Advertising Benchmarks for Real Estate in 2021

Running real estate ads in 2021 and wondering what your results should look like? It can be difficult to tell whether or not your campaigns are hitting the mark—or missing them entirely.

One way to be sure your real estate advertising is on track is to look at available industry benchmarks with the help of a real estate digital marketing agency to determine the answers to questions like:

• What’s a good conversion rate for real estate advertising?
• What’s the average click-through rate for real estate ads?
• What’s a good cost per lead for real estate advertising?

To provide some context around your real estate advertising results, WordStream and LOCALiQ have partnered to share some benchmarks based on new data for the real estate industry. Here you’ll find the below information for search advertising, display advertising, and social media advertising:

• Average click-through rate
• Average cost per lead
• Average conversion rate
• Average monthly budget

Let’s dive in.

Real estate advertising benchmarks for search ads

Social media advertising on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube is a highly effective strategy for real estate. Just ask the 77% of real estate agents who use social media as part of their marketing—or the almost 50% that say social media results in their highest quality leads.

The data shows that our clients are getting excellent results with social media advertising with a high average click-through rate between 2.01% to 3.02%. To compare, the available data on average social ads click-through rate for real estate is 0.99%.

These real estate businesses are also seeing a low average cost per lead. Apartments and rentals and residential real estate agents each have an average cost per lead under $50, while homes for sale by agent have an average cost per lead under $60, and real estate brokers have an average cost per lead under $80.

Improve your real estate advertising results

By understanding the data around real estate advertising benchmarks, you can compare your results to see how you’re performing and determine whether or not you need to make optimizations to your campaigns across search, display, and social. Get even more insights into these real estate advertising benchmarks plus actionable ideas on how to improve your real estate advertising from LOCALiQ.

Data sources

This data was pulled from a sample of 2,690 North American-based LOCALiQ client accounts in the real estate vertical who were running search advertising, display advertising, and/or social media advertising between March 1, 2020, and April 25, 2021. Each subcategory includes at minimum 10 unique active clients. “Averages” are technically median figures to account for outliers. All currency values are posted in USD.