Dallas and Fort Worth deserve separate budgets, not one Metroplex campaign
A single campaign spanning six counties reports one blended cost that describes no market you actually operate in.
Dallas and Fort Worth are separate cities with separate downtowns, separate occupier bases and an hour of freeway between them. Inside the same metro you also have Collin, Denton, Rockwall and Ellis counties, each with its own inventory and its own pricing.
Build geographic targets around where your brokers actually go. Presence targeting rather than interest targeting, so you are paying for people in or searching about your ground, not for someone in another state idly reading.
Split reporting by county from day one. You will find that a Tarrant County industrial click and a Collin County office click behave nothing alike, and you cannot see that inside one line item.
Resist the urge to claim the whole Metroplex in the ad copy. Overstating reach buys inquiries you have to hand to someone else, and hand-offs are where relationships and margin both disappear.
Storm restoration, house flippers and job seekers spend your industrial budget first
Broad commercial phrases in this market pull three sizeable audiences who will never become clients.
Warehouse and distribution terms pull job seekers. Anyone searching for warehouse work in Carrollton or Irving is going to click, read for four seconds and leave. Negatives for jobs, hiring, careers, salary, pay and employment belong in the account before it launches.
Commercial property for sale phrasing pulls small residential investors looking at duplexes. Add the residential vocabulary to the negative list: duplex, fourplex, rental homes, foreclosure lists, and the various no-money-down variants.
After a hail event the auction fills with roofing and storm restoration intent, plus vendors prospecting owners. Broad terms containing damage, repair, contractor, restoration and insurance claim will start pulling clicks that have nothing to do with a transaction.
Pull the search terms report weekly for the first stretch, then monthly. The negative list is not a setup task. It is the ongoing maintenance that determines whether the account is profitable.
Landlord assignments and tenant requirements cannot share one campaign
Two different people, two different searches, and one budget that will quietly favor whichever converts faster.
An owner searching for who should list a Richardson office building and a tenant searching for thirty thousand square feet near a highway are not the same buyer, do not read the same page and should not compete for the same daily budget.
Separate campaigns, separate landing pages, separate bids. Tenant and buyer demand is more frequent and cheaper per click. Owner representation demand is rarer and worth far more, which means it needs its own protected budget or it will be starved out.
Pitch support deserves a third structure. When you are competing for a specific assignment, a tightly geofenced campaign around the property and the decision makers, running for the weeks that matter, costs little and puts you in front of the owner during the exact window they are evaluating firms.
Keep match types disciplined. Broad match in commercial real estate is a fast way to fund an education in what the general public searches for.
Competitor names are cheap in DFW, and the click is often a real requirement
The national houses all have large Dallas offices, and their brand terms cost a fraction of generic commercial phrases.
Someone typing a competitor's name alongside an asset class and a submarket is in market right now. They are not browsing. They may be checking availability, or checking whether there is an alternative.
Rules that keep it clean: do not use a competitor's trademark in the ad copy, do not imply an affiliation, and send the click to an honest page about what you cover rather than a page attacking anyone. Worth a look from your own counsel before launch.
Expect small volume. Budget it separately and small, keep the bids modest, and treat it as a supplement rather than a strategy.
Watch for the reverse. If your own brand terms are being bid on, defending them is usually cheap, and losing a client who searched for you by name is an unforced error.
Remarketing is where a long lease decision gets paid for
Nobody signs a lease from a first click, so that first click has to be worth something months later.
Commercial decisions here run long, particularly for relocating occupiers who are also choosing a corridor, a labor market and a construction timeline. A campaign judged on same-session conversions will be shut off before it ever gets credit.
Build audiences with intent baked in. People who viewed an availability list, people who opened a specific building page, people who downloaded a market report. Message each differently, and exclude anyone who has already inquired.
Cap frequency hard. Following a facilities director around the internet with the same banner for two months is a way to be remembered badly.
Professional network placements reach the person who signs rather than the person doing the searching. Costs per click are higher there, so treat it as awareness inside a defined audience, not as a lead source with the same arithmetic as search.
Cost per tour reads differently east and west of DFW Airport
The form fill is not the unit of account, and optimizing to it produces more form fills and fewer deals.
Decide what you are actually buying before you decide what to bid. A qualified requirement, a booked tour and a signed agreement are three different milestones, and only your CRM knows which one an inquiry reached.
Feed the outcome back. Send the qualified stage from the CRM into the ad platform as an offline conversion so bidding works toward the thing you sell rather than the thing that is easy to count.
Report those costs by county. Tarrant industrial and Collin office will not produce the same number, and a blended figure lets a bad geography hide behind a good one for months.
No account will promise you a volume of tours, and any agency that does is inventing it. What honest reporting gives you is a defensible answer to whether the next dollar goes into paid search, into content, or into hiring another broker.
Questions we actually get
- What should a brokerage expect to spend on paid search in DFW?
- It depends on how many counties and asset classes you are covering, and we would rather scope it from your actual coverage than quote a number that sounds credible. The more useful framing: a budget too thin to gather data across six counties will not produce a readable answer, so it is usually better to fund one county properly than five badly.
- Do we bid on the portals' brand names?
- Generally not worth it. Someone typing a portal name wants that marketplace and will bounce. Competitor brokerage names are a different case, because that searcher usually has a real requirement, though the volume is small and the ad copy rules are strict.
- Search or LinkedIn for tenant representation work?
- Search catches the requirement once it exists. Professional network targeting reaches the person who will sign before they start searching. They answer different questions, and the honest sequencing is usually search first, because it is measurable, then a defined audience on the network once you know which occupier profile actually converts.
- How do we stop paying for job seekers on warehouse terms?
- A negative keyword list built before launch, covering jobs, hiring, careers, salary and pay, then weekly review of the search terms report for the first couple of months. Tighter match types help too. Expect it to be ongoing maintenance rather than a one-time fix.
- Can you guarantee a cost per lead?
- No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Auction prices move, competitors enter and leave, and a metro with two anchor cities produces different economics in each. What we will commit to is measuring to the stage that matters to you and reporting it by county so you can see where the money is actually working.
