Pay-Per-Click Mortgage Marketing
Online mortgage marketing is about maximizing the number of ways people can find your main website (visibility), and then respond to it in some way (lead generation).
The ways people can find you online are known as “channels,” and it stands to reason that the more channels you have the more website traffic you might enjoy. We discuss the different kinds of online mortgage marketing channels quite a bit on this website. They range from online articles, press releases, blogs and good-old-fashioned search engine optimization (SEO).
But there’s another online marketing channel we have not covered up until now, and that is pay-per-click marketing.
Pay-per-click (also known as sponsored search or paid search) is one of two paths to search engine visibility. SEO is the other path. Here’s the difference between them:
- With pay-per-click / sponsored search, you are paying to have your website ranked at the top of the search engines for certain phrases. In other words, with pay-per-click, you could reach the top of the search engines later today or tomorrow.
- With search engine optimization / SEO, your website ranks well in the search engines naturally, due to its content, link popularity and other factors. In other words, with natural SEO, it takes a lot of work and patience to reach the top of the search engines.
So if your mortgage website needs search engine visibility in a hurry, pay-per-click / PPC is the only option for you. If you have long-term search engine success in mind, SEO techniques can accommodate you.
There are as many PPC / sponsored search programs as their are major search engines. After all, search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask derive most of their profits from their respective pay-per-click programs. But of all the PPC programs out there, Google AdWords is by far the most popular.
Mortgage Marketing Online with Google AdWords
AdWords is a pay-per-click / sponsored search marketing program offered by Google, the most popular of all the search engines. Google AdWords lets you create your own ad and choose your own keywords. Sponsored ads appear in certain areas within a Google search engine results page (SERP). See image below.
In the image above, the green shaded area shows pay-per-click (sponsored) listings, while the pink shaded area shows natural (organic) listings.
Benefits of Google AdWords Marketing
One of the primary benefits of using a PPC program like Google AdWords is the fact that you can get your ad in front of people quickly. In fact, if you were to implement an AdWords program today, you could be on the first page of Google for your chosen phrases within a day or two. Of course, this all depends on how much you decide to pay per click, and therein lies a broad spectrum of spending options.
Google AdWords also has some pretty impressive reporting, tracking and testing features built into their PPC program. Using these tools, you can track and measure all aspects of your pay-per-click marketing campaign. This kind of analysis will help you decide whether or not PPC should be a permanent part of your online mortgage marketing program.
Drawbacks of Google AdWords Marketing
Google AdWords is entirely different from natural SEO in one regard. With AdWords / PPC, you are paying for placement. With a mortgage SEO campaign, you will achieve placement / ranking over time based on your website’s content, structure, popularity and relevance to certain search phrases.
With a sponsored PPC program like AdWords, you will achieve your ranking based on the amount you bid per click and the number of click-throughs your ad gets. In other words, the top rankings in Google AdWords are dominated by search ads that either (A) pay the most per click, (B) have the best click-through rates, or (C) a combination of the two.
This is a drawback of sponsored search / PPC as compared to search engine optimization. With PPC, you will always have to pay for your placement. So it can be a form of dependency that never goes away.
Is PPC Right for Your Mortgage Marketing Program?
So now that you’ve learned a little about pay-per-click / sponsored search, the next question you should ask is whether or not PPC is right for your online mortgage marketing program. In truth, only you can answer that question. But with the ease of setup and flexible pricing of a program like Google AdWords, there is certainly no harm in a little experimentation!
