Retargeting for Real Estate: Complete Guide to Bringing People Back to Your Site

September 21, 2019

Did you know that only 2 percent of your website visitors convert on the first visit? In other words, you build a great website, fill it in with interesting content your target audience will love and get yourself ready for an influx of leads…. only to discover your site visitors are bouncing off. Luckily, you have an easy, effective and affordable way to fix this. In this post, we’ll take a look at how retargeting for real estate delivers personalized impressions across the web and helps realtors convert more leads online.

There’s a reason why retargeting became a buzzword in recent years. Quite simply, it works for businesses of all sizes and any industry.

Indeed, for every business striving to get more online leads, conversion is not an uncommon question to struggle with. Meanwhile, retargeting tools make this undertaking essentially easier.

Exactly how much traffic is not converting on a site on the first visit is hard to tell but some marketing consultancy undertook some work and discovered only 2 percent of those do convert into subscribers, leads or customers. That leaves 98 percent of prospective clients lost for your business.

If you think that’s too much to give away after putting so much hard work into landing them on your website, retargeting tools should be the next technology to master.

So how does retargeting for real estate work?

People may come across your site in many ways. Ideally, you’d want to rank on page 1 for the most important and popular keywords related to your niche. While this should be your ultimate online marketing goal, it’s not that easy and takes time, and you need leads filling your sales pipeline now.

When people get really interested in some solution to their needs, they notice information related to it more readily. In other words, if they are thinking of moving to your area, they will be very likely to open up any ads or links with more local info wherever they see it. Retargeting for real estate lets you capitalize on these search patterns and bring people back to your site.

Let’s say someone’s quest for home-buying information in your area brought them to your site. They browsed a few pages but left soon after. Retargeting tools use cookies to track which sites your visitors use. Next, the ad you created intelligently follows them across the web and social media, gently reminding them of the fix to their problem and keeping your services on top of their minds.

This easy visual may explain it even better:

So you can advertise to these people intelligently almost everywhere on the web, from their favorite sites to their Facebook news feeds – even if they didn’t subscribe for your updates or did nothing at all at your site.

Add to this that retargeting for real estate is cheaper than AdWords and has higher conversion rates and you’ll have yet another huge reason to give it a try.

Now that we are clear on how ad retargeting works, let’s see how to apply it to your real estate marketing strategy.

First of all, which ad retargeting tools should you use?

Just any of them you like best. The retargeting tools market is big and very diverse so everyone can find a solution that works for their particular needs. For example, AgentDrive partnered with the leading retargeting apps, AdRoll, Chango, Perfect Audience, Triggit and ReTargeter, to get all the retargeting needs of our customers covered so you might as well start with these.

Once you’re all set, it’s time to start testing.

7 ways to use retargeting for real estate to convert more leads online

1) Retarget to each and every website visitor, except…

The whole idea of retargeting for real estate is to follow up with your ideal, target audience, right? So part of you website traffic, however, is not qualified, so you wouldn’t like it to eat up your ad budget.

Retargeting tools let you easily embrace each and every one of your website visitors but that may not be the smartest strategy, especially when you’re on a pretty limited budget.

Don’t worry, though: you can segment your visitors and target exactly the right ones. A good rule of thumb is to:

exclude visitors who signed up (they’re already all yours and you can follow up with them personally);
exclude visitors who only viewed one page and didn’t browse any other pages or didn’t use the home search. Most likely, this is unqualified traffic which has nothing to do with your target audience so you won’t like to spend your budget on them.

Depending on your situation, you’d want to be more specific about your retargeting options to increase the odds of reaching the right people. Just make sure to exclude the above categories first and then refine your settings.

2) Create beautiful ads with your listings and promote them

With retargeting tools, you can create a branded ad featuring your services and use it to consistently keep your brand in front of bounced traffic. But there’s even more to it! You can create multiple ads, each targeting a specific segment to bring you better results.

Why not create an ad with one of your listings and impress your clients with it? This is a perfect opportunity to showcase your hard work to your seller clients. Your reporting data will show thousands of impressions for your ads (i.e., people who actually saw your ad).

Isn’t that alone enough to make your clients excited about the huge exposure their house is having (and give you some nice referrals afterward)?

But don’t just stop at showing the number of impressions! Next thing you can do is show your clients the sites their homes were advertised on. It’s incredibly easy as retargeting tools provide the ultimate advertising reach of 98 percent of the web. Now, what will your clients say if they see their home appear on NY Times, Forbes, Washington Post, Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia and loads more?

An additional benefit is other agents your seller knows are not really likely to use this powerful promotion. Well, good for you – this makes your expertise even more valuable. And don’t forget to use this proof that you can feature properties on high-profile sites in your marketing materials to strengthen your reputation.

3) Target buyer leads intelligently

One of the main reasons people come to your site is they are looking to buy a home. As you can imagine, a huge number of potential buyer leads bounce off without looking much at what you have to offer for whatever reason, including they simply might not be ready for purchase yet.

The best way to catch up with these visitors is to create some nice banner ads that promote home search in your area. At this stage, you only need to promote a home search, not any of your listings, as the leads aren’t qualified yet.

Once they’re ready to renew their home search, chances are big they’ll return to your site for more home-buying information (after seeing your ads before) and contact you for advice.

4) Stay on top of your seller leads minds

Likewise, you can specifically target your seller leads. Here’s a super simple strategy for bringing them back to your site:

create a segment of visitors who viewed your ‘Sell your home’ pages but bounced off;
build ads with headlines like ‘What’s my Home Worth?’, ‘Get a Free Home Evaluation’, ‘Monthly Market Updates – Free’ with a link pointing to your seller pages.

This offering will then appear in front of potential seller leads across the Web and prompt them to go back to your site for your expertise.

5) Enhance your brand meaningfully

At some point, you may need to give your brand image a strong and meaningful support. Again, retargeting for real estate is one of the tools that will do a stellar job of showcasing your brand and it’s unique value proposition.

Invest some time and effort in creating beautiful, fully branded ads. Make sure to include your logo and brand colors, slogan and contact details. Place the URL to your website as well to make the ad even more memorable.

Your brand ad will then keep popping up in front of potential leads helping you stay on top of their minds. A powerful way to foster brand recognition, right?

6) Clean up your landing pages

Last but not least, remember to make sure your landing pages play nicely together with your retargeting ads. If a visitor clicks on your ad and gets back to your site only to find there’s no opt-in form on the landing page, they’ll find it hard to convert, right?

Keep the design simple and clean, make sure to include all the relevant info and remember about contact forms. This will make joining your sphere of influence easy and quick.

7) Advanced tips to make your next retargeting campaign perfect

Retargeting for real estate can bring excellent results. But if you never used it before, be prepared for a bit of trial and error. The more you test and segment, the better results will be.

Meanwhile, here are a few other things to keep in mind:

time wise – your ad cannot follow your visitors endlessly, even if your budget allows it. Go for 90 days at most;
set up frequency caps – you can even set a limit to the times your ads are shown per month and find a sweet spot between your budget and the number of required impressions;
use search retargeting – catch up with people who haven’t even visited your site but searched for specific queries related to your business, and expose your ads in front of them;
use Facebook retargeting – don’t forget to capitalize on the power of world’s largest social media with custom Facebook ads, news feeds campaigns, segmentation, reporting, multiple dynamic ads – it’s insanely effective;
blacklist some websites – exclude any sites from your list and keep your ads from appearing there. This way you can focus your efforts on the top-performing resources and get a better ROI;
create retargeting lists, e.g. website visitors, newsletter subscribers or social media users;
leverage CRM data onboarding – you can also power your retargeting campaigns with your contact database. Just create a list with your contact emails, set a campaign and your ads will intelligently follow them up across all of the Web and on any device;
measure results – keep an eye on the key metrics to refine your campaigns and update the settings for even better results.

What’s next?

The value of retargeting for real estate is huge, yet few of your competition uses it already. But how can you possibly ignore the opportunity to appear in front of potential leads everywhere on the web and consistently iterate upon your brand messaging? Backed up by a great real estate website, retargeting is going to make your online marketing strategy effective and your online presence ubiquitous at a fraction of the marketing expense. Good luck with your next retargeting campaigns!