A Cedar Park flex requirement and a South Congress retail suite are two accounts, not two ad groups
Asset classes share no searchers, no landing pages and no sensible budget, so stacking them lets the cheapest clicks eat the expensive ones.
Industrial and flex, office, retail, land and investment sales each deserve their own campaign with its own budget cap. When they share one, the platform funds whichever produces cheap clicks, which is almost never the line of business you most want to grow.
Split tenant demand from landlord assignments too. A tenant with a requirement is searching. An owner deciding who lists their building usually is not, at least not in the same words, and that side of the business is better served by outreach, by content and by a small brand campaign than by a bidding war.
Each campaign needs a page written for it. An industrial click should land on current industrial availability filtered to the submarket, not on the homepage or a general contact form.
Keep the account small enough to manage. In a metro this size, twenty campaigns starve each other and nobody ever gets clean data on any of them.
Event space, apartment locators and coworking day passes drain an office budget first
Broad commercial phrases in this market pull people renting a venue, booking a desk for the day, or hunting an apartment.
Start the negative list before launch, not after the first invoice. Obvious blocks include apartment, rent, wedding, event space, party, coworking, day pass, jobs, salary, license, courses and classes.
Then read the search terms report every week for the first months and keep cutting. The real waste is never the terms you predicted. It is the ones specific to this market that you would not have guessed.
Prefer phrase and exact match while you learn. Broad match with automated bidding will find you volume, and most of that volume will be someone looking for a studio apartment near Zilker.
Watch the land campaigns closely. Land phrases attract residential buyers, ranchette shoppers and people researching taxes, and they are the fastest way to lose a month of spend quietly.
I-35 and the MoPac corridor deserve separate budgets and separate landing pages
Where the building sits changes the buyer, the price and the competition, so geography belongs in the account structure rather than in a radius setting.
A radius around your office is a lazy proxy for a market that runs from Georgetown to San Marcos. Target by the geography of the inventory instead, and keep Travis, Williamson and Hays separate enough that you can read them apart.
Set location targeting deliberately. Sustained in-migration means a meaningful share of your best searchers are sitting somewhere else while they plan a move, so presence only targeting can cut off exactly the requirements you want. Interest based targeting brings noise with it, so it needs its own budget and its own scrutiny.
Write the ad copy in the geography the searcher used. A Round Rock query should get a headline that says Round Rock and a page that lists space there, not a metro wide index.
One more split worth making: the western side of the market behaves differently. Lakeway, Bee Cave and Dripping Springs searches skew toward owner users and land, and mixing them with an urban office campaign makes both unreadable.
The clicks worth paying for come from a lease expiring, not from curiosity
Commercial intent lives in phrases that name a size, a use, a submarket or a deadline.
Fund the phrases that describe a requirement: warehouse for lease in a named suburb, office sublease, medical office space, retail pad site, tenant representation, and the sell side equivalents for owners ready to move.
Research phrases are a different job. Market report, cap rate, and how much does office space cost belong to content, not to a conversion campaign, unless you are deliberately buying an audience to remarket to later and you have said so out loud in the plan.
Competitor names can be worth bidding on, and they can also be a waste. Test them in a separate campaign with a modest cap so you can kill them without argument.
Remarketing carries real weight here because the decision cycle is long. A tenant who visited an availability page in March may be worth reaching in September, and that is cheap inventory compared to the original click.
Spend against the tours your brokers can actually run this week
Pacing should follow the capacity to answer, not an even spread from midnight to midnight.
If inquiries sit for hours because everyone is out, the fix is not more budget. Schedule ads to the hours your team picks up, and staff a real callback path before you raise a bid.
Pull spend deliberately when it makes sense. During a large assignment pitch, or when a major listing is about to launch, the account should serve the calendar rather than run flat.
Resist rewriting the account on a slow week. Commercial demand arrives in clumps, and a quiet stretch in a market with this few monthly requirements is noise, not a signal.
Set a floor you can defend for at least a quarter. An account that gets cut and restarted every six weeks never accumulates enough conversion history to bid intelligently.
A Dripping Springs tour can eat most of a broker's afternoon, so price the bid from there
Cost per lead is a vanity number in a business where the expensive unit is a broker's time, not a form submission.
Define the stages first and agree on them with the brokers: inquiry, qualified requirement, booked tour, signed agreement. If the team cannot agree what qualified means, no measurement downstream will hold up.
Feed those stages back from the CRM as offline conversions so bidding optimizes toward requirements rather than form fills. Without that, the platform will happily buy you cheap contact submissions from people who wanted a desk for a day.
Expect the reporting window to lie. A lease decision can outrun any thirty day attribution window by a wide margin, so read the account by cohort and judge it over quarters.
Then work the math backward. What a booked tour is worth to you sets what an inquiry is worth, which sets what a click is worth. Bidding without that chain is guessing with a budget attached.
Questions we actually get
- What should we budget to run paid search for a commercial firm here?
- There is no honest universal number, and any agency quoting one has not looked at your market. Work it from the other end. Decide what a booked tour is worth, estimate how many inquiries produce one, and fund the smallest structure that can produce a readable result: usually one or two asset classes and one geography, held steady for a quarter before expanding.
- Google Ads or LinkedIn for a brokerage?
- Search catches the requirement that already exists. LinkedIn reaches the person who will sign or who appoints a listing team before they search for anything. Most firms should start with search because intent is cheaper to convert, then add LinkedIn for landlord and capital audiences once the intake process is proven.
- How do we handle searchers who are not in Texas yet?
- Deliberately. Decide whether you want presence based targeting only or want to include people showing interest in the area, and run the second group in its own campaign with its own budget. Those clicks bring more noise, but they also include relocating operators who have no local broker relationships at all.
- Is it worth bidding on our competitors' names?
- Sometimes, and you should treat it as a test rather than a policy. Run it as a separate campaign with a small cap, write ad copy that does not disparage anyone, and look at whether those clicks produce real requirements or just curious clicks. Kill it without sentiment if it does not.
- Our sales cycle is long. How do we know the ads are working?
- Instrument the pipeline before you scale the spend. Tag every inquiry with its source, push CRM stages back to the ad platform, and read results by the month the click happened rather than the month the deal closed. Then hold judgment for at least a quarter, because a single deal can distort any shorter window.
