Sean Everett is a Las Vegas-based real estate agent and the founder of Everett Academy, an interactive training system that teaches agents the fundamentals of real estate. He previously appeared on Stay Paid to talk about his unique journey into the business.

Today, Sean returns to offer strategies for agents looking to get more leads through Google.

Key Points:

• Google Ads are a great way to generate leads in your market.
• You can find success with multiple types of ads, depending on what your goals are.
• You can get offline/farming leads into your database by directing them to a landing page, and then follow up with them until they become clients.

Q: Tell us about Everett Academy.

I originally created Everett Academy for my team so I wouldn’t have to keep repeating the same points over and over. Now I offer those same courses to other agents.

About four or five years ago, I got really good at generating leads on Google. What I’ve done over the last few years is write down all the questions people have for me and then build a course around it.

Google has become really important because you can no longer take advantage of a lot of the demographic options for housing ads on Facebook, and Zillow can be incredibly expensive.

This course is designed to help agents take back market share from Zillow, Homes.com, and similar websites by advertising effectively on Google.

Q: Explain how real estate agents can use Google Ads.

The first thing to do is create an account on Google Ads. I have 22 minutes’ worth of video that will show you how to get an ad up and running on Google.

Essentially, the consumer is typing words that will bring up your ads. You’re focusing on a specific area or school district. You can work on branding or digital farming by zip codes. For example, you can run a “just sold” ad within a mile of a target zip code.

I have lenders using Google Ads, as well. They drum up leads and pass off the leads to our agents, who will then refer the buyers to those lenders.

Q: What do you recommend as far as the type of ad and budget?

The most basic example is a search ad. It shows up at the top when you type something into Google.

I like to do responsive ads. Basically, Google will grab the best headline and description that matches what someone types in, and then it serves them an ad.

As far as budget goes, I set one up to run on $5 a day. That brought in 36 or 37 leads. Certain days will be great, while others won’t, but it all evens out.

You can turn your ads off if you find that you don’t get performance during certain times. You can shut them off at night or on the weekends. I want my ads running pretty much all the time so that I can give leads to my agents.

Q: What do you mean by responsive ads?

I like to go hyperlocal and market to smaller neighborhoods, where there is much less competition. This is what we call long-tail keywords. You’re creating ads to specific niches or to a small, defined area. You can do this with listings, just sold ads, or anything similar.

The important thing is to have something visual, because text ads tend to get lost in the mix. From there, Google will look for the best headline and description that matches the search phrase.

Q: Are you targeting different groups with different types of ads?

There are basically two different ads, which are a graphic ad and a display ad. I use Canva to create my graphic ads. You can also do videos, which are cool because not a lot of people are doing them.

One thing you might do is create a video about why someone would use an agent rather than an iBuyer. You can create that video on YouTube and then target people who are watching iBuyer videos on YouTube. You’ll be the pre-roll ad that someone sees before they watch those videos.

Q: What do you do to market a listing?

I like to do videos. You’re running your video ads inside Google Ads, because Google owns YouTube. You can use a bunch of different services to create videos from your photos and listing information.

I like to create videos targeted toward people looking to relocate, and then also hit the people in surrounding states. Then, I’ll see how many people are watching those videos and I can refine the budget.

For example, I have a horse property in the northwest part of town. I’m targeting equestrian interests in the whole western side of the United States, since the audience for this is much smaller. I created a single property website with a click funnel, so that people can see everything they need in one place (and then I can follow up with them).

Q: How much are you spending per property?

I’ll typically spend $250–$500, but that’s only because I’m really blasting it out there. You could spend $50 and get great results.

Q: Are these all listing inquiries, or are there other types of leads you’re collecting?

The less expensive ads are targeted toward buyers. With sellers, you’re competing against Offerpad, iBuyers, and all these other sites that are bidding for the same keyword. Some of these ads are $40–$50 a click. I’d rather go play blackjack or roulette—and I’d probably do better!

With buyers, the clicks might cost between $0.20 and $1.20 each. The thing with Google is that you can say which keywords you want and how much you’re willing to pay per click. Then, you can see what happens.

For seller leads, I mainly do farming and direct mail, with click funnel sites set up to capture their information. We might put something out there about rates being extremely low, or something focused on how much equity they’ve built. We’re converting them from offline direct mail to online leads, and then work to set up appointments from there.

Q: Do you set up retargeting ads?

There are two different ways to do it. You can upload a farm list that will grab everybody in the area, kind of like how Facebook does it. You can also drop a pin in the center of the current zip code and then go a mile or two out. You’ll target branding ads to them, and as soon as they click on anything they’ll be retargeted.

I run conversions on these leads using my CRM. There are a lot of them out there, but as long as you’re able to capture the leads and then add them to your funnel, you can do this.

Q: Are you calling every single lead, or do you nurture some through email?

A lot come through with just an email address. But a lot of times we can find their other contact information. From there, we can work to build the profile on our CRM. If we have someone’s physical mailing address, we can start sending them direct mail and nurturing them that way.

We just had a huge client appreciation event. A lot of those people started as Google leads. Once they go through the funnel, we give back to them that way. They become a deal, then a client, then a friend who will send you referrals.

Q: How are you tracking your success with these campaigns?

When we get them in through the ads, they go into our CRM, and then we nurture them from there. I’ll check on these leads every couple of hours and follow up with agents to make sure they’ve been called. Your conversion rate goes up 400 percent if you call in the first five minutes.

We’ll figure out how many people we needed to reach to get that one lead, and then we can figure out where to focus more of our money from there. We use software call Sisuto help us reverse engineer our goals, and it’s really working for us.

Q: How much time a week do you need to devote to this?

Some people have an assistant who takes care of this kind of thing. But I spend maybe five minutes a day to keep track of my ads and refine things as I need to. Once you get things up and running, it doesn’t take a lot to keep everything going.

Action Items:

• Set up your Google Ads campaign and run a simple branding ad for your farming list.

Connect with Sean:

To receive a free trial and special pricing for Sean’s course, text “staypaid” to 702-710-8890.