Using Google & Meta Ads to drive buyer and seller inquiries

Framing the Growth Challenge

Founders in property lead generation face a paradox: demand is abundant, but qualified attention is scarce. Buyers begin their journey on search and social, hop between listings and reviews, and expect instant responses. Sellers want experts who can move fast and maximize price. Meanwhile, competition from portals and tech-forward brokerages pushes cost per click up, while privacy changes and attribution gaps make performance harder to read. The result is an expensive acquisition funnel with leaky points at targeting, creative, and conversion. This guide shows how to use real estate ppc on Google and Meta to capture high-intent demand, warm cold audiences with local proof, and convert clicks into booked appointments at a measurable, scalable cost.

Why SEO and Paid Ads Are Essential

SEO compounds trust and lowers blended acquisition cost over time, but it takes months. Paid Ads give you immediacy and control: you can put hyper-local offers in front of people searching homes for sale near me right now and segment sellers by homeownership and life stage interests on social. Google Ads for realtors excels at capturing bottom-of-funnel intent; Facebook ads real estate excels at demand generation, retargeting, and nurturing. Together they create a flywheel where search captures ready buyers and sellers, social fills the pipeline and keeps your brand present, and retargeting brings fence sitters back when they are ready to act.

What You Will Learn

• Campaign structure that pairs search and social to cover demand capture and creation
• Ad copy that builds trust and local appeal to lift click-through and lead quality
• Lead form optimization to raise conversion while filtering tire kickers
• Retargeting with listings to re-engage high-intent visitors efficiently
• Tracking CPL and ROI with offline conversion import and clear lead stages

Industry Overview

Real estate is digitally mature: most buyers start online, mobile dominates, and video tours are mainstream. Search interest for listings and agent terms spikes on weekends and during key seasonal windows. Even in slower markets, purchase research remains active. On the paid side, rising CPCs reflect intense competition from portals and national brands. On social, algorithmic feeds reward engaging creative and fresh inventory. Privacy updates reduce deterministic targeting, making first-party data, modeled audiences, and event quality essential. Typical high-intent search terms like homes for sale + city, buy a house + city, and best realtor + city carry strong commercial intent and map well to bottom-funnel conversion.

Audience behaviors to note: buyers comparison-shop across 3 to 5 portals, bookmark listings, and respond well to map-based and carousel formats. Sellers want recent local sales proof, transparent timelines, and fast valuation. Both groups favor brands with real photos, local voices, and immediate follow-up via call or SMS.

Benchmark insight to orient expectations: local search CPCs often range from 1.50 to 6.00 depending on market competitiveness; paid social CPMs commonly run 5 to 20. Click-to-lead conversion on well-optimized forms often lands between 8 and 20 percent for buyers and 5 to 12 percent for sellers, with variance by market and brand strength.

Common Challenges

• Leaky funnels: Strong traffic but weak conversion from generic landing pages and long, intrusive forms.
• Low lead quality: Too many unqualified buyers or non-owner seller leads due to broad targeting and vague offers.
• Inefficient spend: Overlapping audiences across platforms, no negatives, and no budget guardrails by intent.
• Weak measurement: No offline conversion import, no call tracking, and inconsistent UTMs obscure real ROI.
• Slow speed to lead: Minutes or hours to respond instead of seconds, crushing appointment rate and CPL efficiency.

Strategy

Campaign Structure: Search for Demand Capture

• Split by intent: Buyer campaigns (buy, homes for sale, open houses) and Seller campaigns (sell my house, list my home, best listing agent).
• Granular ad groups: Group keywords by theme and neighborhood to improve relevance and Quality Score.
• Match types and negatives: Use phrase and exact for core terms; add negatives for jobs, rentals, zillow, redfin, zestimate, and unrelated locations.
• Local signals: Enable location targeting by city or tight radius; add location extensions and call extensions.
• Ad assets: Use sitelinks for neighborhoods, price points, and services like Free Home Valuation; add structured snippets like Service and Neighborhoods.
• Landing specificity: Route clicks to neighborhood or property-type pages with live inventory and fast filters, not generic homepages.
• Bidding: Start with maximize conversions with target CPL guardrails; graduate to target CPA or target ROAS once you have enough conversion volume.

Campaign Structure: Social for Demand Generation and Nurture

• Audiences: Geo-fence your service area; layer interests like house hunting, mortgage, home improvement; build lookalikes of past clients and high-intent site visitors.
• Creative formats: Use carousel for listings, vertical video for tours and tips, and lead ads for valuation and guides.
• Objective mix: Lead generation for seller offers and buyer guides; traffic or sales goals for catalog-based listing retargeting.
• Budget split: 60 percent prospecting, 40 percent retargeting at the start, then rebalance based on lead quality and frequency.
• Frequency caps and sequencing: Keep frequency under 6 per 7 days for prospecting; create sequences like local proof video followed by valuation offer.

Ad Copy for Trust and Local Appeal

Real estate is a trust sale. Copy should prove local expertise, reduce risk, and make the next step clear. Use neighborhood names, price brackets, and time-bound offers. Emphasize social proof and speed to value.

• Buyer search example: City Homes for Sale Today - Tour This Week. New listings in Neighborhood A and B. Get alerts before they hit the big portals.
• Seller search example: Sell in City for Top Dollar. Free 2-minute valuation + 7-day marketing plan. Recent sales in Your Neighborhood included.
• Social hooks: 60-second tour of the 3 best starter homes under 400k in City. Tap to book a private showing.
• Trust builders: 147 local sales, 4.9-star rating, average 11 days to offer. Local team, no pressure consult.

Lead Form Optimization

• Right-form, right-intent: Use short lead ads for top-of-funnel offers and slightly longer forms for high-intent valuation or showing requests.
• Friction smartly: Add one qualifying question such as Are you currently working with an agent or Timeframe to move 0 to 3 months to filter unqualified leads.
• Auto-enrichment: Use address autocomplete and email verification to improve data quality.
• Speed to lead: Trigger instant SMS and call routing. Aim for first call in under 60 seconds.
• Routing logic: Send buyers to an ISA or agent pool and sellers to senior agents. Tag by neighborhood for faster matches.
• UX basics: Fewer required fields, visible privacy note, progress indicator, and a clear what happens next message.

Retargeting With Listings

Use dynamic retargeting to show people the listings or neighborhood pages they viewed. On Meta, sync a catalog of listings and fire view content and add to saved events to feed dynamic creative. Create segments for high-intent behaviors such as saved listings, price filter usage, and contact page views. On Google, mirror this with custom segments, remarketing lists, and dynamic ads where available. Keep lookback windows at 3, 7, and 30 days and tune bids by recency. Add a soft offer for sellers like instant home value check or a neighborhood price report. For buyers, rotate new inventory weekly to keep freshness high.

Tracking CPL and ROI

• Define conversion taxonomy: Lead, Qualified Lead, Appointment Set, Contract Signed.
• Offline conversion import: Pass back stage changes from your CRM to ad platforms so bidding optimizes for quality, not just volume.
• Call tracking: Use unique numbers for search and social, and capture call duration and outcome.
• UTM discipline: Standardize source, medium, campaign, content, and term to ensure clean attribution across tools.
• Revenue mapping: Track commissions or net contribution per closed deal and connect to the original ad level when possible. Calculate CAC to LTV by channel and by buyer vs seller.

90-Day Growth Roadmap

Month 1: Foundation and Launch

• Set up conversion tracking: online forms, call goals, and offline conversion import structure in CRM.
• Build search campaigns: separate buyer and seller with at least 3 neighborhood ad groups each; add negatives and ad assets.
• Build Meta prospecting and retargeting: 2 to 3 prospecting audiences, 1 to 2 dynamic retargeting sets using listing catalog.
• Create landing pages: buyer listing hub by neighborhood; seller valuation page with social proof and recent sales map.
• Implement lead routing and SLA: under 60-second response with SMS and call; calendar link in auto-reply.
• Baseline tests: 3 ad copy variants per group, 3 creatives per audience, 2 form lengths per offer.

Month 2: Optimize and Scale Winners

• Bid strategy: shift top ad groups to target CPA using Qualified Lead as the optimization event.
• Creative refresh: rotate new listing carousels weekly; add one proof-driven video with client testimonial.
• Audience refinement: exclude recent leads and site converters; layer lookalikes of appointments on Meta.
• Form tuning: keep the highest conversion questions; add one qualifying toggle if lead quality is low.
• Budget reallocation: move 20 to 30 percent of spend to campaigns hitting target CPL and appointment rate.
• Testing cadence: A or B two headlines per ad group and one new offer such as First-time buyer tax credit checklist or 72-hour Seller Prep Plan.

Month 3: Quality and Profitability

• Offline feedback loop: import Appointment Set and Contract Signed events; prune campaigns that drive volume but not quality.
• Segmentation: spin out top neighborhoods into their own campaigns for cleaner budgets and better ad rank.
• Remarketing depth: add 3-day high-frequency retargeting with urgency copy for hot buyers; use 30-day education drip for sellers.
• Landing speed: improve mobile performance score; aim for sub 2-second load and keep image sizes lean.
• Scale: increase budgets 15 to 25 percent on campaigns that maintain CPL and quality after import optimization.
• Blended target: set a channel-level CAC to LTV ratio goal and track weekly.

KPIs and Benchmarks

• CPC Search: 1.50 to 6.00 depending on market and term competitiveness.
• CTR Search: 5 to 12 percent with strong local copy and extensions.
• Click-to-Lead CVR: buyers 8 to 20 percent; sellers 5 to 12 percent on optimized forms.
• CPL: buyers 15 to 60; sellers 35 to 120 depending on market and offer strength.
• Lead-to-Appointment Rate: 20 to 40 percent with under 60-second response time.
• ROAS or CAC to LTV: aim for at least 1 to 5 revenue to ad spend or 1 to 6 CAC to LTV over 90 to 120 days.

Real-World Example / Case Insight

What a winning campaign might look like: A regional team allocates 12,000 per month across Google and Meta, split 55 percent search and 45 percent social. Search focuses on three neighborhoods with exact and phrase match for homes for sale, townhomes, and sell my house terms. Average CPC on buyer terms is 2.40 with 8 percent CTR and 14 percent conversion to lead, yielding a 17.14 CPL. Seller terms average 4.80 CPC, 6 percent CTR, and 8 percent conversion, yielding a 60 CPL. Meta prospecting uses two lookalike audiences based on past appointments, plus geo interest stacks. CPM averages 9.50; CTR 1.8 percent; landing-page conversion 10 percent for buyer guides and 7 percent for seller valuation. Dynamic retargeting shows the last viewed listings and a valuation offer to visitors; CPL here averages 22 for buyers and 48 for sellers. Over the month, the program generates 380 buyer leads and 95 seller leads. With a 30 percent lead-to-appointment rate and 20 percent appointment-to-contract rate for buyers, and 35 percent and 25 percent respectively for sellers, the team closes 23 buyer transactions and 8 listings in a 60 to 90 day window. With an average gross commission of 7,200 on buyers and 9,800 on sellers, attributed revenue is roughly 262,400 on 12,000 ad spend over the attribution window, for a blended ROAS near 21.9. Key drivers: tight neighborhood structure, strong local proof in ad copy, responsive follow-up under 60 seconds, and offline conversion import that lets bidding favor leads that become appointments.

Next Steps / CTA

If you want a clear, profit-focused system that mixes google ads for realtors and facebook ads real estate with rigorous measurement, this playbook is your start. We can tailor the campaign structure, copy, forms, retargeting, and reporting to your market and inventory. Need a tailored growth plan? Get in touch.