for two things:
In order to balance their two objectives, they created an algorithm to incentivize ads that provide a better experience for the searcher (or youtube watcher, etc). Basically, the more relevant your ad and website is to the keyword being searched, the better price you'll get from Google per click.
When a searcher enters a search query or visits a website with ad space, Google triggers an auction. This determines which ads will be displayed and in which order on the Search Engine Results Page.
The auction is automated and takes place in real-time based on which advertisers are actively bidding for ad placement, the relevancy of their ad, and their bids.
Advertisers participating in the auction set their maximum bid. This represents the maximum amount they are willing to pay when a user clicks on their ad.
This bid can be adjusted at any time to align with campaign goals and budgets, but most campaigns we'll just set "Automatic Bid" to give us the best shot at a good placement. This also is the easiest way to get set up.
In addition to the bid amount, Google considers the quality and relevance of ads and websites. They do this through a metric called the Quality Score.
The Quality Score is determined by factors such as click-through rate (CTR), ad relevance to the search query, landing page experience (and relevance to the search) and historical performance.
Ad Rank determines the position of an ad on the search engine results page (SERP) or partner website. It's calculated by multiplying the maximum bid by the Quality Score. The higher the Ad Rank, the better the ad's position.
The actual cost per click that you pay is determined by the Ad Rank. This is calculated by the ad bid divided by their Quality Score, plus a small increment.
So even if you have a higher bid, you may pay less per click if you have a higher Quality Score.
The auction system ensures fairness and relevance in ad placement. It allows advertisers with higher bids and better-quality ads to secure more prominent positions.
However, it also rewards advertisers who create highly relevant and engaging ads, and also advertisers with engaging content on their website. This means lower costs and better positions even with lower bids.
Understanding the auction system and optimizing factors like bid amounts, Quality Score, and ad relevance is crucial because it can help you save a ton of ad dollars over the lifetime of a campaign (and keep high quality leads flowing to your leasing team for cheap).
These are the factors we help our clients at Lease Engine optimize for. It’s how we help them maximize ad placements and achieve cost-effective multifamily Google Ads campaigns.
I’ve established the what, why, and how of Google Ads for apartments and how they work. Now it’s time to put ad formats, targeting options, and the ad auctions process into greater context.
Below is the step-by-step Google Ads campaign creation process that we use with our clients at Lease Engine.
Start by clearly defining your campaign goals and objectives. Determine whether you aim to increase website traffic, generate leads, boost apartment inquiries, or achieve specific conversion metrics (like open house bookings, or email newsletter subscribes).
By having clear goals in mind, you can structure your campaign and measure its success effectively.
To effectively target your audience, it's essential to understand the demographics and characteristics of your potential renters. Apartment renters can vary in age, income level, lifestyle preferences, and more. Conduct market research to gain insights into your target audience.
You’ll want to consider factors such as age groups (e.g., young professionals, families, retirees). Income levels, preferences for urban or suburban living, and desired amenities are also demographics to consider.
These understandings can help you tailor your messaging and keyword targeting strategies accordingly.
Understanding how your building or complex is positioned in the market is the stepping stone to a good ad on Google (or anywhere for that matter). If you're already building an Google Ads campaign for your apartment, it's likely that you have some of your positioning figured out. What's important is that you are mindful of this positioning when you build out ad creative.
Perform thorough keyword research to identify the relevant search terms and phrases potential renters are using when looking for apartments -- put special consideration into qualifiers that may narrow that to a search for your specific apartment.
Examples of qualifiers to help you narrow where you show up on search could be: "Luxury, Family Friendly, Pet Friendly, Student, etc"
Use tools like Google's Keyword Planner or SEMrush to discover popular keywords with high search volume and moderate competition. We always try to target a mix of broad and specific keywords to help our clients reach prospective renters.
They say "Location, location, location" for a reason. Real estate is a local game. Fortunately, Google ads has a number of tools that will allow you to use Geotargeting to your advantage.
For example, if your apartment is in Houston, you can drop a pin in Google Ads to geo-target only that city, or even specific neighborhoods within Houston. We often create multiple location layers for each of our broader ad campaigns, bidding on broader and broader keywords when the search is local, and more specific keywords when the search is from further away.
If you have an apartment in a desirable and notable neighborhood, keyword targeting that calls out your neighborhood is always a good strategy.
Craft compelling ad copy that highlights the unique features, amenities, and benefits of your apartments. Use accurate yet persuasive language and calls to action to encourage users to click on your ads. Ensure your ad copy aligns with the keywords you are targeting to increase ad relevance.
Interestingly, there is a balance here to walk -- you don't want to get too crazy or use too much marketing speak on Google. We've found that accurate, descriptive ads do best.
We dive into much more detail below, so we'll cut this short here (for now).
For ad copy inspiration, and a pre-built template to help you write copy that's the right length and format for Google's most popular ad types, try our free apartment Google ad creative template.
Google search is becoming more and more visual, which is typically great for apartments. Be sure to add your best photography and visuals to your campaigns to help them stand out to searchers.
You also now have the option to add your Logo to your add, and get your business verified by Google.
All of this will help you grab attention, build authority, and drive down your cost per click and lead.
Where you send your website traffic matters a ton, in fact, a great web experience will make up for an okay ad campaign, and a horrible website experience will dampen even the best ad campaigns.
Good photography, descriptions, and strong design all need to come together seamlessly on a good website.
For many of our ads, we're sending people to a website home page, but we also use floor plan pages, galleries, sitemaps and more for some specific campaigns. Occasionally for portfolios of properties, we'll use an apartment listing (ILS Style) page as our ad link destination.
Whichever page you send people to, they should be able to find detailed information about your apartments, the amenities you offer, and give a glimpse at life in your apartment.
Pro-tip: amazing photography sells! Websites with professional photography convert way better than sites without photography.
Your landing page should also make it easy for someone to take the desired action. This might be filling out an inquiry form, visiting an open house, or scheduling a tour.
This is one of the more technical steps involved with starting a Google ads campaign, but if you are tech savvy, it's worth the time.
As management guru Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” It's super important to implement conversion tracking on your ads, as it will allow you to measure the success of your campaign accurately, and also optimize your ads once they are up and running. Form submissions or phone calls are great goals. You can track these actions as conversions in your Google Ads account.
Conversion tracking enables you to analyze the performance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. This is what allows you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your campaign for better results.
Before you start drafting your Google Ads campaign in Excel, one thing to note is that the most common Google ad format today is Responsive search ads. Responsive search ads have you input a large number of headlines and descriptions into Google, and they will use the list you give them to create a variety of ads optimized for conversion. This ad type requires you to form a list of up to 15 headlines (with a max of 30 characters each) and 4 descriptions (with a max of 90 characters each). Focus on value, use keywords, leverage extensions, test variations, and be creative for best results.
Every property has its own personality – quirks, charms, available amenities, culture, and culture.
However, the best amenities don't mean much if nobody hears about them.
When you're competing for traffic on Google it's important to write amazing copy that intrigues, so we can get people in the door and further down our marketing funnel.
Fortunately, there are a few tips you can follow to make your ads stand out against the competition.
The following are Lease Engine strategies that we use with our clients to generate more engagement for their apartment communities.
You can set your apartment ads apart by using Image Extensions to stand out.
The Image Extension lets you include images in responsive Google ads to showcase your property and entice prospective tenants.
This allows you to give Google searchers a peek into what your property has to offer. It also creates interest and breaks up the wall of text that usually accompanies a Google search.
The result is more attention and more clicks.
If you need help setting up image extensions, check out this Google Image Extension Guide for some pointers.
You want to choose photos that showcase the best elements of your property and its defining features.
At the end of the day, having a variety of photos to choose from is the best strategy.
You can see how that works in practice by doing a quick search for Apartments near you -- most search ads now have image extensions.
As you can see, the top ad for rent.com takes up a lot of space. But the image in the ad below commands attention.
Properties often have qualities or characteristics that draw a particular type of tenant.
So it’s important to establish who exactly you expect to fill your units. Whether it be students, young professionals, families, or older residents.
Already have the ideal tenant in mind? Your next step should be creating a “persona or avatar” to hone in on your messaging.
This exercise doesn’t have to be too complicated either. You just need to answer a few questions about our preferred tenant.
Apartments typically serve multiple demographics, so it can be helpful to run this exercise a few times.
From the example above, Bethany values safety, security, and the well-being of her child. Bethany and her husband are currently saving for a house.
But that might be a few years off.
So they want a stable place for their child to make friends and grow while they figure out the next step.
With that in mind, you may want your ad copy to highlight:
You might also highlight family-accessible amenities like a movie theater in the clubhouse or a pool.
Bethany might be looking to stay in shape. But commuting to a gym, and paying for the membership don't seem fun. Nor does she have the time to commute with her young child at home.
She searches for "Apartments With Gym Near Me" and boom -- there's your ad promoting your apartment with a "2 Story Fitness Center".
Highlighting your amenities are always a good ad tactic. The more specific, the better. There are far too many ads out there with generic phrasing.
Most properties have a few tradeoffs.
Maybe you have large spacious units, but you’re further away from the major shopping centers of town.
Maybe you have newly renovated kitchens, but the gym lacks modern equipment.
Consider what would make your target tenant walk out of the leasing office.
Identifying these objections will help you craft ads that resonate.
You likely won’t want to write copy to combat your property's shortcomings. But it can help you to get a deeper understanding before you start typing.
While a 7-minute drive from the nearest grocery store might be a negative for some shoppers, you could flip this fact into a positive by using it to highlight the quietness of the property.
People are, in general, reactionary.
Promotions, giveaways, and seasonal specials all drive actions because they create a sense of urgency, scarcity (and they help remove some friction from high costs).
Some examples of offers and deals to generate a sense of urgency include
Notice that all of these offers include one thing -- a deadline, or a sense that the offer wont last. Deadlines create scarcity and urgency for the shopper, which in turn get people to act.
Once you have your avatars, you can start writing copy that better speaks to the audience, highlights your unique amenities, and helps you stand out. Remember, specificity sells!
Description 1: Enjoy a quiet community with A+ rated schools within walking distance. Only 5 blocks from I-10.
Description 2: Family-friendly 1-3 bedrooms available. Ask us about our June move-in specials.
Call Out Extensions:
You’ve written your ad and it's live. Testing and optimizing your apartment Google Ads campaign is the crucial next step to maximizing your performance.
By following best practices you can maximize the effectiveness of your apartment Google Ads campaign and drive better long-term results.
Here's the approach we use with our clients at Lease Engine to test and optimize campaigns:
Intuition is a great starting point, but finding your optimal copy is going to take time.
This is where A/B testing can help you compare different variations of your ads. You can test elements like:
Optimizing each of these ad components can help you determine which variations resonate best with your target audience.
Key metrics like click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and cost per conversion can also help you identify your winning variations.
We always recommend going out the gate with multiple campaigns at once, with a variety of campaign types.
Once you see which campaigns are performing best, give them a larger share of your budget. If you have lagging campaigns, don't be afraid to pull back on your spend with them.
One thing to keep an eye on is that not all campaign types produce the same quality of leads. For example you might be running a P-Max campaign that generates a lot of leads for cheap, but only 1 in 20 will lease, whereas your local search campaign generates more expensive leads, but one in 8 leases.
While optimizing your budget is a highly effective way to get more from your campaign, it should be done carefully, with as much information backing your decision making as possible. At the end of the day, we're running ads to drive leases, not just get the most leads.
Suggested Article: Apartment Lead to Lease Conversion Guide + Free Calculator
Just like refining your audience, it’s important to regularly review and optimize your keyword strategy relative to what people are actually searching to find your site.
Start by identifying high-performing keywords that drive relevant traffic and conversions. Then remove low-performing or irrelevant keywords -- we recommend that you check your "Search Term" reports frequently -- especially on new campaigns.
Keyword match types (broad, phrase, exact, negative) can also help you refine your targeting and improve the quality of your traffic, and negative keyword lists help you eliminate what you don't want to bid on at all.
You’ll want to ensure that your landing pages align with your ads and provide a seamless user experience.
Landing page optimization best practices include:
You can also conduct A/B split testing on different landing page variations. This can help you identify the most effective design, layout, and content that drive conversions.
Analyzing the performance of your ads based on the time of day and days of the week is another optimization hack.
Consider adjusting your ad schedule and bidding strategies. You’ll want to allocate more budget during peak times or days when conversions are more likely to occur.
Continuously monitoring and optimizing your bids helps you maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).
Taking the plunge into Google Ads for your multifamily portfolio or lease-up can be a daunting task. It’s why working with a trusted apartment marketing company could be your best bet.
We've generated tens of thousands of leads for our clients through Google ads, and have the playbooks and know how to get your campaigns up and running fast, so you can get the leads you need to crush your occupancy targets.
If you're looking to drive more leads that turn into leases for your company, reach out today.
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