Google Ads for Mortgage Brokers: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

The power of Google Ads for mortgage brokers is seen in the relevance, control and results that advertisers benefit from. This is relevance in targeted ads for visitors’ search queries. It can be seen in the control of how much you spend to reach your audience that is looking for mortgages.

And it is seen in better leads and enquiries that is higher than other online channels.

So, setting up a pay per click (PPC) campaign for your business will help you realise these benefits.

Advertisers of financial services in Google Ads like mortgage brokers, lenders and others, now need to provide certifications. These new requirements help to verify identity so visitors know who they are dealing with and that they are approved.

Here are some instructions on how to setup your Google Ads campaign and achieve your goals.

 

Campaign objective

First, you should choose the objective that is most relevant for your business. As mortgage brokers, the “Leads” objective is the most relevant because it helps you to focus on getting leads and other conversions by encouraging customers to take action.

 

Campaign type

Next, choose the campaign type that you want to run. The best campaign in Google Ads for mortgage brokers and lenders is the Search campaign. Using keywords and ads helps you to target people that are actively looking for a mortgage online.

 

Budget

Budget is a very important factor to achieving your goals. If your budget is too small, you’ll struggle to get sufficient mortgage leads. So, doing some keyword research as I describe below, will help you to decide on what budget to set.

Another thing to do is set a starter budget to test what returns you will get. Because this is a competitive area with higher average costs per click, this should be taken into consideration.

A good budget to start with is $1300 or £1000 minimum for the first month. And then increase it as performance improves and as you see your conversion rate increase.

 

Bidding

Google Ads provides mortgage brokers and lenders with powerful bidding tools to reach their audiences at auction time. One of these is automated bidding which uses Google’s machine learning technology to set bids automatically when your ads are eligible to appear.

One of the best to start with is Maximise Clicks because it works to get as much click traffic as possible for your budget. Later you can switch to another automated bid strategy like Target Impression Share to appear higher on the page and drive more impressions and clicks. This focuses on visibility.

And you can also test a manual bidding strategy later. This helps you to control your bids at the keyword level, but can be less efficient and more time-consuming.

 

Keywords

Keyword research will help you find mortgage related keywords that are targeted and more transactional than informational. This will help increase leads and means you can continue to increase your budget as performance improves.

The Keyword Planner tool can help you in that endeavour. It’s an in-built, free tool powered by Google’s knowledge of your market and machine learning technology to forecast your performance.

When you have built a good keyword list, you can then focus on the match types you’ll use. These help to control the searches that you get.

And two match types to start with are phrase and exact match. These give you greater control than broad match which could send you a lot of traffic that is not relevant. You should add broad match later when you have built a comprehensive negative keyword list.

This is an example of a keyword in phrase and exact match.

“mortgage for bad credit” – phrase match keyword
[mortgage for bad credit] – exact match keyword

And you can do the same for all the keywords that you find in your research.

 

Text ads

To reach your audiences that are looking for mortgages, you will need to create adverts. This is what people see when people search on Google.

Most importantly it should encourage your visitors to click through to your website or call from your ads. So, you should focus on the key benefits and features that relate to your service. And this should include a good call to action in the headline or description.

Also, your ads should be differentiated from your competitors’ ads. This means you should do a little research into them and see what ads and keywords they are using. A good tool to use for this is SERanking.

 

Locations

It’s important that the right locations are set and not waste budget on locations that you don’t serve. The Locations feature helps you to set the cities, towns, postcodes, etc that you cover and you can exclude any that are not relevant to your needs.

Also, update the Location Options feature to only target “people in or regularly in your targeted locations”. However, this will block people who are interested in your locations but are somewhere else. But the benefit is you will prevent many clicks that are not relevant and save budget.

 

Ad schedule

When your ads appear is very important. People search for mortgages at all times and especially so when they are more relaxed and have more time at hand. So, it’s important to be able to reach them at all times and setting your ads to run on all days and hours is the best setting at the beginning.

Later, you can change to the best times based on the Time reports that you can see in the Segments section. You can access it on the Campaigns page.

 

Where your ads appear

Where your ads appear is important too. Because you’re running a Search campaign, your ads are eligible to appear on Google in the search results above or below the Organic listings.

You can also opt into the Search Network and your ads will appear on some of the hundreds of sites that deliver search results for Google Ads advertisers. This network is effective for mortgage brokers and you can check your reports to see how they are performing.

Unfortunately Google doesn’t provide stats individually for these sites and you won’t know who most of these are except Google owned properties like YouTube, Play and Maps Search.

And you can opt into the Display Network, but this is a different advertising model and it’s best not to include it with search ads.

 

Case Study

Mondo Finance is a mortgage broker in a very competitive sector. Keyword CPCs are high and over time they have struggled to run effective ads. I suggested setting up a new Search campaign which required some regular updates to achieve higher ad positions. Their ads are now more often found in the absolute top positions and they have achieved a click through rate of 15%. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

Google Ads is a great resource and top advertising platform for mortgage brokers that want to reach their target audiences. Contact me to find out how I can help you setup a targeted PPC campaign.