Denver the city and county is a fraction of the Denver your buyers mean
The platform will happily sell you a municipality when your market runs from Boulder County to Castle Rock.
Denver is consolidated as a single city and county, so the city geo target in your account is a much smaller footprint than the market your brokers cover. Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Westminster, Thornton, Centennial, Littleton, Englewood, Broomfield and everything in Douglas County sit outside it.
Build geography deliberately instead. County level targets, or drawn polygons around the corridors you actually work, give you spend you can read. A radius drawn around a Cherry Creek office pushes budget west into the foothills where there is very little to lease.
Set location options to include people searching about your area, not only people physically in it. A corporate real estate manager in another state researching an expansion is one of the most valuable searchers you will see, and presence only targeting removes them.
Report by county from day one. Spend that looks fine at the account level often turns out to be one strong corridor carrying three weak ones.
Mountain property and Wash Park apartments will drain an industrial budget by Wednesday
Broad property phrases in Colorado pull ski condos, rental hunters and job seekers long before they pull a requirement.
Property searches here carry a heavy consumer shadow. Mountain and resort listings, apartments in RiNo or Wash Park, house hunting, real estate license courses and brokerage job openings all sit close to the phrases you want.
Start on phrase and exact match rather than broad. Broad match plus automated bidding in this category is an efficient way to buy irrelevant volume, and the damage is hard to see in an aggregate cost per lead.
Read search terms weekly for the first several months, then monthly. Build the negative list as you go and keep it in one shared place across campaigns so a new campaign inherits everything you already learned.
Watch for the commercial ambiguity too. Commercial cleaning, commercial insurance and commercial lending queries all collide with commercial property, and none of them will ever tour a building.
Your buyers type RiNo and LoDo, and the ad platform has never heard of either
Submarket vocabulary is where the cheap, high intent clicks still live, and automated targeting will not discover it on your behalf.
People searching for space use the names locals use. RiNo, LoDo, Cherry Creek, the Wash Park edge, plus suburb names like Arvada, Englewood, Golden and Castle Rock. Those phrases are lower volume, cheaper and far more qualified than metro level terms.
Every submarket keyword group needs a page that names the place and shows what you have there. Sending a Golden search to a homepage or an unfiltered listings index wastes the click you just paid a premium for.
Include the spelling and spacing variants people actually use, and keep an eye on how the platform's close variant matching interprets neighborhood names. It sometimes broadens them into something unrecognizable.
Layer the asset class on top: warehouse, flex, retail pad, medical, small bay. A submarket term plus an asset term is usually the highest intent combination in a brokerage account.
Half your clicks come from people who will never sign a lease
Competing brokers, appraisers, lenders, students and vendors click commercial property ads all day, and none of them are pipeline.
Turn off search partners and the display network for search campaigns until the core account is clean. Those placements generally produce the cheapest clicks and the least useful ones.
Exclude your own office IP ranges where the platform allows it, so your brokers checking placement do not quietly consume budget. Add known competitor domains to placement exclusions on any display or video activity.
Instrument the phone. A meaningful share of commercial inquiries come by call, and without call tracking you will optimize toward whichever campaign happens to generate form fills instead of the one generating conversations.
Score the account on conversations where somebody named a company, a size and a timeframe. Raw conversion counts flatter the campaigns attracting curiosity.
Mountain time gives you two live hours before your brokers open the laptop
Capital and corporate real estate teams on the East Coast are two hours ahead of you, and their searching happens before anyone in your office picks up a phone.
Check the hour of day report before you touch bid adjustments. In most brokerage accounts the early morning window carries a disproportionate share of serious searches, and the response to those is a voicemail box.
Either staff that window or give it a path that works unattended. A booking link that opens a broker's real calendar, a short qualification page or a text back option all beat a contact form nobody reads until nine.
Resist switching ads off overnight on instinct. Out of state searchers and owners reviewing property after hours are both real, and blanket day-parting tends to cut the least competitive hours you have.
Pace budget across the quarter rather than the calendar month. Commercial decisions move on lease expirations and board cycles, and a slow three weeks followed by four inquiries in a day is normal here rather than a signal to rebuild the account.
A tour from Broomfield to Castle Rock costs half a broker day, so price that
The number worth optimizing is not cost per lead, it is what it costs to put a broker in a car with somebody who has a genuine requirement.
Write down the stages before you measure anything: inquiry, qualified conversation, scheduled tour, tour held, proposal or letter of intent. Without those definitions everyone in the room is arguing about a different funnel.
Push the stage back into the platform as an offline conversion where your CRM supports it. Bidding toward scheduled tours rather than form fills changes which keywords survive, often dramatically.
Geography makes bad tours expensive here. The metro is long and thin because the foothills close off the west, so a broker who drives from Broomfield to Castle Rock for an unqualified showing has spent most of a working day. Qualification in the ad and on the landing page is worth more than a wider keyword list.
Expect a cost per booked tour that looks alarming next to consumer benchmarks, and judge it against the value of an assignment rather than against another industry. No agency can responsibly promise you a cost or a volume before the data exists.
Questions we actually get
- What should a Denver brokerage expect to spend on paid search?
- There is no defensible number to quote before we see the auction for your asset classes and submarkets. Commercial clicks are expensive and volume is thin, so a budget that produces meaningful learning is usually the practical floor rather than a percentage of revenue. We would size it from search term volume and your close rate, not from a benchmark.
- Should we bid on competitor brokerage names?
- Sometimes, and it depends on the name. Searches for a specific firm often come from someone with a live requirement, and the click can be reasonable. It also invites retaliation and can irritate a firm you co-broker with, so it is a business decision as much as a media one.
- Do we need separate campaigns for landlord work and tenant work?
- Yes, because the searchers behave differently and the budgets should not compete. Owner and investor queries are lower volume and higher value, and mixing them with occupier searches lets the cheaper clicks absorb the spend. Separate campaigns also let you pace each against its own calendar.
- Is LinkedIn or another paid social channel worth adding?
- It can be, once search is clean and measured. Paid social reaches people who are not searching yet, which suits owner outreach and market report distribution, and it usually costs more per conversation. Adding it before search is instrumented generally makes attribution harder without adding pipeline.
- How quickly will we know whether paid search is working?
- Long enough to be uncomfortable. Commercial requirements move over months, and early clicks often surface as tours much later, so early cost per lead readings are misleading in both directions. Tracking scheduled and held tours from the start is what shortens the honest answer.
