Earlier this year, we added Google’s Local Services Ads to Homesnap Concierge. These ads are a brand-new advertising product from Google, designed to seamlessly facilitate contact from homebuyers and sellers to real estate agents in their market. They’re prioritized at the top of the Google search page, above traditional paid search advertisements, and enable prospects to live-call an agent directly from their desktop or mobile device.
Recently, our data scientists set out to discover if Local Services Ads really are the game-changing digital marketing product they’re purported to be. What they found was even more staggering than we expected.
After crunching the numbers, our data scientists found that, on average, agents receive one high-intent lead for every two calls they answer. That’s a 50% percent conversion rate—a stunningly high ROI.
Additionally, they found agents receive, on average, one high-intent seller lead for every ten calls they answer.
That’s particularly impressive when you consider the current state of the market, where serious seller leads are hard to come by for even the most experienced and productive agents.
Taken together, the data suggest Google’s Local Services Ads are the single-best digital lead-generation product available to real estate agents right now.
What’s the catch?
If you’re thinking there’s no way these ads can deliver such outsized results on their own, you’d be partially correct. Unlike other set-it-and-forget-it advertising products, Local Services Ads require you to put forth more effort than usual. The results, though, speak for themselves.
We covered this topic in greater depth in this blog post, which we encourage you to read, but to sum it up here, agents need to do the following three things to see the best return on their marketing spend:
- Secure a Google Screened badge: Google wants to ensure advertising agents are, in fact, licensed real estate agents. To do so, Google conducts a business-level background check. Once complete, you’ll automatically be ranked over every non-screened agent in your market.
- Answer the phone: Because Local Services Ads allow prospects to call an agent directly from the ad unit, Google ranks agents who answer the phone higher in search results. Each agent is assigned a Responsiveness Score that reflects how reliably they answer the phone. Ignore too many calls, and Google will deprioritize your ads.
- Get reviews: Local Services Ads display an agent’s Google reviews, too. The more positive reviews the agent has, the more likely Google is to prioritize the agent’s ad unit over those without positive recommendations.
Learn more about the actions you need to take to optimize your Local Services Ads.
Get Started with Google’s Local Services Ads on Homesnap Concierge
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