- SEA
- Tracking & Data
- CRO
The starting point
US real estate is one of the most expensive auctions in paid search. The budget was already large, and buying more clicks does not make the auction cheaper, so growth had to come from the quality of each click rather than the number of them.
The account had to do two things that usually pull in opposite directions: win better positions at a lower cost per click, and send partners leads that convert in a call, not only forms that look good in a dashboard.
What we did
Three moves, all pointed at the same idea: let relevance, not budget, decide who wins the auction.
- 01
Winning the auction on relevance
Ad Rank treated as the primary lever. Query-to-ad-to-landing-page relevance was rebuilt end to end, so the account earned better placement at a lower cost per click. Google gives relevance a discount, and it is worth collecting.
- 02
Intent triage
Query mapping separated browsing traffic from mortgage-ready intent, and budget followed the second. The person comparing neighbourhoods on a Sunday and the person whose offer was just accepted search with the same words and are worth very different amounts, so they got different bids.
- 03
Optimising to partner-accepted leads
Signals fed back from downstream acceptance, so bidding optimised toward the leads partners wanted rather than raw form fills. The algorithm is only as good as the conversion you give it, so we gave it the real one.
The impact
Lead quality, as defined by the client and its partners, rose 9%. That is the number the mortgage partners feel, and the one that decides whether the channel keeps its budget.
Cost per acquisition came in 22% below the market benchmark in one of the most contested auctions in the category, by being the most relevant result on the page rather than the highest bidder.
