Real Estate Paid Ads with AI: Facebook & Google PPC for Investors, ROI Benchmarks, and Compliance Tips

Michael Walsh (00:00)

It’ll tell you how many search volumes a month for that area. And then you can just click a button, check market and say, add to campaign. And so I always tell people if you can go in and find the keywords, people always want, look, this one has 20,000 searches a month, but it’s sitting there at 40 bucks a click. That’s, that’s insane. that’s going to cost a lot of money because there’s a lot of clicks to get to that conversion sometimes. And you’re fighting others for that. But if you’re looking at one and it only has, you know,

50 to 100 searches a month and maybe even 200 to a thousand in that range. But it has under that thousand and you just get a lot of those and they’re like a couple dollars, a couple dollars, a dollar. I’ve even seen in like the agent space, I’ve seen some like 20 cents, 40 cents once. And it’s like, if you get a bunch of those, that’s how you’re going to bring that down.

Kristen (00:38)

Yeah.

Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Michael Walsh, who is the founder of UpRank. And we’re gonna talk all about paid ads, social media, how you can get your marketing out there for your business. So thank you for being here, Michael. Yeah, so I’m excited to talk about this subject. I feel like the marketing is maybe a piece of the puzzle that a lot of people miss within their business. Do you see that a lot?

Michael Walsh (02:33)

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Kristen.

Yeah,

do. ⁓ A lot of people, they get into real estate and they get into the hustle phase, which is more what I would consider the sales phase because sales and marketing is very different from each other. They work together, but they’re different. And then they get to the marketing and they continue to do sales. And then a lot of times they even call it marketing and it’s not really marketing. They’re just selling more.

Kristen (03:05)

Right. Yeah. And so talk about kind of the white space you saw and why you, you know, created UpRank.

Michael Walsh (03:12)

Yeah, so inside of marketing, I’m sure you guys have all heard of paid ads. And there’s this big disconnect when it comes to getting into marketing and hiring an agency. And the math sometimes, and majority of time, it doesn’t even make sense to hire the agency because you’re looking at spending maybe 1,000, 2,000, $3,000 a month, and the agency fee alone starts at 2,000 to 3,000. So now literally 100 % more than what you’re already spending

Kristen (03:40)

Right. Right.

Michael Walsh (03:40)

agency fees. And so until

you get to that 10,000, 8,000 10,000 range, it doesn’t start to make sense. So I saw that and my wife and I, we co-founded the company together and we just saw this space. We were actually in the SEO space running ads for people, doing the agency thing, and then we realized what if we could use AI to help us to do this and not only us but help our clients and allow them to do it and put it into their hands.

Kristen (04:07)

Yeah, that’s amazing. So I mean, you bring up a good point, because I think a lot of people don’t know where to start with the paid ads. So hiring an agency or a contractor makes a lot of sense. But you are just, at the end of the day, eating up your ad spend that you could be putting into ads themselves. So how do you use AI to help people?

Michael Walsh (04:17)

Absolutely.

Right.

So AI works a couple ways. So the first thing is to help to create. And I’m sure everybody knows about this side of AI. AI can help you to create ads. It can help you to create videos, help you to create, you know, maybe visuals, maybe voiceovers, ⁓ UGC avatars. Those are all things that we have on our platform that AI can help to create. We also have it to create copy. So basically you put in your business, your brand, you put in your URL, it can build out your

brand. And once it has that information, then you give it some raw images that just work with your brand. So I always tell people in the real estate space, if you’re an investor looking for ugly homes or looking for a home that’s run down, don’t do what a real estate agent would do and put a beautiful home in and say, do you want to sell your home? You know, cause people are just going to disconnect from that. So you put in those raw images and then the AI, ⁓ you just basically hit generate and the AI will

Kristen (05:15)

Right, right.

Michael Walsh (05:24)

use your brand to then generate different variations of videos, images, and all that around your brand. Copy all that stuff. Then you can literally go through, just like with an agency, you can go through and you can fine tune it. You can fix it. You can say, no, I don’t want it to say this. I want it to say this. Or you can say regenerate. And that’s the same thing with an agency. You’re just in a lot of back and forth with an agency. And a lot of times it’s email or Slack channel and it takes a little bit of time. Whereas with this, it’s everything with AI.

instant. It’s like fix this, done. Fix this, done. And then you can hit launch and we have an API direct connection with over 10 platforms and it will literally launch your ad on those platforms, any platforms you want to launch it on. And then that’s where I say that the magic happens with AI. AI is good at creative, it’s great at looking at data.

Kristen (07:02)

Right.

Michael Walsh (07:02)

sifting

through it, analyzing it, figuring out patterns, and then saying, hey, this ad runs better than this, choose this over this. And so our system basically A-B split tests.

four variations of copy, four variations of headlines, and four variations of videos, four variations of images, mixes them all up, and figures out what’s doing the best. And the cool part is now we have the ability to just click a button and say optimize for me, and the AI will actually optimize it all for you. You just check in on it just to make sure you like what it’s doing, and that’s it. It’s just kind of like a check-in, a daily, every few day check-in to make sure everything’s going good, but the AI can handle it for you.

Kristen (07:28)

Wow.

Wow, that’s really cool. And does it help you kind of target by geographic area? Like if someone was, you know, only doing business in a certain area.

Michael Walsh (07:51)

Yeah.

Yeah, so

can build out anything that you can build out. example, I’ll use Meadow or Google kind of as examples, because we’re also on other platforms. But Meadow and Google are kind of the biggest ones that investors are using. And so you can build out just like you could build out your audience on their platform. You can build it out, save it. You can build lookalike audiences, retargeting audiences. The only thing you can’t do, obviously, is once you click the special categories, because we do have that ability, because we are very big in the real estate area.

is you can’t sort by ages, but that’s just a legal thing versus anything. And that’s, I’m sure as any of you guys know, that’s something you shouldn’t be doing or can’t be doing in real estate and you’ll just get your ads banned anyways. So that’s something that our platform does and you build those out right in the platform. Same with Google, we have a keyword researcher. So you can research keywords and then add them to your campaign, stuff like that.

Kristen (08:45)

Yeah, and you mentioned something interesting. What are some of the compliance issues with real estate ads?

Michael Walsh (08:51)

Yeah,

so really the biggest thing is age, gender, race, all that kind of stuff. So basically you can’t just say, you know, I only want people that are below the age of 50, above the age of 40 to be seeing this ad.

That’s the real, that’s the real one that they just shut down. Like they don’t want you doing that. And that’s a good thing. I mean, that’s a good thing for everybody. But you can say, Hey, I only want people in Denver, Colorado, or I only want people in, you know, Indian Indianapolis, Indiana. You can go to geographic areas. You could also go to interest-based. So that’s another way that you can kind of fine tune people down is based on their interests, based on what they’re doing, what they’re searching online. Are they?

Kristen (09:35)

Got

it.

Michael Walsh (09:35)

searching

to sell their home? Are they searching for real estate? Are they asking for fixing up their home, for example? Are they searching projects to fix up their home or how-to, stuff like that?

Kristen (10:21)

I mean, that’s really interesting. And does it help you kind of decide, kind of narrow that in? Cause I know that’s a big, cause the meta backend from what I’ve experienced, it’s so confusing. And even with someone who has marketing experience, they make it as difficult as possible. And even picking your audience, it’s not as straightforward as you would think where it’s like, well I’ll just, you know, pick these things that make sense. So does the AI kind of help you

Michael Walsh (10:27)

Yes.

Kristen (10:48)

actually realistically fine-tune the audience.

Michael Walsh (10:51)

Yes, and you’re

exactly right about Meadows backend. what this is interesting about Meadows backend, what you see is not what I may see. And I learned this years ago with a client when we were on the phone and I was telling him where to click and he’s like, I don’t have that button. And I’m like, no, I think you’re in the wrong screen. And then I was talking to my Facebook rep and they were like, ⁓ well, sometimes when we roll out features, everybody sees something a little different.

And with ours, it’s not like that. So we have the direct API integration with Meta, for example. that’s just one place, but we have a direct API integration. So everything that you can do in Meta, you can do in ours, but the UI is just a lot easier to use. it’s just, it’s very straightforward. It’s, know, pick your goal and then it gives you a selection of which goal you want. literally walks you step by step to launch. And I.

I can literally show somebody in less than 15 minutes from start to finish and they’re launching their ad. And that’s literally how fast it is. For even a newbie, as long as you can use basic Facebook or basic email, you don’t have to have heavy tech experience, obviously.

Kristen (11:46)

Wow

Yeah, and then when we’re talking about actually optimizing it and making sure you’re getting the results, what are some good ROIs to shoot for when you’re doing paid ads for real estate?

Michael Walsh (12:08)

Yeah, so it really depends on the market. That is a huge…

huge difference. What I always say is when you’re looking at PPC ads, the things that I like to look at, the numbers I really like to look at is if you’re getting good leads, you’re looking at about a one in 10 close, maybe even better. Some markets are a higher, some markets are a little lower. So you’re looking at about a one in 10 close and depending on the market, could be that lead could cost you anywhere from a hundred to a few hundred dollars and you can’t get a

little

bit more obviously if you’re like very honed in on this type of lead in this type of search and that’s where the keywords become so important. Like if you’re bidding on the most expensive keywords you’re going to spend in the couple hundreds but if you start throwing in a lot of the smaller keywords and this is what’s cool about our tool is the keyword search tool like it will literally tell you how much is cost per click on that.

Kristen (12:54)

Yeah.

Michael Walsh (13:04)

It’ll tell you how many search volumes a month for that area. And then you can just click a button, check market and say, add to campaign. And so I always tell people if you can go in and find the keywords, people always want, look, this one has 20,000 searches a month, but it’s sitting there at 40 bucks a click. That’s, that’s insane. that’s going to cost a lot of money because there’s a lot of clicks to get to that conversion sometimes. And you’re fighting others for that. But if you’re looking at one and it only has, you know,

50 to 100 searches a month and maybe even 200 to a thousand in that range. But it has under that thousand and you just get a lot of those and they’re like a couple dollars, a couple dollars, a dollar. I’ve even seen in like the agent space, I’ve seen some like 20 cents, 40 cents once. And it’s like, if you get a bunch of those, that’s how you’re going to bring that

Kristen (13:43)

Yeah.

Michael Walsh (13:54)

And so one in 10 close.

I’m comfortable with about $100 bucks a lead. $100 bucks a lead and under in Google. With Facebook, I like to see anywhere from $15 to $40-ish lead tops. $40 is starting to get high in my book. We’ve seen them as low as $8 to $10 a lead. And it just depends on the market. Some markets are going to be very expensive. Some aren’t.

Kristen (14:11)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, the keyword thing is interesting because I’m sure people type in real estate investor or real estate agent all the time, but that doesn’t even help you. mean, because people want to get granular. So it kind of helps both ways where you want someone searching exactly the market you’re in, exactly what you do.

Michael Walsh (14:32)

Yes.

Absolutely.

Kristen (15:20)

It’s very interesting. ⁓ So what are some of, I mean you mentioned kind of the visuals, but what are some of the other common mistakes you see in the real estate industry, you know, when people are trying to run their own ads?

Michael Walsh (15:31)

I think a lot of times people don’t give themselves enough credit, I’ll say that much. They kind of just say, okay, I can’t do this, I’m not gonna learn it, this is too hard, stuff like that. And I see the biggest mistake is that they are always listening to everybody else, but they’re not just learning and understanding.

And I remember when I first got into Facebook ads, and this was back, this was back 2000, this would have like 2013, 2014. And I got into it and I was taking a bunch of courses on it. And it was amazing how fast those courses just were obsolete.

Kristen (16:11)

Yeah.

Michael Walsh (16:11)

And today

it moves so much faster than ever. So I am constantly, for example, when I’m running a campaign, when I’m looking at a campaign, I’m always asking AI, you know, what’s going on with this? What’s going on with this? What works right now? I’m also looking at what other people are running and what’s been running longer. can quick hack is you can just search a Facebook meta library.

and then go in and search for We Buy Houses ads, for example. And you will see every We Buy Houses ads that’s running currently. It’s all public knowledge. Like Facebook puts it out there for the public. The hack is to then back set your date by three months and then back set your date by five or six months. ⁓

what ads have been running and are still running. Maybe they launched back in May and they’re still running today. You know that ad is doing good.

Kristen (17:07)

Interesting.

Michael Walsh (17:07)

on some level because

I mean, unless the person, unless somebody’s just sitting there throwing money at nothing. And most people don’t have that ability. Some ads you got to watch because they might be a bigger company. They might be a Wall Street company. So those ones you don’t want to go after looking at as much because they’re just in a different game. But look at the smaller investors and if they’ve been running an ad since May,

you know something’s good with that ad. So that’s just a good kind of base to follow. And so give yourself more credit. I think that that’s the number one thing is give yourself more credit in marketing and don’t always hand it off to others. That’s the other mistake. I had a guy come in to our agency and he when we were just doing agency only and he was literally telling me about this other agency that he had worked with and it took him.

took him three months to figure out that they weren’t even watching his ads for about three months. And his ads were underperforming and he kept contacting them and they’re, no, no, this is just the market. This is just normal. Well, then he got a message from Meta and he didn’t notice it. And then about a month later, he notices the message and his card had canceled.

Well, the agency never reached out to him when his card canceled and his bills hadn’t been being paid. If that agency was really watching his account, they would have reached out to him day one and been like, your card was expired. We need to change that.

Kristen (18:20)

Yeah.

God.

Wow, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people fall into that. And you were talking about looking at other people’s work to kind of help you with your work. I would imagine, because you were talking about smaller investors, that would also kind of apply to the big guys, right? Because they have so much money to throw into data and research.

Michael Walsh (18:47)

Yeah,

yeah, it does, but it doesn’t. So the smaller guys don’t have a lot of money, so they’re going to keep an ad running only if it’s actually doing something good for them, usually. Usually. That’s in most cases. The bigger ones, they’re sometimes looking at a brand play. They’re looking at, for example, let’s just take like HomeLite, for example. ⁓ HomeLite can afford to say, hey, we’re gonna throw away, you know,

Kristen (19:09)

Yeah.

Michael Walsh (19:15)

$10,000 a month on this ad, as long as it’s getting enough impressions. Whereas the small investor, they don’t just want impressions. Impressions doesn’t do it for them. They need clicks, they need people to fill out the form, they need deals from it. Whereas HomeLite can say, hey, we’re building our brand and we have all this cash to sit on. And that’s where you just gotta be careful about following the bigger guys.

Kristen (19:20)

right?

Michael Walsh (19:38)

because they can have stuff that works, but at the same time, they may have stuff that’s not truly working in the same way that it needs to work for you.

Kristen (19:45)

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. mean, I wouldn’t have followed that logic because I think a lot of people, when they’re in that, especially when they’re investing, they’ll follow kind of like the companies like, a McDonald’s popped up in this neighborhood, you know, Starbucks, where it’s like, we’re going to follow their data because they obviously do more data. But you’re so right in this industry. It’s not the same. There’s different goals. And yeah, especially for a big guy, they don’t know they just kind of like being out there and the name

Michael Walsh (20:14)

Yeah,

Kristen (20:15)

It’s still circulating.

Michael Walsh (20:15)

yeah, they’re just playing a different game. They’re at a level where like in I heard a study the other day and it really made me think about the whole entire market in general, not even just real estate, just everything. And it was that 40 % of job postings are actually not even real. There’s no real job there. And what it is is that companies run these for one of a few reasons. One reason is because they want to show all their hardworking employees

Hey, look, we’ve got people coming. Don’t worry. We’re going to, we’re going to back you up. They also want to show under performing employees. Hey, look, we got people coming. If you don’t perform too bad. And then the last thing, which is the scary one that really messes with the market is if they have 3000 jobs out there, but they really don’t. But if they can show that to investors, we are hiring 3000 jobs for 3000 jobs right now. Investors are like, Ooh, that looks good.

Kristen (20:47)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Michael Walsh (21:12)

And so on paper,

it makes them look really good. And that’s why you have to be very careful of who you follow when it comes to marketing.

Kristen (21:19)

Yeah, that’s really interesting. Well, I mean, I think you’ve given such good tangible advice for people. I think the marketing part of it is where a lot of people struggle. So I think it’s great. So tell everyone where to find you and where to find UpRank.

Michael Walsh (21:28)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

you can just go to uprankpro.com. It’s U-P-R-A-N-K-P-R-O.com. And I’m sure you guys will put it in the show notes, so.

Kristen (21:40)

Amazing. Well, thank you.

Yes, amazing. Thank you so much. I think that you probably helped a lot of people just with some general advice, you know, how to start. Yes, thank you. And thank you everybody for watching. I hope that you learned a lot, got some inspiration to maybe, you know, change up your marketing. So we’ll see you back next time. Bye.

Michael Walsh (21:49)

Great, great. Well, thank you guys so much.

Thanks.