How to Generate Mortgage Leads Using Google Ads

Google Ads often gets a bad press amongst mortgage brokers. They say it's too expensive and they get lured towards the seemingly cheaper clicks that are available with Facebook Ads. 

But I firmly believe that Google Ads is a great way to generate your own mortgage leads - so long as you know what you're doing.

So in this article I'm going to explain

• how Google Ads works
• why it goes wrong for a lot of mortgage brokers
• how to set up a campaign the correct way so it generates mortgage leads at a sensible cost per lead

If you'd rather hear me explain all this instead of reading the article, then check out this video of a Facebook Live that I presented in my Marketing and Lead Generation for Mortgage Brokers Facebook group.

How Google Ads Works for Mortgage Brokers

I've covered this in some detail in other articles, so I'll just give an overview here and include links to other articles where you can get more information.

Google Ads allows advertisers such as mortgage brokers to specify a list of keywords that they want to bid on. These are the types of words or phrases they think their potential clients will type into Google when they're looking to get a mortgage or remortgage - e.g. mortgage broker, mortgage advice, remortgage quotes, best mortgage deals, etc.

When a user enters a search term into Google which is a close enough match to one of your chosen keywords, Google will display one of your ads above or below its organic search results. You write these ads yourself and each one can have three headlines and two lines of description.

You only pay if someone clicks your ad. You specify a maximum bid for each click and then actual amount you pay is determined by an auction process.

Why Do Mortgage Brokers Lose Money on Google Ads?

There are several reasons why Google Ads can end up costing a lot of money and not delivering you the mortgage leads that you want.

A common problem is that advertisers choose keywords which are too broad or too generic - for example, mortgages rather than something more specific like mortgages for company directors.

Another issue is that people use keywords which will be triggered where the search intent is wrong. For example, consider these two search terms:

• first time buyer mortgages
• first time buyer mortgage broker

Someone who searches for the first one of these might want to speak to a mortgage broker, or might just be looking around for the best lender with the intention of arranging the mortgage themselves.

On the other hand, the second search indicates someone who is specifically looking for a mortgage broker to help them get their first mortgage.

So the search intent is much stronger with the second keyword and this makes it a better choice that is likely to generate mortgage leads for a lower cost per lead.

The other issue with keywords is that the advertiser may not have taken the time to understand how keyword matching works. This means that, even if they have chosen their keywords really carefully, they could end up appearing for lots of irrelevant searches.

Even if you get your keywords right, it's possible to waste a lot of money by having badly written adverts. You need to make sure your ads are relevant to the keywords you're targeting and that they are packed full of benefits and unique selling points which will differentiate you from your competitors.

Finally, you need to ensure that your landing pages are up to The job of turning visitors into leads. This is an area where many advertisers fall down. If your website does not have well-designed landing pages then there are plenty of easy-to-use tools that can help you create high converting landing pages.

How to Use Google Ads for Generating Mortgage Leads

You'll have a much better chance of success with Google Ads if you focus on one or two specific niches within the mortgage industry. This will make your marketing more focused and will naturally steer you towards choosing less competitive and lower cost keywords.

Before you start advertising, take a long hard look at your business. What are your unique selling points? What makes you different from, or better than, other mortgage brokers? Why did your current clients choose to work with you? Drill into these questions and use the answers to help you create a value proposition for your website and to identify the benefits that you're going to shout about in your ads.

Follow the steps in my free guide to Google Ads or my free Google Ads course to help you create a Google Ads campaign with the correct settings (Google's default settings are often not the best choice).

Stick to a small number of keywords to begin with and expand the campaign gradually once you start to see some results.

Before you write your ads, watch the video at the top of this article. There's a section in there where I show examples of a couple of different mortgage adverts from Willow Private Finance and from Mojo and explain what makes them good or bad.

Finally, make sure you set realistic bids and choose a daily budget that you feel comfortable with but which is still going to give your campaign enough scope to achieve success.

At first glance, you might think that bidding, say, £5 per click is expensive. But look at it this way. At £5 per click, it will cost you £500 to get 100 people to visit your website. Out of those 100 visitors, it would be reasonable to assume you'd get at least 10 leads. And out of 10 leads you'll surely be able to close one deal, won't you? 

If so, then even on those fairly conservative estimates, you'll have got one new client for a spend of £500. Given that a single client could earn you £1,000, that's not a bad return on investment.