PPC for mortgage broking in Australia

Why does one broker’s Google Ads account keep producing settled loans year after year, while another burns through the same monthly budget and ends up with a CRM full of enquiries that never get past the second phone call? It’s almost never the keywords people blame first.

Mortgage brokers now write close to seven in ten new home loans across Australia, according to the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia. That single fact changes the maths on paid search completely: the enquiry you’re bidding for isn’t competing against a handful of local rivals, it’s competing against every other broker in the postcode, the big four’s direct channel, and three comparison sites, all chasing the same twenty or so high-intent phrases. Pouring more budget into a leaky account doesn’t fix the leak, it just pushes more dollars through the same hole. A broker paying for forty enquiries a month and settling six isn’t under-resourced. They’re running an account that was never built to tell a genuine first home buyer apart from someone three weeks out from a job interview at a lender, googling “what does a mortgage broker do.”

The fix rarely starts with a bigger budget or a sharper headline. It starts with finding the structural mistakes already sitting inside the account, because in mortgage broking these mistakes compound. A broad match problem gets worse every time the Reserve Bank moves the cash rate and refinance search volume spikes. A missing landing page gets more expensive every month the account runs. Here’s what we see most often when we open a broker’s account for the first time.

Six mistakes we keep finding in mortgage broker Google Ads accounts

If you’re building persona landing pages, worth checking them against real on-page signals before you launch, not after. A quick pass with a Core Web Vitals checker and a meta description checker catches the kind of slow-loading, poorly tagged page that quietly tanks Quality Score before a single lead shows up.

What to fix this month, and what can wait

Not every mistake above needs fixing in the same week, and trying to fix all six at once usually just resets the account’s learning phase and makes everything noisier for a month. The order matters more than the speed.

If you’d rather have someone else carry this prioritisation while you keep seeing clients, that’s the kind of ongoing account work a paid search partner normally owns end to end, from the negative keyword cleanup through to the bidding strategy change.

A two-broker practice that stopped chasing volume

Picture a two-broker practice operating out of a regional Victorian town, split between home loans and small commercial finance. Their account had been running for two years on broad match against generic terms, no negative list, and a single landing page that tried to speak to first home buyers, refinancers, and investors all at once. Enquiries looked healthy on paper, somewhere around three dozen a month, but the principal broker couldn’t say with any confidence how many of those enquiries ever became a settled loan, because the CRM tracked leads by source tag that nobody had updated since the account was first built.

The one change that mattered wasn’t a new ad or a bigger budget. It was connecting call tracking to the CRM and tagging every lead through to settlement, which took about three weeks to show a clean picture. Once that picture existed, the negative keyword list came next: terms like “mortgage broker jobs,” “home loan calculator,” and “what is a mortgage broker” were quietly eating a meaningful share of the monthly spend. Booked appointment volume actually dropped in the first month after the cleanup. The number of calls that turned into a genuine application climbed, because the people calling were the people who actually wanted to refinance or buy, not the people doing homework for a assignment or a career change. That’s the trade most brokers don’t expect going in: fewer enquiries, more settlements.

Once the tracking was solid, the second landing page, built specifically for refinancers and separate from the first home buyer page, started outperforming the original homepage on conversion rate. Checking a page like that against how a real visitor actually scrolls and where they drop off before submitting a form is exactly the kind of gap HeyLead Insights is built to surface, rather than guessing at it from a dashboard full of averages.

What broker principals notice once the account stops rewarding volume

“I used to look at the lead count every Monday and feel good about it. Then our settlement ratio told a completely different story, and I realised I’d been congratulating myself on the wrong number for about a year.”

Principal broker, two-site metro brokerage

“The thing that actually changed our minds wasn’t the ads, it was finally being able to see which campaign a settled loan came from. Before that, every conversation about the budget was a guess dressed up as a decision.”

Office manager, multi-broker regional practice

FAQs

How much should a mortgage broker budget for Google Ads in Australia? It depends heavily on the loan types you write and how competitive your region is, but the more useful question is what your settlement ratio looks like before you scale spend. A clean account converting well on a modest budget is a better candidate for more spend than a messy account that’s already expensive.

Can mortgage brokers advertise specific interest rates in their ads? Brokers generally shouldn’t lead with a specific guaranteed rate, since the rate belongs to the lender, not the broker, and doing so creates real compliance exposure under credit advertising rules. Build ad copy and landing pages around service, access to lenders, and process, with your Australian Credit Licence number clearly disclosed.

Is Meta Ads worth running alongside Google Ads for a brokerage? Often yes, but for a different job. Google captures people already searching for a broker or a loan type; Meta is better used for staying visible to people who’ve visited your site but haven’t enquired yet, and for local brand awareness in a specific catchment. It rarely replaces search intent, it supports it.

How long before PPC starts producing settled loans, not just enquiries? Given typical settlement timeframes, expect a proper read on quality to take two to three months after the account and tracking are clean, not from the day you launch. Judging a new or newly rebuilt account on its first few weeks of lead volume alone will usually lead you to the wrong conclusion.

Do I need a separate landing page for every loan type I offer? Not every single variation, but at minimum split first home buyers, refinancers, and investors, since their objections and proof points are genuinely different. A self-employed or commercial finance page is worth adding once that part of the business has enough volume to justify it.

Putting it to work

This week, pull the last 60 to 90 days of your Google Ads search terms report and go through it line by line, marking every term that’s clearly not a genuine enquiry, the job seekers, the calculator searches, the generic research queries. Cross-reference what’s left against your CRM to see how many of those enquiries actually turned into a booked appointment. That single exercise, which takes an afternoon, usually tells a broker more about where the budget is actually going than a month of dashboard reviews.

If the gap between enquiry volume and settled loans is the thing keeping you up at night, that’s exactly the account work HeyLead runs for brokers: cleaning up match types and negatives, wiring in call tracking and offline conversion import, and rebuilding the bidding goal around settlements instead of raw lead count. Chat with us on WhatsApp.