We held cost per click below £0.40 for a Cardiff estate agent across nine months by spending only on the searches that produce valuations — and aggressively excluding everything else. Over that period the account delivered more than 190,000 impressions and 30,000 direct link clicks for Hern & Crabtree, one of Cardiff’s longest-established independent agents.
Forty pence a click is low for property, a category where generic terms can run several pounds. Here is how the account got there.
Estate agency search is crowded. You are bidding against portals with enormous budgets, national agents, online-only disruptors and every other local agent in the city. Terms like “houses for sale” attract bids far above what a local agent’s economics can support, and the traffic is mostly browsers rather than sellers.
The trap is bidding on the words that describe your industry rather than the words your actual customer types. An estate agent does not need people looking at houses. It needs people thinking about selling one.
We ran exhaustive keyword research and then did the harder part: cutting. The account focused on terms that signal a seller or landlord rather than a browser — valuation language, letting enquiries, and area-specific terms tied to the neighbourhoods where Hern & Crabtree actually have stock and reputation.
High-volume generic property terms were left to the portals. They can afford them; a local agent cannot, and should not want to.
We implemented tight geographic targeting focused on the specific areas relevant to the agency’s listings, rather than accepting Google’s default radius. In a city the size of Cardiff, the difference between “Cardiff and surrounding area” and a defined set of neighbourhoods is the difference between a 40p click and a £1.50 one.
This is where most of the saving came from. Negative keywords tell the platform not to show your ads against searches that waste money — jobs, rentals when you want sales, other agents’ brand names, “free”, student lets, map and directions queries, and the long tail of research terms that never convert. Building and maintaining that list is unglamorous and it is the single highest-return activity in a small paid search account.
Spend was concentrated on the keywords and campaigns that demonstrably performed, with bids adjusted continuously rather than set and forgotten. Underperforming terms had budget pulled rather than being given time to improve.
Refined ad copy and ad extensions did double duty: they lifted click-through rate, which improves quality score and lowers cost, and they stated clearly who the service is for — which stops the wrong people clicking at all. A click you did not pay for is better than a cheap one.
Alongside the paid search work, the integrated organic and paid social activity for Hern & Crabtree delivered a 227% increase in targeted reach and a 73% increase in profile visits — worth noting because search and social reinforce each other for local service businesses in a way that is easy to underestimate.
If your cost per click has crept up and nobody has looked at the negative keyword list in a year, that is usually where the money is. Send us access to the account and we will tell you what we would cut. See our websites, PPC and SEO work or browse the showcases.