Case studies / Real estate
Google Ads · Low-ticket acquisitionReal estate clicks for $1–3. The trick was who we didn't bid on.
OwnersRE let homeowners sell without a commission for a $399 flat fee. That fee was the entire acquisition budget, and seller keywords in real estate run $8–20 a click. The only way the maths worked was to bid exclusively where brokerages don't.
A flat fee, full service alternative to a commission.
OwnersRE gave homeowners nationwide what a listing agent would: MLS, Zillow and Trulia syndication, a property website, a yard sign, appointment scheduling with a live person, and offer vetting, for one flat fee of $399 instead of a commission.
The service sold itself once someone understood it. The problem was the arithmetic of reaching them at a price point that left almost nothing to spend per customer.
Every seller search is a different seller.
"How to sell my house" and "sell my house without a realtor" look like the same intent. They aren't. One is someone still weighing options, and every brokerage in the country is bidding to reach them. The other has already ruled out paying a commission, and almost nobody is bidding there, because the businesses with the budgets don't want that customer.
Where the brokerages spend.
High volume, contested by realtor brands and iBuyers whose entire model depends on the commission assumption holding. The landing page has to explain why flat-fee selling is even viable before it can sell anything.
- Search volume High
- Who else is bidding Every brokerage
- Typical CPC $8–20
- Implied cost per lead ~$500+
Where almost nobody does.
"Flat fee MLS listing", "sell my house without a realtor", "FSBO MLS". Lower volume, and the searcher has already made the commission decision. The ad doesn't need to persuade, it needs to be the first credible answer.
- Search volume Lower
- Who else is bidding Few
- Actual CPC $1–3
- Actual cost per lead $89
A $399 product in a $20-a-click category.
OwnersRE gave homeowners what a listing agent would: MLS, Zillow and Trulia syndication, a property website, a yard sign, appointment scheduling with a live person, offer vetting, for one flat fee instead of a commission.
The service sold itself once someone understood it. The problem was the arithmetic of reaching them.
-
The fee was the entire acquisition budget
$399 per customer, and nothing else. In a category where a single click can cost $20, there was no room to pay for anyone who wasn't going to convert. Most businesses in real estate advertising have a commission behind them absorbing that cost. This one didn't.
-
Brokerages bid hardest on exactly the wrong searches
The high-volume seller terms are contested by companies whose revenue depends on the commission model continuing. Competing there meant paying premium prices to argue with the audience.
-
There was almost no conversion flow to start with
Form and call conversions were close to nonexistent, which meant no data to optimise toward and no way to tell which traffic was worth anything.
-
Nationwide, with no single market to optimise around
Seller behaviour, price expectations and competitive intensity shift by state and metro. An evenly-split national campaign would have overspent in expensive markets and underspent in the ones ready to convert.
Five decisions, mostly about exclusion.
At $399 a customer, what you refuse to buy matters more than what you buy.
Build conversion tracking before anything else
Call tracking and form conversion tracking across every entry point, attributed to campaign and keyword. With almost no conversion flow in place, there was nothing to optimise toward until this existed.
190% more form and call conversions, from almost none.
Segment by decision stage, not by keyword volume
Separate campaigns for decided sellers and comparison-stage searchers, budgeted and bid independently so the expensive early-stage traffic could never quietly absorb budget meant for people who had already chosen.
Clicks at $1–3 in a category that averages far more.
Exclude aggressively
Negative keyword work filtering out people looking for an agent, renters, job seekers, and the research queries that share vocabulary with seller intent. In real estate those overlaps are large, expensive and constant.
Budget concentrated on genuine sellers.
Build landing pages around the objection, not the offer
Pages structured around what a skeptical seller actually wants to know, what's included, what it costs, what happens after signing up, because "no commission, still full service" reads like a catch until it's answered.
Click-to-lead conversion strong enough to hold $89 per lead.
Move budget toward the markets that converted
Continuous market-by-market bid management, shifting spend toward the states and metros producing signups rather than splitting it evenly across the country. Retargeting through AdRoll kept the offer in front of sellers who left without converting.
45 leads a month on $4,000 in media.
Six times cheaper than the category, and still tight.
At the benchmark CPC for real estate seller keywords, $4,000 a month buys roughly 330 clicks. At the same conversion rate that's about seven leads, at more than $500 each.
Bidding only where decided sellers search, the same budget bought 45 leads at $89.
- Monthly media $4,000
- Cost per click $1–3
- Leads per month 45
- Cost per lead $89
- Lead to signup ~30%
- Cost per signup ~$297
And here's the part worth being honest about
At a 30% lead-to-signup rate, $89 per lead becomes roughly $297 per customer. Against a $399 fee, that's about 74% of revenue going to media before anyone at OwnersRE did any work.
That is what low-ticket acquisition actually looks like. A six-fold improvement in cost per lead still left a narrow margin, because the underlying maths of selling a $399 product through paid search in real estate is genuinely hard.
We're publishing that rather than stopping at the cost per lead, because the cost per lead on its own would be misleading. $89 is a good number in this category. It is also, at 30% conversion to signup, most of a $399 sale.
The levers that would have changed it sit outside an ad account: raising the lead-to-signup rate through intake, increasing average revenue per customer through add-ons or renewals, or both. Paid search had already done the part paid search can do.
Their public review.
"DiscoverMyBusiness has been a very useful resource for our new company, and I highly recommend them. Currently they are running our Google Campaign, our landing pages, and our AdRoll. Extremely responsive to all inquiries I have made. Very reasonable price. We have an ongoing monthly meeting. In each meeting they are bringing more and more information to the table. Again I highly recommend them, and I am available for references should you want to ask me any questions."
Posted publicly on Google during the engagement.
Four things for any low-ticket offer.
Find the searches your competitors don't want
If a search implies rejecting the dominant business model, the companies with the budgets won't bid on it. That's where cheap clicks live, and the searcher is further along.
Work backwards from the price
Divide your product price by a realistic close rate before you set a target cost per lead. If the number that comes out is below your category's CPC, broad targeting was never going to work.
Cost per lead is half the answer
A great cost per lead at a poor close rate is still a bad cost per customer. Always carry the multiplication through before deciding the account is working.
Some constraints aren't marketing problems
When media already accounts for most of the sale price, the remaining levers are conversion rate and revenue per customer. An agency that won't tell you that is selling you more media.
What went into it.
Five of our services, on one account.
Are you paying to convince people, or to reach the ones already convinced?
Most accounts blend both into one campaign and wonder why cost per lead looks fine while cost per customer doesn't. Give us read-only access and we'll show you the split, and what your cost per customer actually is once the close rate is applied. Findings are yours to keep either way.
Read-only access · No obligation · You keep your accounts