Google Ads for mortgage brokers, built around funded loans

Where mortgage brokers lose money on paid search

Mortgage has been one of the most expensive categories in paid search for years, and the reason is not mysterious. A funded loan is worth real money, so plenty of well funded bidders will pay for the click that might become one. That leaves very little room for a sloppy account. Every setting left on its default gets billed.

• Bidding against lead sellers on rate shopping terms. The top of that auction belongs to aggregators that resell one inquiry to several lenders. They can pay more per click than you can, because they get paid more than once for it.
• Location targeting left on the default. Google will serve your ads to people outside your area who show interest in it. For a broker licensed in two states, that means paying for clicks nobody at your desk can legally originate.
• Purchase and refinance sharing a campaign. Different buyer, different urgency, different click price. On one budget, whichever is hot that month eats the other one's spend without anybody deciding that.
• No negative keyword list. Without one you pay for loan officer job openings, NMLS license courses, payoff statement questions, free calculators, and homework about amortization.
• Clicks pointed at the homepage. An ad about VA loans that lands on a page listing seven programs and a headshot makes the visitor hunt. Most do not hunt. They go back to the results page you just paid for.
• Nothing counted after the click. Most inquiries arrive as a phone call, and plenty of applications finish inside a portal on another domain. If neither is tracked, the account is being managed on a hunch.

What we actually manage in the account

Paid search is a stack of small, boring jobs, each of which costs money when nobody does it. For a mortgage broker, these matter most.

• Campaigns split the way your business is split. Purchase and refinance first, then by program where the volume justifies it: FHA, VA, jumbo, down payment assistance, self employed documentation. Budget can then move toward the work you want.
• Match types chosen on purpose. Tight matching where intent is obvious and the click is expensive, looser matching only where the volume justifies the risk.
• A negative list that keeps growing. The search terms report gets read weekly at first, then monthly. Job seekers, license students, calculator hunters, and programs you do not offer come off the bill.
• Geography set to your licenses, not your ambitions. Presence based targeting, state by state, with the radius drawn around where you can actually originate a loan.
• Ad copy written for a 30 character headline. Which loan, which state, who it is for. Vague copy buys vague clicks, and here a vague click is an expensive one.
• A landing page built for the ad that sent them. One program, one question answered, one obvious next step. We can build that page, and show you a free mockup of it first.
• Conversion and call tracking, including the handoff. Calls, forms, and the click into whatever application portal your lender uses, so a campaign ties to real applications rather than a click count. First-party lead dashboards run on more than 20 of the sites we manage.
• Budget pacing. Daily caps, scheduling around the hours somebody is there to pick up, and spend that moves with the month instead of sitting flat.

What we do not control: what competitors bid, what Google charges on a given day, and whether the phone gets answered. The Google Ads hub covers the channel in general, analytics and CRO the measurement.

The auction you are actually bidding in

Before deciding what to bid, it is worth being honest about who else is in the room. On broad rate shopping terms you are up against national aggregators, rate table sites, and lenders with a marketing department. They are not going to run out of budget on a Tuesday.

That does not close paid search to a local broker. It means the profitable ground is narrower than the terms everyone lists first. Program plus place plus situation is where a broker still wins: the self employed borrower in your county working out what two years of returns will get them, the buyer told a VA loan needs money down, the person declined once who never found out why. An aggregator writes for the whole country. You can write for one market and one situation.

Then comes arithmetic nobody enjoys. What a funded loan pays you, what share of inquiries become applications, and what share of applications fund. Those three numbers set the ceiling on what a click is worth, and the ceiling is also how we decide what to stop bidding on. When the going price for a term passes what the loan behind it earns, the move is to drop the term, not to raise the budget. If the arithmetic does not work anywhere in your market, we would rather say so on the consult. The free what should you pay tool is a fair place to start.

Rates, seasons, and the rules this category runs under

Two things move mortgage demand, and only one of them is on a calendar.

• Purchase follows the season. Buyer activity builds through spring and summer and thins over winter. A budget divided evenly into twelve pieces spends its best money in January.
• Refinance follows rates, and rates give no notice. When they move, query volume and click prices climb the same week. Paid search is the one channel you can turn up on a Wednesday afternoon and back down two weeks later, which is most of its value here. It only helps if somebody is watching when the news lands.
• Capacity is a real ceiling. A loan officer buried in files does not benefit from more inquiries. Spend should step down while the pipeline clears, not stack up applications nobody can return for three days.
• Housing and credit ads are a restricted category. In the United States, campaigns for housing or credit related products give up audience targeting options including age, gender, marital and parental status, and ZIP code level targeting. That is Google's rule, not a setting to work around, and the account gets built inside it.
• Copy has to survive review. A rate or a monthly payment in a headline can pull in disclosure requirements no 30 character headline can carry, so those numbers belong on the landing page with the disclosures they require. Financial services accounts can also face extra verification before ads serve, better handled before launch than on launch day.

Pages an ad points at get built with your NMLS ID, licensed states, and Equal Housing Opportunity notice in view, and nothing we write implies a guaranteed approval. Sign off on wording is yours or your brokerage's. We are not your compliance officer, and nothing here is legal advice.

What makes Kelly WM different

Plenty of agencies run a broker's ads off the same skeleton they used for their last twelve accounts, on a fee that is a percentage of whatever you spend. It scales nicely for them, and it is why so many loan officers have one bad story about trying Google Ads.

• The landing page is built, not borrowed. Pages are custom coded to match the ad that sent someone there, so relevance is a decision instead of a hope. How we build covers the approach.
• The fee is flat. A percentage of spend pays an agency more every time it talks you into a bigger budget. That is a poor incentive to put between you and your own money.
• You talk to the person doing the work. Kelly WM is one operator in Orlando, working nationwide since 2008. A call or a text reaches whoever touched the account last, because it is the same person.
• The tools are public and free. More than 50 free tools are published at kellywm.com/tools with no email wall, and a custom calculator on the landing page is yours to keep.
• Nothing is held hostage. Month to month, no long term contract, and the ads account, the landing pages, and the conversion history stay in your name.

One thing an ad budget cannot buy is a mention inside an AI generated answer, which increasingly sits where the list of results used to. That is a separate discipline, covered under AI search optimization.