Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany are three auctions wearing one metro's name
Parish lines separate the budgets because they separate the buyers, the competitors and the price of a deal.
Draw the targeting on parish and submarket shapes rather than a radius. A circle from an office in the urban core takes in water, a good deal of Lake Pontchartrain and towns you have no inventory in. Polygons around Metairie and Kenner, around the Orleans submarkets you work, and around Mandeville, Covington and Slidell give you budgets you can actually read.
Target by where the building is as well as where the searcher sits. A corporate real estate manager evaluating a Jefferson Parish requirement may be sitting in Houston or Atlanta when they search, and presence targeting alone will hide them from you.
Report by parish from day one. A blended cost per inquiry across three parishes averages a market you are winning with one you are losing and tells you to do nothing about either.
Keep the Northshore funded separately. Clicks there are usually cheaper, which means a shared budget will quietly drift across the lake and starve the campaigns you opened the account for.
Event venue and short term rental searches will drain a leasing budget first
The city's visitor economy uses the same words your listings do, and the auction cannot tell the difference.
Broad phrases about property, space and buildings in this market pull people shopping for wedding and event venues, short term rental investors, pop up operators and location scouts. Every one of those is a real search with real commercial intent. None of them is your client.
The negative keyword list is the account. Build it from the search terms report weekly for the first stretch, then settle into a monthly review. Expect to add terms for months, not weeks.
Job seekers are the other steady drain. Searches about commercial real estate careers, licensing and courses look adjacent and convert at nothing.
One more filter worth setting early: exclude the residential vocabulary that overlaps with yours. Anything about homes, condos, rentals by the month or neighborhood living will find a way into a loosely matched campaign.
Put the size and the parish in the ad, or the portal takes the click
You are bidding against national portals with more inventory, so the ad has to promise something specific that they cannot.
Ad copy that names a submarket, a size range and a use qualifies before the click is paid for. Fewer clicks, better ones, and a lower cost per useful conversation even when the cost per click goes up.
Send the click to a filtered availability view, not the homepage and not a generic services page. Somebody searching for warehouse space in a specific parish should land on the buildings that match, with the parish named on the page.
If you have nothing in a size band, do not bid on it. Paying for a click you cannot serve buys you a bad first impression and a search term that will haunt the account.
Where the requirement involves an older building, say so in the copy. A tenant who already knows they are looking at a raised structure or a storefront subject to historic district review will click the ad that acknowledges it.
One cost target across a downtown tower and a Gentilly strip center misprices both
Deal value varies enough by asset class and submarket that a single blended target starves the campaigns worth funding.
Work the target back from the fee you would earn on that kind of assignment and how often that kind of inquiry becomes one. Nobody outside your firm can supply those numbers, and no agency should be inventing them for you. They come out of your own pipeline.
Then judge the account on tours booked and agreements signed, not on form fills. Where your CRM allows it, push the stage back into the ad platform so bidding optimizes toward the outcome instead of the inquiry.
Watch cost per lead and lead quality on the same screen. Cost per lead almost always falls when quality falls, and an account congratulating itself on a cheaper lead is often just buying worse ones.
Attribution windows close before a Louisiana due diligence period does
Commercial decisions outrun the platform's reporting window, and the default view will make patient campaigns look like failures.
A buyer who clicks in the spring may sign in the fall. Questions about drainage, elevation, access under a raised building and what a historic district review will allow stretch that further, because each one adds a professional to the chain.
Keep the record outside the ad platform. Source on the CRM record at first touch, then again at the deal, is worth more than any dashboard the platform will draw for you.
Remarketing carries the middle of that gap at a small fraction of the cost of the original click. So does a modest always on presence against your own firm name, which is cheap and keeps a competitor from buying the moment somebody checks you out before a listing presentation.
Do not rewrite the account after a slow fortnight. A market this size produces lumpy weeks, and reacting to noise is how a working account gets dismantled.
The landing page a Louisiana buyer reads should not have been written in Ohio
Paid traffic lands somewhere, and a page assembled from national boilerplate loses the reader in the first paragraph.
Louisiana runs on civil law rather than the common law assumed by nearly every piece of syndicated commercial real estate copy in circulation. A landing page built from that material is not just bland here. It can be wrong, and the reader most likely to notice is the one with the authority to sign.
Write the page for the parish it targets. Name the submarkets, say what you transact, and describe the process in your own words. Where a legal, code or insurance question comes up, keep it general and say it is worth confirming with the local building department, their insurer or their own counsel.
The form matters as much as the copy. Ask for the use, the size, the parish and the timing, and leave the rest for the call. Every extra field is a chance for a qualified buyer to close the tab.
Questions we actually get
- What should we spend to start?
- It depends on how many parishes and asset classes you want to cover, and the honest answer is that a small budget spread across all three parishes will not teach you anything. Better to fund one parish and one asset class properly, learn what a qualified inquiry costs there, then expand. We would rather show you a real number from your own account than quote an industry figure that has nothing to do with your market.
- Do we need separate campaigns for landlord work and tenant work?
- Yes. An owner deciding whether to list a building and a company looking for space are different people with different searches, different objections and different values to your firm. Running them together means one subsidizes the other and you cannot see which. Separate campaigns, separate pages, separate targets.
- Is LinkedIn worth it alongside search?
- It can be, for reaching a specific set of decision makers when search volume for your asset class is thin. It works differently: search catches somebody with an active requirement, while professional network advertising reaches people before they have one. Fund it as its own line item and judge it on meetings, not on clicks, because comparing the two on cost per click will always flatter search.
- How quickly can we tell whether the account is working?
- You can usually tell whether the traffic is qualified quite early, from search terms and from what your brokers say about the calls. Whether it is profitable takes as long as your deal cycle takes, which in commercial work is measured in seasons. Anyone promising a verdict inside a month is measuring form fills.
- Should we bid on competitors' names?
- Often yes, and it is usually inexpensive, but read the searches carefully. Some competitor searches are clients trying to find a phone number and some are genuine comparison shopping. Watch the search terms and cut the ones that are clearly somebody's existing client, because you are paying to be an inconvenience.
