Home builder
Clicks weren’t the problem. Who was clicking was.
Two conversions in March at $566.75 each. By May the rate had moved seventeen-fold and the cost was $149.16 — on roughly the same budget.
Industry
Residential home building — new construction
Channel
Google Ads (Search, Performance Max, Demand Gen)
The account
A residential home builder selling new construction in the $500K+ tier across a metro area and the counties around it. Long consideration, high value, and every enquiry worth chasing.
The diagnosis
The account looked busy. 242,605 impressions and 2,202 clicks in a single month — the kind of numbers that read like momentum in a report.
Two of those clicks converted. A 0.04% conversion rate, and $566.75 for each one. A Performance Max campaign was quietly burning $619 at 0.23%. Broad match was doing what broad match does: buying browsers.
The instinct in that position is to raise the budget or rewrite the ads. Both would have bought more of the same people — and the same people could not afford the houses.
The account wasn’t underfunded. It was pointed at the wrong buyers.
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The treatment
Seven things moved together. Pull any one on its own and you get two or three times. Pull all seven and they multiply.
Structure first. The broad-match campaigns were killed and the losing PMax paused. What replaced them was intent-led and geographic: brand defense, county-level and community-specific campaigns, and a Performance Max built for tour bookings. Demand Gen picked up the people who had already visited.
Then discipline. Broad moved to phrase and exact wherever intent could be qualified. Negatives went in hard at account and campaign level — cheap, free, rentals, jobs, salary — and search query reports were mined weekly, before the waste compounded.
Then the highest-leverage line of copy on the account. Competitor monitoring showed that nobody in the new-construction market was putting a price in the ad. Everyone was paying for the same low-intent clicks. We added “Homes from $599,900” to the headline. Click volume fell by design — because the people who could not afford it stopped clicking.
Then the signal. Call tracking with a duration threshold, offline conversion imports for booked tours and downstream sales, and conversion values mapped so Smart Bidding could tell a $599K lead from a sub-$400K one. Without that loop the algorithm optimises for the wrong outcome, confidently.
One line of ad copy did more for lead quality than any bidding change. It cost nothing.
The results
March baseline → May
- Conversion rate: 0.04% → 0.69% — a 17.25× lift
- Cost per conversion: $566.75 → $149.16 (−74%)
- Conversions: 2 → 13 in the first restructured month
- Phone calls: 3 → 7 in twenty days
- Brand defense alone: 6.67% conversion rate at $22.06 a lead
Clicks fell from 2,202 to 617. Impressions fell from 242,605 to 24,382.
Every volume metric went down. The business went up.
