Don’t throw good money after bad habits.
Two things our agency team hears a lot:
Either “I need to cut my PPC spend” or “We need traffic … crank up our Google Ads campaign.”
In both cases, the desired goal isn’t about the ad campaign. But it’s often one of the easiest levers to pull (up or down) to feel like you’re making a difference *right now.*
Too often, it’s a reaction. Or a way to compensate for something else that’s not working in your marketing.
So if you find that your team is making either of these asks, look beyond the ad campaign to see what else might need some attention.
Putting up an ad is an easy way to “drive traffic.”
Cutting an ad budget is a quick way to “save money.”
But while you lean on those ads to capture demand, focus on the details that make the post-click experience easy, remarkable, and fun.
We’re all on tight budgets and looking for ways to save. Looking to do more with less.
And sure, there are always opportunities to nibble around the edges and optimize campaigns. Dial in the targeting. Tweak the focus keywords and ad copy.
But that’s often not enough.
If you’re looking for ways to reduce your spending on Google Ads, start by looking at all the connecting and complementing areas that are either a) bringing down your campaign or b) forcing you to spend more to buy traffic to make up for deficiencies in other parts of the business.
Both are costing you money.
Want to spend less on PPC? Here are over a dozen places where you can find savings and cut your ad budget:
📞 Answer the phone. You already know this one — half of the prospects who try to reach us don’t talk to anyone. That’s like flushing half (ok, more like 30%) of your ad spend down the drain. And as we move toward more specialized roles, the on-site folks really shouldn’t be the ones answering the phones … we need them available to take care of residents in person.
👩🏽 Reinforce your sales training with your leasing team to improve their closing rate. We did the math: If your leasing team can improve their closing rate by 10% (say you go from 35% to 39% closing), you could reduce your top-line ad spend by over 50% without seeing any impact on leasing velocity. It makes that big of a difference.
🏡 Invite the prospect to tour (or simply contact you) from every floor plan on your website — You can more than double your website lead conversion rate by making this one change. Double the conversions means you need half as many visitors to get the same number of leads.
🌐 Work on the quality of your landing pages and make them as relevant to your ads as possible. Google rewards higher-quality, more relevant pages … so stop sending all of your traffic to your homepage.
📆 Make it as easy as possible for prospects to schedule a tour on their own time. I’m not talking self-guided tours; put a tour scheduler calendar on your site. And don’t fake it – connect it to your leasing team’s actual availability. Be the easiest to do business with. You’ll be rewarded.
📈 Work to improve your website conversion rate. Beyond asking for the tour, there are lots of ways to more effectively merchandise your available, create urgency, and otherwise get more folks to take action on your site. Be sure your ad campaigns can clearly track what counts as a true lead (not just a view or a click) — this helps your campaigns get smarter and more efficient over time.
🕐 Follow up with every lead within five minutes. 24/7, no exceptions. (Please just automate this. It’s extremely easy to deliver a relevant, personalized message today that keeps prospects engaged.)
🏎️ Work with your website partner to improve your page load speed, schema formatting, and accessibility. Nail the technical basics.
💸 Stop driving up auction prices by competing against your own sister communities.
🤖 Create more content that helps you rank organically and in AI searches. When you’re already the best answer to their question, you don’t need to spend as much to buy the traffic you need.
📧 Send more lifestyle/brand-focused emails and texts to your prospect list to reinforce why they should live with you. Not just the transactional emails from your automated assistant. Show your prospect what it looks like to live there. Make them feel something. Remind them when you have a deal that’s a match. When they’re excited to see the place, they’re more likely to tour and close. (See above: Improve your team’s closing rate.)
📣 Get louder about what makes your brand unique and worth your customer’s attention.
⭐️ Improve your Google ratings — There’s a proven correlation here. The higher your ratings, the higher your ad click-throughs and the lower your ad costs. And the reverse is true, too — lower ratings mean fewer click-throughs … you have to work harder and spend more to get the same amount of traffic. Talk to our friends at Opiinion or SatisFacts or Widewail
Google Ads are often the quick lever to pull when you need traffic right away. And that makes paid search an incredibly useful tool to have in those moments. But that doesn’t mean it should be the crutch that we lean on to compensate for other parts of our marketing that need more focus and attention.
Break those bad habits. Focus on the details that make the post-click experience easy, remarkable, and maybe even fun.
You’ll be surprised at how much you can cut your ad spending when everything else is working for the customer.
