Motivated Seller Leads Update
I am continuing the monthly updates for how I am marketing for motivated seller leads. This Google Ads campaign is driving traffic to a website hosted and managed by Carrot. Follow along as I share insights, wins and more.
If you have been following along you know that August produced some results and September was a bit slower.
October Results
I will talk about this below, but my spending increased (unintentionally) in October due to me reconfiguring my campaign and missing a couple of settings before clicking publish.
However, I did generate 6 leads in October. Of the 6, none of the leads have closed and we are in a backup position on 1 of them.
Most of the leads are somewhat motivated but still looking for retail pricing with how hot the real estate market is. I will give a bigger update later on with how I plan to handle this situation going forward.
One of the leads is very promising but hasn’t been responding to our follow up so time will tell if we can provide a win-win solution.
Biggest Insights
October was another learning month. I saw a big decline in traffic in September due to a low ad quality score. If you recall from the last post, I talked about making some changes to increase this score.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have panicked and made a bunch of changes because it was hard to tell what was actually helping or hurting the quality score. I should have left the campaign running and allowed more data to flow through.
Here’s what I did to try and get back on track in October.
I duplicated the original campaign and simplified it. Instead of having multiple ad groups going after a variety of keywords, I simplified it to 2 simple ad groups going after the highest performing keyword phrases.
When duplicating the campaign I missed a couple of really small options that caused me to spend more than I intended.
- I was showing my ads on the Google Display network as well as Search Network
- A couple of my keywords were set to broad match vs phrase match.
You will see in the graph above (and below) that I had a strong start to the month of Oct with clicks but these weren’t the right types of clicks and I paused the campaign from the 5th – 15th so I could regroup and also waited for a payday so I could put more money into my ads account.
Simplified Ad Groups
I like the idea of having more strategic placements of my ad groups and keywords. My working thesis is that by keeping everything in sync my ad quality score will go up.
The ad group → keywords → ad copy → landing page headline
I feel confident that I can add more keywords to this campaign, create an ad group and a target ad campaign for a specific landing page in the future.
Going Forward
I would love for a lead to close in the next 30-60 days to justify the investment I have made into this Google Ads campaign. Only time will tell.
I have been reading more and more about the Google recommendations for optimizing this campaign. I am worried that the CPC and CPA of this type of lead are outside of Google’s normal recommendations and will come back with my thoughts, tests, and insights.
November is typically one of the most expensive months for ads due to Black Friday. I am going to do my best to not chicken out if ad costs balloon a bit and keep the campaign running during this time.
More Data
If you want to see more marketing data for my Carrot website I am publishing a monthly scorecard here. You can also grab a copy of the same wholesaler KPI tracking spreadsheet I am using here.