Cost per click or cost per mandate: why your campaigns measure the wrong thing

Here is a situation we meet regularly in audits. An agency spends € 400 a month on advertising. Its cost per click is low, its click-through rate is good, and its supplier sends a green report every month. Nobody in the agency can say how many mandates that spending produced.

Why cost per click means nothing here

Cost per click measures what you pay to bring someone to your site. It says nothing about what that person came looking for. A campaign targeting « flat to rent Brussels » will produce very cheap clicks and not a single sales mandate.

Conversely, a campaign on « house valuation Uccle » will cost more per click and may bring in a commission. The right question is never « what does the click cost », but « what does the mandate cost ».

Two campaigns, two crafts

A well-built real-estate advertising account systematically separates two objectives, because they share neither the same keywords, nor the same landing pages, nor the same value.

• The seller campaign targets valuation and listing queries, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, and points to the valuation funnel. Every conversion is an owner considering a sale.
• The buyer campaign puts your listings in front of active buyers. Its aim is not to find mandates but to sell faster the ones you already hold — an argument your agents then reuse in valuation meetings.

Mixed into a single « real estate » campaign, those two logics cancel each other out: the algorithm optimises towards the cheapest click, therefore towards the buyer, therefore away from the mandate.

Tracking stops too early

In most accounts we audit, the conversion stops at the form submission. That is progress on nothing at all, but it is still halfway. Between the form and the signed mandate there is a valuation appointment, a fee negotiation, and a signature.

Connecting the campaign to the CRM changes the nature of the decision. You are no longer comparing cost per lead between two ad groups: you see which keyword produced an appointment, and which produced a mandate. Some expensive keywords then become obviously profitable, and some cheap ones turn out to be waste.

Advertise on your area, not on your country

The most expensive mistake we see is also the simplest to fix: a campaign running « in Belgium » when the agency works five municipalities. The budget goes to people you will never serve.

The targeting has to match your real catchment area, irregularities included. An agency in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre does not have the same useful area as one in Anderlecht, even fifteen kilometres apart.

The account must stay in your name

One last point, less technical and more important than it looks. The history of an advertising account has value: it feeds the optimisation models, and it belongs to you. If your supplier advertises from their own account, you start from zero the day you change.