Google Ads for
real estate.

Google Ads for real estate
businesses.

A property search is one of the few moments where a person hands you the neighbourhood, the property type, and roughly the stage they are at, all inside one query. Paid search is how a real estate business answers that query on the day it happens. The alternative is waiting to be found.

The complication is that real estate attracts an enormous volume of searching that will never become a client. Price histories, market commentary, mortgage curiosity, students writing papers, and people looking three provinces away from anything you can sell. Most of the work in a real estate campaign is keeping the budget away from that traffic and pointed at buyers and sellers in the markets you cover.

Our Google Ads management page covers how an account gets run week to week: structure, bidding, negatives, reporting. This page is about what changes when the thing being advertised is property.

Six parts of a real estate
account, managed together.

Real estate accounts break in predictable places. Targeting set wider than the licence area, a keyword list full of research terms, every ad pointed at the homepage. We manage these six parts as one thing, because fixing one on its own usually just moves the problem somewhere else in the account. Tighten the keywords without fixing the pages and the enquiries still do not arrive.

Tracking goes in
before the ads go live.

We build a real estate campaign in a fixed order. Keyword research against the properties, services, and locations the business sells. Campaign and ad group structure that keeps those apart. Conversion tracking for enquiries, calls, viewings, and valuations. Then, last, the advertisements.

Leaving tracking until the end is the most common way a new property campaign wastes its first month. Without it the account can only report on clicks, and by the time the tracking is working the search terms that produced the early enquiries are already buried under everything else.

The first weeks after launch are mostly data collection. The search terms report is the one thing worth reading then. It shows which property searches the campaign is matching in practice, and that list rarely resembles the one anyone wrote at the start.

Real estate Google Ads
campaigns.

We build campaigns around the areas and services that matter to the business, not one catch-all campaign carrying everything. A brokerage selling condos, a property manager filling units, and an agent chasing listings are not buying the same searches. Put them together and none of them can be priced properly.

Splitting them makes it easier to match the advertisement to what the person searched for. It also makes the reporting mean something, because you can finally see which side of the business the budget is producing leads for.

The eight below are the splits that come up most often in real estate accounts. Not every business needs all of them. A business that needs three of them and runs one is paying to blur its own reporting.

Four people, four searches,
one property market.

One is looking for a property. One is comparing neighbourhoods. One is searching for an agent. One is ready to book a consultation. Four stages of the same decision, arriving through different keywords and needing different pages when they get there.

A campaign that treats those four as one audience ends up writing an advertisement general enough to suit all of them, which usually means it suits none of them. The ad that wins a neighbourhood comparison search is not the ad that wins a valuation request, and the page behind each of them has a different job.

Separating the stages also changes what a lead is worth. A consultation request sits close to the transaction. A neighbourhood comparison sits a long way from it, costs less to reach, and only earns its place in the account if the page it lands on gives that person a reason to come back with a real property enquiry.

Two property searches,
two different intents.

Someone searching for homes for sale in Montreal is not doing the same thing as someone searching for real estate market trends. Both are real estate searches. Only one of them is anywhere near an enquiry, and only one of them is worth a click.

We focus the budget on searches that are closely connected to the services, properties, and locations the business serves, and let the informational half of the category go. That is a deliberate choice, not a gap in the keyword list. The research traffic is real and it is enormous. It also converts at a rate no property business should be paying for.

Negative keywords do the other half of the work. Rentals when the business sells, jobs and careers, courses and licensing, cities outside the service area, and the endless supply of research queries all get excluded so the advertising budget is not spent proving that real estate is a popular subject.

Location does more work
in real estate.

Few categories depend on geography this heavily. We structure campaigns around the specific cities, neighbourhoods, regions, or property markets where a business both operates and is able to take on clients. Everything outside that boundary is spend with no possible outcome attached to it. In a category where people browse listings in cities they will never move to, that is not a small share of the available traffic.

Once the geography is set, we match the ad messaging and the landing pages to the locations being advertised. A neighbourhood-level campaign pointing at a province-wide page throws away the one detail that made the search valuable.

For a business covering several markets, keeping them in separate campaigns is what makes the numbers readable. One market can be producing enquiries at a sensible cost while another quietly absorbs the budget, and a merged campaign hides both of those facts behind an average.

Generate real estate
leads.

Google Ads sends potential buyers and sellers to pages designed around one property, one service, or one market. That is the whole mechanism. The campaign chooses which search gets an ad. The page decides whether the visit becomes an enquiry.

Buyer leads and seller leads behave differently and rarely cost the same, so we keep them apart in the account. A valuation request and a viewing request are both conversions. They come from different searches, need different pages, and are worth different amounts to the business. Counting them as one figure hides which half of the account is carrying the other.

Tracking those actions properly is what tells you which campaigns generate useful leads rather than useful-looking traffic. Without it there is nothing to judge the account on but clicks, and clicks in real estate are cheap to produce and easy to misread.

A property campaign can look busy
and still produce no enquiries.

What the data
actually changes.

We use real estate campaign data to adjust five things: keywords, locations, advertisements, landing pages, and budgets. Nothing moves because one number looked low for a week. It moves when the search terms, the tracked enquiries, and the cost per lead all point the same direction.

Most of that work is subtraction. Keywords that keep pulling in market research come out, locations the business cannot serve come out, and the budget those were quietly consuming moves across to the property campaigns producing enquiries. Adding keywords is the rarer move, and when it happens it comes out of the search terms report, not a keyword tool.

The rest is matching. An ad group winning clicks and losing enquiries has a landing page problem, not a bidding problem. No amount of budget repairs a page that does not show the properties the search asked for.

The homepage is not
a real estate landing page.

Sending every Google Ads visitor to the homepage makes it harder to turn a property search into an enquiry. The visitor arrives having asked a specific question about a specific property or area, and gets handed a menu and a search bar instead of an answer.

A dedicated landing page gives that visitor what they came for: available properties, detail on the neighbourhood, the service they searched for, and a clear way to contact the agent or the real estate company. Everything else on that page is optional.

This is the cheapest thing to fix in most real estate accounts. The targeting is often close to right, and the enquiries are being lost in the ten seconds after the click. That is the one part of the funnel that costs nothing extra in media to improve. Often the right destination is a page that already exists on the site, and nobody had pointed the ad group at it.

Straight answers on
real estate Google Ads.

What sits behind a
real estate campaign.

Real estate is the vertical. These are the pages on how the platform itself works, how an account gets managed month to month, and what the same approach looks like in two other categories.

Property campaigns share most of their mechanics with every other lead-generation account. What changes is the price of a click, the length of the decision behind it, and how tightly the geography has to be fenced before the budget starts leaking.