Practical blueprint unpacked — read the full story...
Since 2006, Fast Sale Today has been a leading cash house buyer in England and Wales.
However, despite their success, a mounting problem was lurking: rising advertising costs, poor-quality leads, and a dwindling return on ad spend (ROAS).
Robby du Toit, the owner of Fast Sale Today, shared his frustration with us:
"Our PPC agency is rapidly depleting our budget with minimal returns. They keep blaming the market, but we're the ones suffering the consequences."
Our audit peeled back the layers of Fast Sale Today's PPC woes, revealing a fiercely competitive battleground.
Robby's plight was set against a backdrop where 20+ companies were vying for the top four exclusive ad spots above Google's organic search results. This intense competition inevitably led to inflated click prices and a rise in the cost per lead, squeezing margins and heightening the struggle for visibility.
But the challenges didn't stop at market saturation. Robby was candid about the quality of leads funnelling through the campaigns.
"The leads we are getting are mostly dead ends. People are either impossible to contact, or they wouldn't return calls, or they tell us they were merely comparing market options, having no real intent to sell quickly for cash."
These low-quality leads not only failed to convert but also sapped the energy and resources of the sales team, leading to a weakened sales pipeline.
The culmination of these factors — the fierce competition for prime ad real estate and the influx of non-committal leads — was taking a toll on Fast Sale Today's business health
After reviewing the search term report, we saw that there was £1,000s in wasted ad spend on clicks that would never convert into qualified leads. For instance, broad match keywords triggered clicks from search terms like “repossessed houses for sale”, “sell my car fast”, and “property for rent”, which deviated significantly from the desired intent of a motivated seller who wants to sell for quick cash.
To stop this waste, we built extensive negative keyword lists, preventing the ads from being seen and clicked by people who were not in our targeted segments.
This tactic alone led to savings of ~£5k per month, adding up to £60k over a year.
After cutting out irrelevant clicks on Google Ads, we moved the saved budget to Bing, the best-kept ‘secret’ in search engine marketing.
With fewer advertisers running ads on Bing, ad clicks cost less than on Google, but thanks to the same high-intent keyword-based targeting, the leads could be just as valuable.
This shift resulted in 16% more incremental leads at a 23% lower cost per lead compared to Google.
In PPC, not all leads are created equal. What truly matters is whether they convert into closed deals and generate profit.
That's why our next step was to overhaul the tracking system, aiming to understand each lead's journey from initial click to final sale.
In collaboration with Robby, we identified three critical milestones to track and report on:
For every qualified lead that entered the system, the sales team would mark them as 'Accepted offer,' 'Solicitor instructed,' or 'Purchased property' in Salesforce, Fast Sale Today’s CRM.
As leads advanced from one stage to the next, their status updates were fed back to Google Ads, giving us real-time insight into which campaigns, keywords, or ads were attracting motivated sellers and which ones weren't pulling their weight.
Finally, we designed a custom reporting dashboard outlining campaigns’ ad spend, the number of qualified leads, expected revenue, profit, and ROAS.
Here's what Robby said:
“At last, the numbers were clear—the cost of our investment and the profit it's generated.”
Once the lead milestone data — accepted offers, instructed solicitors, and purchased properties — began to flow in, we had to wait for the patterns to emerge.
After two months, we performed the lead quality analysis, looking at leads that evolved into accepted offers, legal instructions, and purchased properties.
This analysis provided three key insights:
Equipped with these insights, we segmented keywords into nine groups according to their intent and profitability potential and restructured Robby’s Google Ads campaigns.
Our revamped campaign structure played a pivotal role in improving our deal closure rate, primarily through targeted budget allocation and fine-tuned bid adjustments.
We leveraged Google Ads' capability to set distinct budgets for each campaign. Our approach was straightforward: prioritise the investment on the most profitable campaigns and just then allocate the remaining budget to moderately successful keywords and experimental areas.
This budgeting strategy might seem obvious, but it's actually a core part of effective PPC management—to correctly identify the most profitable traffic segments first, then look at other options.
Like budgets, bids are set on the campaign level in Google Ads. Knowing that not all leads are equally valuable, we increased bids on those most likely to result in sales and decreased them for campaigns with lower potential. This approach ensured we paid the right price for each type of lead, according to their expected value.
We also paused keywords and excluded search terms that showed little to no profitability.
This more focused approach to keywords and audience targeting, budgets and bids significantly improved the quality of the inquiries, resulting in a 34% increase in leads converting into purchased properties.
In Robby’s words:
“When Kwery outlined the strategy changes, I must admit I had my doubts, but the impact on lead quality was undeniable — a complete turnaround.”
Once we honed in on attracting the right leads with refined keyword and audience targeting, we shifted our focus to the next challenge: boosting lead conversion rates to drive down the cost per lead.
How does an increase in conversion rates help to lower cost per lead?
It comes down to this formula: Cost per Lead (CPL) = Cost per Click (CPC) / Conversion Rate (CVR).
Let’s break that down.
CPC is what we pay for each click on our ad, while Conversion Rate (CVR) is the ratio of clicks that become leads. For example, if CPC is £20 and CVR is 10%, CPL would be £200. Boost the CVR to 25%, and the CPL drops to £80.
In other words, by increasing CVR, we lower the CPL, effectively getting more leads for the same ad spend.
To achieve this, we developed a new landing page designed to entice and convert as many qualified prospects as possible. It featured:
After fine-tuning the landing page template, we tailored it for specific target groups, like those looking to "sell my house at auction" or landlords wanting to offload properties with tenants.
With a substantial 76% of traffic coming from mobile users, we also rolled out a mobile-optimised version of the winning design.
This concerted effort paid off, lifting our conversion rates from 18.22% to 27.63%. This helped us counteract the rising cost-per-click, ensuring we continued to pull in a steady stream of motivated leads without breaking the bank.
With search campaigns on track, we broadened our scope with Google Display and Facebook to:
These initiatives yielded a 13% bump in entirely new inquiries, all at just 36% of the cost per lead from Google search campaigns.
Get in touch, and let's have a no-obligation, good old, honest chat about pay-per-click advertising.
You'll speak with a PPC specialist, not a salesperson.
