How not to waste money with Google Ads. Tips for housebuilders using Google Ads

Video transcript

So as you can see here, I’ve done a search for new homes for sale in Yateley, which is where I live, so you would think my intention is to look for, to move to a new home.

We’ve come up with a number of adverts. You’ve got four at the top here, and you’ll also see we have four, sorry, three at the bottom. So let’s just open up some of these adverts. We’ll open them up in new tabs, and then let’s just go through each ad and see how relevant they are to what we’re actually looking for.

Okay. So the first one is from Crest Nicholson, and it is a new development, which is coming soon. It’s called Fernhurst, in a place called Hawley. That is relevant. That is very close to where I live. I would potentially be interested in that, and you can see they’ve already, I’ve got a phone number here, or they’ve got a Register Interest button here. So we could click on the Register Interest, fill out all of our details, and I guess when that probably has some information, we would hear about it. Let’s move on to the next one.

So, Bloor Homes, this is Sandhurst Gardens, High Street. Again, this is very relevant to me. It’s literally a mile or two down the road from where I live, and they’ve given me all the options here, for what I want to do. So these are existing new homes that are ready to be moved into, so I can arrange an appointment to go there, request some information, download the brochure, and so on.

Again, that is very relevant, and they’ve just put down here a few other homes, which, I’m presuming, is in locations … I don’t know, these are the actual homes themselves on the development. You’ve got the site plan, and the actual location, and some facilities around where the places are. So this page is very good. It gives me everything I would need to know on one page.

You can see the arranging point has come back up here at the top. So, yeah, overall, that’s very good.

This one is What Homes. Not totally 100% relevant to me, because it’s not showing me anything to do with homes in the town that I live. It’s basically asking me to do another search, but this is a generic kind of website, which will be promoting homes from a number of house builders. Hence, all the logos here.

So it’s more, sort of like, confusethemarket.com for new homes, I guess, so you can search, basically, what’s happening in the UK. So, I’ve got a work to here. I’d have to put in my postcode or my town, and see if anything actually comes up. So, although not the worst case scenario, it’s not the best.

Next we got Barwood Homes. I don’t know where that is, so let’s have a look down. Oh, it’s in Oxfordshire, so this is miles from where I live. It’s completely not relevant, even at the top hit, and it didn’t really give me any indication as to where the homes were. I can’t see anything up here, it’s not giving me an address or a town or anything.

They do have booking appointments, so these are established new homes that are ready to move into, and make an inquiry. So, overall, not relevant at all, and that’s a wasted click, as far as I’m concerned, because I don’t, I’m not interested in looking there.

Next one, David Wilson Homes. Time to upgrade, with 100% client exchange? Well, this isn’t showing me any homes in my location at all. In fact, it’s asking me to put in my postcode, or location here, so I’m guessing, they don’t actually have any homes in my location. So, again, it’s after me to do a little bit of the work here.

We will actually type something in here. Here we go, Yateley. Okay, well, I don’t know why it didn’t show me this in the beginning. However, these aren’t really … even though they’re near, they’re not in my town. They’re not in the, what I would call the close vicinity. That’s a fair few miles down the road, as is Hook, and there, we’re going into Reading, which is even further away. So you can see the actual mileage away.

If you’re really not too bothered where you wanted to live, you might be interested, but it might be a bit of a waste of an ad, truth be told on that one.

Next one? Well, it’s asking me if I’ve found everything I needed, and I haven’t even looked yet. So I’m not quite sure why that pop-up’s coming up, so let’s just get rid of that. This is really poor, this cookie thing right at the top. It’s hiding the navigation straightaway. It’s quite intrusive on what I’m looking for. I don’t even know where these are. I don’t even know the company or anything.

Okay, so, Graven Hill. I don’t even know where Graven Hill is. Or Graven Hill is the name of the builder. Oh, okay, here we go, some properties here. And still, I do not know where these are. Graven Hill. Where is Graven Hill? Well, I’d be gone by now, if I wasn’t looking at this from a point of view of, where are these things?

Oh, Bicester, here we go. Finally, we’ve found it’s in Bicester. That is absolutely miles away, completely irrelevant to anything I’m looking for, complete waste of money on the advert there.

And the last one, Bellway Homes? Okay, this is good, so they’ve taken me directly to a page, or a development called Forest Chase, in Yateley, in Hampshire. So I can straightaway see what I need to know. Is it in my price range, yes or no? So, yeah, it’s taken me to the right place.

The only thing I would say is, probably make a little bit more of the actions here. Just the word “brochure” isn’t great. Under Request Information, we’ve got a small phone number here. You probably want to make that a little bit more obvious. I was drawn over here first, and into the picture, and then I found this, all this here. You probably wanted something else on the page, to get you to go there. So they’ve got all the other right stuff on there. We got the map on there.

So, overall, okay, and at least it’s giving me the properties in the right place. So that just gives you a bit of an idea on ads that are working. If we go back to the ads here, we see the … we got new homes in Yateley, and Crest Nicholson. Let’s go back to there.

And Crest Nicholson basically is, it had the place in Hawley. So, not 100% totally right, but near enough that I would be interested.

Bloor Homes, which was this one, yes, that is absolutely in the right place. So we would go and have a look at that. It’s a shame, they don’t actually put in the word “Yateley” in here, so it would make me want to click through on that one, as well. The other thing is, I’ve noticed that the phone number here, 750-701, is different than the phone number here.

So make sure that whatever you’re putting in the advert here is reflected in the page that you’re actually going to click onto. So it sends confusing messages, and I don’t know how these numbers are tracked either. So I would want to know, if the phone numbers rang, where that actual, where that actually came from. Now, it may be that that number is a tracking number, and that is the legal number, but it could be confusing for some people.

This one here was the generic one, the What House one, so we clicked on there, and then, actually, we had to a little bit of a search ourselves, which we didn’t do. This one here, okay, so it’s got Oxfordshire Village in there. Why it’s coming up there, I don’t know. I haven’t searched for Ock anywhere in Oxford, and it’s just a waste of time and money.

Let’s go back down here. We then had David Wilson Homes, okay? So that was this one, and we’ve had to actually to do a search, and what we ended up finding, actually, was there wasn’t any homes in Yateley. They just tried to get us to get into their website, do a search and hope we might be interested in moving somewhere else.

Now that might be relevant to some people. Maybe they’re not too fussy about a new home in their specific town. But I would have thought, if you put a specific town name, then you probably want to actually look at houses in that town.

We then had Graven Hill, “The most exciting new homes in the UK.” Well, only if you want to go and live somewhere completely different. This is, it just isn’t very good. It doesn’t tell me at all where it is. So this is probably the worst data out of the whole lot, because at least, even though this wasn’t relevant to us, it did say Oxfordshire in there. So I might have chosen not to click on that.

But this one here, I have no idea. So I’d click on it anyway, and that really would be the worst case scenario is that you’re getting loads of people coming through to your website, you’re spending lots of money on clicks, and many, many of them will not be interested.

Then we have this one here, New Homes in Yateley, that’s perfect. So we, I know it’s in Yateley. It’s a new development that’s just launched, so it’s available, two to five beds, and it was in Yateley, so it gives me everything that I need to know there. So that ad is absolutely fine. They just need to work out how they can get up here, in the top, so this is a prime position on the website, when you do a search.

The only thing they probably could do there, and it may be different in mobile, it could probably give their phone number there.

Anyway, that’s a little roundup of just doing one search in Google, and the kind of results you’re getting, and some of the things that you’ve, should really look out for to make sure you’re not wasting money.

At the end of the day, why have people coming to your, paying your ad, coming to your site, and just not being interested? Hope that makes sense.