You pay good money to drive traffic to your site every month.
So what if there was an easier way to stretch those paid search dollars even further?
Fortunately, there is.
Watch the video below and/or read on to learn how the top real estate teams are squeezing more out of their Goolgle ad spend with better Facebook retargeting. (You can access the full vault of similar videos here)
When you do a Google search, there are two kinds of results to choose from: Ads at the top and organic results at the bottom.
In this example, we'll search “Gaslamp District homes for sale,” and we get the results above. The second ad is for a CINC site. When you click to land on this page, pay close attention to the URL at the top. If you look through it, you'll see that the source includes what's called a GCL ID (Google Click ID). This identifies the click as one that comes from a paid ad in Google's system. So we know that any site visitor that has a GCL ID in the URL that they visit your site has come from a paid Google ad. With that knowledge, we'll segment our list.
Go to Facebook Audience Manager. Click "Create Audience" and choose "Custom Audience." This is going to be from our website. Select "Website" and click "Next." By default the audience will be set to all website visitors, so it would target everyone who had come to your site over the last 30 days. The goal is to segment a bit further than that, so we’re going to click "People who visited specific web pages." You’ll see an option to select "URL" and "contains."
In our example, this is where you’ll enter the GCL ID. With that selected, you're filtering the audience to include people that came to your website over the last 30 days, who came in on a URL that included GCL ID, which we know is from a paid Google ad. Name your audience and give it a description that you'll remember. Then click “Create Audience.”
You can also segment further by frequency, device, or you can add more URL parameters. Maybe you want to retarget everyone who came in from a paid Google ad, and landed on a seller page when they click through to your site. You could add "seller," so the URL contains seller, or you can filter for "does not contain." If you want to retarget people who come to a specific page, not a group of pages, you can select "equals" and enter the actual URL there.
Now that you have our audience created, Facebook gives us a few options. You can Create a look-alike audience, also as it's known in the real real estate space, a special ad audience There's also an option to Create an ad or to Create another Custom Audience. Since you already have our audience set up at this stage, you're ready to create your ad.
Head back to Facebook ad manager. make sure you're doing it from the ad manager and not a boosted post. You’ll find audience targeting options at the ad set level. Click “Edit” and scroll down to the area for Custom audiences. Enter GCL ID.
Just like that, your campaign is set up to target people who have come to your website from a URL that includes a GCL ID over the past 30 days. In other words, you're retargeting your ads to those people who came to your site from a Google Ad over the last month. Since you just set it up, your audience will continue to build.
Harry Kierbow is part of our Client Marketing Team. Together, he and his teammates have over 100 years of real estate advertising experience, and they manage almost 30 million in search and social advertising spend annually.