Case Studies / The ARG Team
Case Study · 2023 to 2025
The ARG Team: Google Ads for Real Estate
981
property inquiries
October 2023 to January 2025
93%
of inquiries from paid search
on 73% of visits
61
inquiries a month
981 over 16 months
The problem
Every agent in the western suburbs is bidding for the same buyers, and the national portals own the results for “homes for sale” in every town. A team website that exists to hold listings gets a trickle of visits and no way to tell whether any of them turned into a showing request.
That was where The ARG Team started. In the six months before the campaign, the site’s analytics recorded 59 visits, and there was no way to know whether a single one of them had asked about a home. The listings were there. The buyers were not.
Approach
- Buy the searches the portals leave alone. The national portals will outspend any team on “Chicago homes for sale,” so that fight was never entered. The budget went to Google searches from people already looking for a home in the western suburbs, where a local team with local listings can win the click. Paid search went on to bring 73% of every visit over the engagement. Four in ten inquiries came from inside Chicago; most of the rest came from the western suburbs, led by Aurora, Naperville, Wheaton, Elmhurst and Downers Grove.
- Make the listing page the lead form. The inquiry that mattered was “request information on this home,” asked on the listing itself rather than on a contact page tucked into the footer. Over the engagement 1,211 people started that form and 981 finished it. The contact page, by comparison, drew 271 visits.
- Test display, then take the money back out. In the second half of 2024 display ads got a real trial: 2,691 visits, a 3% engagement rate, and not one inquiry. The spend was pulled back to almost nothing by year end and stayed in search, where three visits in four engaged with the site, against one in thirty-six from display.
- Judge the account on inquiries, not clicks. A real estate site can look busy and produce nothing. Carousel clicks and listing views were tracked but never reported as results. The one number the account was judged on was people asking about a specific home.
Results
October 2023, when inquiry tracking went live, through January 2025
981 property inquiries from 30,933 visits, about 61 a month.
Where the inquiries came from
Paid search brought 73% of visits and 93% of inquiries
From form start to finished inquiry
4 in 5 people who started the inquiry form completed it
What the traffic looked like before the ads
The six months before the campaign: 59 visits.
Where the inquiries came from
984 form submissions, October 2023 to January 2025; 981 were property inquiries
Where the buyers were
Inquiries by the visitor's city, October 2023 to January 2025
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