Google Ads for Real Estate Agents: A Playbook for Buyer and Seller Leads

11 September 2026·6 min read

Quick answer: A Google Ads account that actually generates listings splits into two campaign types — Search for high-intent "appraisal" and suburb terms, and Performance Max or Display for brand awareness and retargeting — with ad groups broken down by suburb and intent, not by generic real estate terms. Vendor leads and buyer leads need completely different landing pages, because a vendor wants to know what their home is worth and a buyer wants to browse listings. Budget follows intent: put your money where the searcher is closest to picking up the phone. 📈

Most real estate agencies running Google Ads have one campaign, one ad group called "Real Estate," and a handful of keywords like "houses for sale" pointing straight at the homepage. It runs for a few months, generates some traffic, nobody can say whether it produced a single appraisal, and the budget gets pulled. The problem was never Google Ads — it was that the account was built like a general awareness campaign instead of a lead-generation machine with vendor enquiries as the actual goal 💖. Buyers browsing your listings feel good in a dashboard. Vendors requesting an appraisal pay the bills.

What most agents get wrong

The biggest mistake is running one campaign for the whole agency instead of separating buyer intent from seller intent. Someone searching "houses for sale Robina" and someone searching "what's my house worth Robina" are in completely different mindsets, and sending both to the same generic listings page wastes the second person's higher-value intent.

The second mistake is suburb-blind ad groups. "3 bedroom house" as a keyword with an ad that doesn't mention a suburb competes against every portal in the country and converts badly. Agents get the best results when campaigns are structured around the specific suburbs they actually service, with ad copy and landing pages that name the suburb explicitly.

The third mistake is sending every click to the homepage. A vendor who clicked an ad about appraisals should land on an appraisal page with a form above the fold, not a listings carousel they have to scroll past. This single fix — matching the landing page to the ad's promise — is usually worth more than any bid strategy change.

The campaign structure to copy

Campaign 1 — Vendor Intent (Search). Ad groups by suburb, each targeting terms like "[suburb] appraisal," "what's my house worth [suburb]," "sell my house [suburb] agent." Every ad points to a dedicated appraisal landing page for that suburb or region, with a short form (address, name, phone) above the fold.

Campaign 2 — Buyer Intent (Search). Ad groups by suburb and property type ("[suburb] houses for sale," "[suburb] apartments for sale"). Ads point to a live, filtered listings page for that suburb — not the generic listings page.

Campaign 3 — Investor Intent (Search, optional). Separate ad group targeting "[suburb] investment property," "rental yield [suburb]." Points to a landing page speaking directly to yield and growth, not lifestyle.

Campaign 4 — Brand & Retargeting (Performance Max / Display). Retargets anyone who visited a listing or appraisal page without converting, using recent sold results and agent credibility as the creative angle.

Budget split to start: 50% vendor intent, 30% buyer intent, 20% brand/retargeting — then shift weekly toward whichever campaign is producing cost-per-enquiry you're happy with.

A suburban owner-occupier agency: A three-agent office covering five neighbouring suburbs was running one campaign with the agency name as the main keyword — capturing people who already knew them, and nobody else. Splitting into suburb-specific vendor and buyer campaigns, with an appraisal landing page rebuilt for each suburb, moved their appraisal enquiries from roughly one every couple of weeks to a steadier weekly flow, with cost-per-enquiry they could finally track against actual listings won.

An agent chasing vendor leads specifically: A solo agent building a listings pipeline turned off buyer-intent campaigns entirely and put the full budget into vendor-intent search plus a retargeting campaign showing recent sale results to anyone who'd visited the appraisal page but not submitted the form. The retargeting layer, not the initial search ads, ended up recovering the largest share of appraisal requests — people rarely fill in an appraisal form on the first visit.

An agent targeting investor buyers: Running generic "houses for sale" ads was attracting owner-occupiers browsing out of curiosity — high clicks, low quality. Building a dedicated investor campaign with ad copy referencing yield and growth corridors, pointed at a landing page built around investment fundamentals rather than lifestyle photography, cut wasted clicks and lifted the ratio of enquiries that actually turned into qualified buyer conversations.

How to set it up without hiring an agency

1. Build your landing pages first. A dedicated vendor appraisal page and a filtered suburb listings page, before you touch the ads dashboard. Ads sending traffic to the wrong page is the single biggest waste of budget in this playbook.

2. Structure campaigns by intent, then ad groups by suburb. Never mix vendor and buyer keywords in the same ad group — the ad copy needs to speak to one or the other.

3. Write ad copy that names the suburb. "Thinking of Selling in Burleigh Heads?" outperforms "Get a Free Appraisal" because it filters for relevance before the click even happens.

4. Set up conversion tracking on the form submit, not just the page view. Without this, you're optimising blind and Google's automated bidding has nothing useful to learn from.

5. Build the retargeting layer in week two, not week one. You need visitors in the pipeline before retargeting has anyone to target.

6. Review weekly for the first month, not daily. Search campaigns need volume to produce reliable signal — daily tinkering usually does more harm than good.

💡 Track cost-per-appraisal-request, not cost-per-click. A vendor campaign with a higher cost per click but a form that actually converts will beat a cheap-click campaign every time. Agents who only watch click cost end up optimising for the wrong number.

Mistakes to avoid

Running one campaign for the whole agency instead of separating vendor and buyer intent
Sending every ad click to the homepage instead of a matching landing page
Skipping negative keywords, which lets budget leak to job seekers, rental searches, and other agencies' branded terms
Turning campaigns off after two weeks because "it's not working" before there's enough data to judge
Ignoring retargeting, which usually recovers more appraisal requests than the first-touch ad ever will

Frequently asked questions

How much budget do we actually need to see results?

It depends heavily on your suburb's competition and average cost per click, but most agencies need at least four to six weeks of consistent spend before there's enough data to optimise properly — a two-week test tells you almost nothing.

Should we bid on our own agency name?

Yes, generally — it's usually cheap and protects you from competitors bidding on your brand, but it shouldn't be treated as a growth campaign since it only captures people who already know you.

Is Performance Max better than Search for real estate?

Neither is universally "better" — Search gives you control over exact vendor and buyer intent, while Performance Max is stronger for broad reach and retargeting but harder to steer precisely by suburb, so most agencies get the best results running both for different jobs.

Do we need a separate landing page for every suburb?

Ideally yes for your top three to five suburbs by volume — beyond that, a well-built regional page with suburb-specific sections is a reasonable compromise if building dozens of pages isn't realistic.

Keep reading 🤍

Written by

Kate, founder of Chronically Online

I help Gold Coast and Brisbane businesses grow with branding, websites and marketing that actually works.

Work with me ✦