September 2021 – Motivated Seller Leads Update

Published by Alex

Motivated Seller Lead Update

This is the second blog post in a series of posts where I break down my Google Ads results for marketing to motivated seller leads.

We generated 3 leads in August. Of those 3 leads, none of them turned into deals.

September was a little slower. We generated a grand total of…drum roll please…0 leads.

I learned two important lessons in Google Ads this month. Let’s dive into what we learned in the month of September.

You will notice between September 14th and September 20th I received 0 clicks. I noticed a slow down in clicks and an interesting error message in my Google Ads account. A majority of my clicks were coming from a specific broad-matched keyword.

Important Lesson #1 – Ad Relevance Scores

Google Ads was telling me that my ad wasn’t relevant based on three variables

  1. Ad relevance (the headline and copy)
  2. Landing page experience (it loads quick and has content relevant to the ad content)
  3. CTR (the click-thru-rate is lower than expected)

I started reading about how to increase the ad relevancy score. These suggestions were easier said than done without knowing which one of the metrics needed to be worked on. I learned that you can toggle on columns to show more information in our Google Ads account. I was hoping Google would tell me which of the three metrics needed to be improved.

Looks like my work is cut out for me. I need to improve all 3 factors to convince Google Ads to continue to show my ads. All 3 of my conversions in August came from this keyword so I would love to see this improve.

To start I changed the headline copy of this ad to match the headline of my Carrot website. I am going to leave it at that and see if it changes the CTR and we can naturally move this score up from 1/10. I am trying to not make too many changes so I can track what is actually moving this relevance score up.

Carrot home page content

Important Lesson #2 – Broad Based Keywords

While I was waiting on my ad relevance score to improve I decided to do some more keyword research to bring more clicks to my website. I found a keyword I thought was the right mix of intent and motivation so I added quickest way to sell a home.

As you can see it definitely added some clicks to my account.

Motivated seller leads keywords

This new broad match keyword increased my CTR by a whopping 42%. I would have thought this would attract similar traffic as sell my house fast for cash.

But unfortunately the searches this ad was showing up for was not at all related to finding motivated seller leads.

Here is a quick look at some of the searches users were typing into Google that were triggering this ad.

Keyword searches trigged by the keyword.

So as you can see – this is unrelated traffic and I just paid ~$300 to learn a valuable lesson. Here are two tweaks I made to this ad campaign.

  1. I added most of these keywords as negative keywords so my ads won’t show up for them.
  2. I changed the broad match keyword to a phrase match and added for cash. So the keyword is now “quickest way to sell a home for cash”

I realize this will dramatically change the impressions of this keyword but it doesn’t make sense to pay for untargeted traffic.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, we learned two valuable lessons this month.

  1. Ad relevance is important and finding practical ways to improve this score is critical
  2. We need to think about our keywords and watch what searches are triggering the ads so we can stop unncessary spending as early as possible.

I am in a similar situation as I was at the end of August. I need to find a keyword to drive more traffic to my site while I figure out how to improve my ad relevance score.

Time to keep reading and learning on how to optimize a Google Ads campaign.