Viability of PPC for Competitive Keywords?

[Kingalan1]

My company is a commercial real estate agency in New York City that helps businesses acquire office space. We are thinking of running a PPC campaign on Google Adwords. However our targeted keywords can cost up to $30 each. Perhaps we can spend $2,000 to $3,000 per month. Is there any way to predict if this campaign would be cost effective?

If only 1 out of 15 site visitors generated by the PPC campaign contacts our firm, and one out of ten of those is a viable prospect, and we close with one out of five of those, it would mean that it would cost 750 clicks per transaction. If an average click is $20, that means that we would need to spend $15,000 per transaction. Our average commission is $20,000. So this is very marginal. Is my calculation overlooking something?

A few keywords we would be competing on are the following:

Manhattan office space rates
Manhattan office space for lease
Rental office Manhattan
Midtown office space for rent
Office space for lease nyc

I might ad that we are competing against huge companies like Loopnet, Weworks,  Regus, and several large real estate brokerages and landlords.

Also, many of PPC visitors are running office space like searches when they are looking for shared executive office suites with very short term leases. This is not our market, we are seeking tenants that need their own demised space for a lease term of at least 3 years. Is there any way PPC can filter out clicks so we don't pay for visits from the executive office suite market?

The site that we would be marketing is www.metro-manhattan.com

Thanks,
Alan Rosinsky

[Alick300]

Hi Alan,

cost of per click depends on many factors like the keyword that you are going to use, target location, competitors bidding. So as far as I know without running a campaign it is very difficult to predict about exact cost per click.

As I can see the budget that you want to use is low so IMO you should start campaign with long tail keywords and you should not bid on broad match.

You can use BMM to target long tail keyword.

e.g +Manhattan +office +space +rates
+Manhattan +office +space +lease

You should also consider Call-Only Campaigns, in this campaign there are chance of getting more leads in low cost.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[LynnPatchett]

As mentioned above the exact CPC is going to vary based on a number of factors.

With a smallish budget you start off with a disadvantage against your larger competitors but this does not mean you cannot compete, you just need to think smart and target intelligently!

In addition to the BMM and call only campaigns mentioned I would suggest looking at even longer tail keywords (for example long term manhattan office space lease - I do not know the market but you get the idea, you can focus on areas of manhattan, types of office spaces etc).  The objective is to focus both your keywords and your ad groups very tightly and hopefully gain a competitive advantage against your larger competitors who might not be doing such tight targeting because they have the larger budget and therefore do not put in the extra effort (it happens more often than you might think!).

Tight targeting like this should allow you to get high quality scores on your keywords (hopefully reducing cpc) and at the same time help reduce irrelevant or more generic office leasing clicks that will just waste your limited budget. Negative keywords will also be important to avoid the 'shared' and 'short term' type searches, there will probably be a lot of relevant negative keywords!

If you set up your targeting very specifically then you should be able to get better qualified traffic at a better cpc and therefore hopefully a better conversion rate. This is important when you look at your numbers. They look correct if they are based on data you already have from your site, but consider what happens if ANY of those numbers change: If you get 1 contact for every 10 visitors instead of 15, if two out of ten are good leads instead of one out of ten, if your average cpc is 15 dollars instead of 20. Changing any of those numbers makes the situation look better, changing all of them makes it look A LOT better! You will only get real data once you try - just target intelligently to increase your chances of success!