309 First-Home-Buyer Mortgage Leads at $4.41 Each

The Challenge

Our mortgage client was a busy brokerage relying on referrals, repeat business, and the occasional walk-in. It worked, but it was unpredictable. Some months brought a flood of enquiries, others went quiet, and there was no reliable way to turn marketing spend into a steady flow of qualified mortgage applicants.

The brokerage wanted a predictable pipeline for the deals it valued most:

• First-home-buyer pre-approvals
• Refinancing and restructuring enquiries
• Investment property finance
• General home loan consultations

First-home buyers were the priority. They sit at the top of the funnel, they often return for refinances and top-ups, and a single settlement is worth thousands of dollars in commission. The challenge was reaching them at the exact moment they started looking for help, without burning budget on tyre-kickers.

Our Approach

We built a Google Search strategy designed to capture high-intent borrowers the moment they searched for mortgage help, then route them into landing pages built to convert.

Campaign Structure

We split the account into tightly themed search campaigns rather than one catch-all campaign:

• A dedicated first-home-buyer campaign with its own budget and messaging
• A companion high-intent campaign covering broader mortgage and refinance searches
• Separate ad groups by intent so ad copy matched the exact query
• Conversion-based bidding once we had enough lead data to optimise against

Keeping the first-home-buyer campaign isolated meant we could protect its budget and scale it independently once it proved itself.

Keyword & Intent Targeting

Search works because the prospect tells you what they want. We targeted the queries that signalled a borrower ready to act:

• First-home buyer and KiwiSaver-related mortgage searches
• “Mortgage broker near me” and locality-based searches
• Pre-approval and home loan eligibility queries
• A tight negative keyword list to filter out job seekers, DIY researchers, and irrelevant finance terms

This high-intent focus kept clicks relevant, which is exactly what drove the cost per lead down to $4.41 on the standout campaign.

Landing Pages

We sent paid traffic to purpose-built landing pages rather than the brokerage’s homepage. Each page matched the searcher’s intent, led with the outcome (getting into a first home), and made the next step obvious with a short, low-friction enquiry form. Strong message match between the ad and the page is what turns a cheap click into a cheap lead.

Fast Follow-Up

A $4.41 lead is only valuable if someone calls it back. We worked with the brokerage to ensure new enquiries were contacted quickly while intent was still high, which lifted both contact rates and consultation bookings.

The Results

The first-home-buyer campaign became the brokerage’s best-performing lead source:

• 309 first-home-buyer leads generated
• $4.41 cost per lead (exceptional for financial services)
• ~$1,362 ad spend on the standout campaign
• 281 additional leads from the companion high-intent search campaign
• 590+ total mortgage leads across both campaigns

The economics here are hard to ignore. At a $4.41 cost per lead, the brokerage spent roughly $1,362 to generate 309 enquiries. A single mortgage settlement is worth thousands of dollars in commission, so even a low close rate makes the campaign hugely profitable. Convert just a handful of those 309 leads and the entire ad spend is recovered many times over.

Key Takeaways

1. Search captures intent, not interest - These borrowers were already looking for mortgage help, which is why the leads were both cheap and qualified.
2. Tight campaign structure protects your best segment - Isolating the first-home-buyer campaign let us scale it without diluting its budget.
3. Negative keywords pay for themselves - Filtering out irrelevant searches kept the cost per lead remarkably low.
4. Message match drives cheap leads - Purpose-built landing pages aligned to each search turned low-cost clicks into low-cost enquiries.
5. High-ticket services can run on tiny budgets - When the lifetime value of a client runs into the thousands, a $4.41 lead is one of the best returns available in paid media.

This campaign shows that mortgage brokers do not need huge budgets to build a predictable pipeline. With high-intent Google Search, sharp targeting, and conversion-focused landing pages, the brokerage turned a modest spend into hundreds of qualified first-home-buyer leads and a lead source it can scale on demand.