You cannot outbid Zillow in your own market

The Grand Union build, part 4 of 8. Season 1: The Diagnosis.

TL;DR

When organic presence is not producing, the obvious alternative in real estate marketing is to pay for attention. In this category that means bidding against Zillow and Redfin for terms in your own city.

You will lose that auction, not because your ads are worse but because they can pay more than the lead is worth to you, and it is still worth it to them. Their economics and yours are not the same economics.

The deeper problem is what happens when you stop. Rented attention returns nothing to you when the payment ends. There is no residual. A small business can afford that for a quarter and cannot afford it as a strategy.

Read next: Part 3: More of the same is the most expensive thing · EST, made discoverable rather than louder · Part 5: The differentiator was in his background

The auction is not a fair fight and it is not supposed to be

A portal and a brokerage bidding on the same search term are not buying the same thing.

The brokerage is buying a possible client. The portal is buying inventory for a marketplace it sells back to hundreds of agents, in every city, forever. One lead is worth a fraction of a commission to you. To them it is worth a slice of a subscription business.

So they can bid past your ceiling and remain profitable. That is not a flaw in your campaign management. It is the structure.

The bit that gets missed is the residual

Everyone knows ads stop when you stop paying. Fewer people price it.

Spend twelve thousand dollars over a year on search ads and you may well get clients out of it. What you will not have on the last day is anything you own. No page anybody found on their own, no reason for a stranger to arrive, no accumulated reason to be chosen. The meter simply stops.

Spend the same twelve thousand on work that belongs to you, and the last day of the year is the day it is worth the most, because it keeps running.

This is not an argument against advertising

It is an argument against advertising as the whole plan, and against advertising into an undifferentiated offer.

Ads are very good at accelerating something that already works. If people who land on your site convert, more of them landing is straightforwardly good. If people who land on your site cannot tell you apart from the next result, paid traffic buys you a faster, more expensive version of the original problem.

Spending money on attention before you have something to be attentive to is the most common way real estate marketing budgets disappear without a trace.

The order matters more than the channel

Figure out what makes you the obvious choice for somebody. Prove that with something you own. Then, if you want to go faster, rent attention and point it at the thing that already works.

That order costs less and takes longer, and almost nobody wants to hear it in month one.

What we did instead

We stopped buying attention and went looking for the thing that could not be bought.

It turned out to be in his résumé, and he had never mentioned it.