Google Ads Guide: Luxury Real Estate in London

Most estate agents in London treat Google Ads like a digital version of a bus stop advert. They throw a huge budget at broad, ego-driven keywords like "luxury homes London", point it at their homepage, and then wonder why they're just getting a flood of tenants looking for one-beds in Zone 4 and competitors clicking their ads. They're burning cash to attract the exact opposite of the person they want to talk to. Tbh, it's a complete waste of money, and it gives paid advertising a bad name.

The truth is, selling multi-million pound properties in areas like Knightsbridge, Mayfair, or Kensington requires a completely different mindset. You're not looking for volume; you're looking for a handful of highly qualified, often very private, individuals. This isn't about shouting the loudest. It's about whispering the right message in the right ear, at the exact moment they're ready to listen. It's a game of precision, not a brute force attack. Over the years, I've seen the same mistakes made time and time again. Let's walk through how to actually make this work and stop financing your competitors' lunch breaks.

So why are most luxury property ads in London a waste of money?

The fundamental mistake is a misunderstanding of intent. Someone typing "London property market" into Google is not looking to buy a £10 million penthouse in Belgravia tomorrow. They're probably a student writing an essay, a journalist, or just someone curious. Yet, I see major agencies spending a fortune to appear at the top for these searches. It's madness. You're paying a premium to talk to people who will never, ever become a client.

High-Net-Worth Individuals, especially the international buyers flocking to London, are incredibly time-poor. They don't 'browse'. When they search, their queries are specific and purpose-driven. They've already done their initial research, probably through their private office or wealth manager. When they go to Google, they're looking for something very specific. Your entire strategy has to be built around capturing that specific, high-value intent. Anything else is just noise.

Think about the user's journey. The path from idle curiosity to signing a multi-million pound deal is long and complex. The vast majority of your ad spend should be focused on the very end of that journey – the point where they are actively looking for properties with specific features in specific London postcodes. We're not trying to create awareness that London exists; we're trying to find the person who has already decided they want a lateral apartment with a view of Hyde Park and is now looking for an agent who can deliver it. This is a core part of any successful playbook for targeting HNWIs.

How do I find keywords that actually attract buyers, not dreamers?

This is where the real work begins. You need to get out of the mindset of bidding on what you *sell* and start bidding on what a serious buyer *searches for*. It's a subtle but massive difference. The key is to add qualifiers to your keywords that signal serious commercial intent and filter out the tyre-kickers.

Forget these keywords:

• -> luxury homes London
• -> expensive houses London
• -> Kensington property
• -> London real estate

They are far too broad and will attract a huge volume of irrelevant clicks. Instead, you want to focus on long-tail keywords that include specific features, property types, and ultra-specific locations. These searches have much lower volume, but the quality is exponentially higher. Every click might cost more, but it's infinitly more likely to be from a genuine buyer.

Here’s the kind of keyword structure you should be building your campaigns around:

• -> Property Type + Location: "penthouse for sale Knightsbridge", "5 bedroom townhouse Chelsea", "mansion with pool Hampstead"
• -> Specific Feature + Location: "lateral apartment Mayfair W1K", "new build development Nine Elms", "house with private garden Notting Hill"
• -> Street Name + Query: "Eaton Square property for sale", "apartments on The Bishops Avenue"
• -> Intent-Driven Phrases: "prime central london property investment", "international buyer real estate agent London"

The goal is to build tightly themed ad groups. For instance, one ad group would be dedicated entirely to "penthouses in Knightsbridge". The keywords, ad copy, and landing page for that ad group would all be perfectly aligned, speaking directly to someone looking for that exact property type in that exact location. It's a level of detail most agencies can't be bothered with, which is why their campaigns fail. Getting this right is the foundation of any profitable keyword guide for the London market.

It can be hard to visualise the difference in quality, so I've put together a simple chart to show how search intent breaks down. You want to spend all your money on the right-hand side of this chart.

What should my ad say to attract a millionaire?

Your ad copy is not the place for exclamation marks, cheesy sales slogans, or "Limited Time Offer!". The HNW audience values discretion, expertise, and exclusivity. Your ad needs to reflect that. It should sound like it was written by a knowledgable advisor, not a desperate salesperson. The tone should be confident, understated, and professional.

Here's a comparison. Let's say you're advertising a £15m penthouse in One Hyde Park.

The Bad, Generic Ad:
Luxury London Apartments For Sale!
Stunning Penthouses in Knightsbridge. Unbeatable Views & Finish. Call Us Now For A Viewing! Limited Availability. Don't Miss Out!

This ad screams "mass market". It uses generic language and creates a false sense of urgency that a sophisticated buyer will see right through. It's desperate and it cheapens the property.

The Good, Targeted Ad:
Penthouse, One Hyde Park, SW1X
Discreetly available. Unrivalled views of Hyde Park. Full concierge & spa facilities. By appointment only. Enquire for private brochure.

See the difference? The second ad is specific. It uses the postcode. It mentions features that matter to the target audience (discretion, concierge). The call to action isn't "Call Now!", it's a more refined "Enquire for private brochure", which suggests exclusivity and provides a lower-friction next step for a buyer who may not want to get on the phone immediatly. Every word is chosen to filter out the wrong people and attract the right one. It's also important to make sure that once they click, they don't land on a page that lets them down; many agents waste money on great ads that lead to bad landing pages.

How on earth do I set a budget for this?

This is the question that paralyses most agents. They either spend too little to gather any meaningful data, or they spend way too much on the wrong things. The key is to work backwards from your target outcome. You're not buying clicks; you're buying viewings, and ultimately, a commission.

Let's do some basic maths. Suppose your average commission on a successful sale is £150,000. And let's say you know from experience that you need to conduct, on average, 20 qualified viewings to secure one sale. And to get 20 viewings, you need roughly 100 qualified leads from your website (a 20% lead-to-viewing rate).

• Target Commission: £150,000
• Viewings Needed Per Sale: 20
• Leads Needed Per 20 Viewings: 100

This means that each qualified lead is ultimately worth £1,500 to your business (£150,000 / 100). This is your target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). Now, you have a concrete number. You can confidently pay up to, say, £500 per lead and still be incredibly profitable. Suddenly that £50 CPC for a highly specific keyword like "St George's Hill mansion for sale" doesn't seem so expensive, does it? If your website converts clicks to leads at 5%, you can afford to pay up to £25 per click (£500 * 5%).

This is the kind of framework you need to build a sensible Google Ads budget for the London market. It's based on business goals, not guesswork. To make this easier, I've built a simple calculator below. Plug in your own numbers to see what your target cost per lead should be.

How do I stop showing my ads to everyone in London?

Keywords are your primary targeting tool, but they aren't the only one. Google Ads allows you to layer on additional targeting to further refine who sees your ads. For luxury property, this is absolutly critical. We need to do everything we can to exclude the mass market and focus on postcodes and demographics associated with wealth.

First, location targeting. Don't just target "London". Use the postcode targeting feature to focus your budget on the most affluent areas. You can specifically target places like SW1, SW3, SW7, W1, W8, and NW8. You can even exclude less affluent boroughs to prevent your budget from being wasted there. For international buyers, you might run seperate campaigns targeting cities like Hong Kong, Dubai, New York, or Monaco, but with keywords that explicitly mention London property.

Second, audience layering. Google has demographic and in-market audience data. While you can't explicitly target "millionaires", you can get closer. You can layer on audiences like "In-market for Investment Services" or "In-market for Business Financial Services". You can also target users in the top 10% of household income brackets. None of these are perfect on their own, but when you combine them with highly specific keywords and tight location targeting, the effect is powerful. You're building a profile of your ideal buyer.

Finally, remarketing. This is a big one. Anyone who visits a specific high-value property page on your site but doesn't enquire is a warm lead. You should have a dedicated remarketing campaign that shows them ads for that specific property (or similar ones) as they browse other sites. This keeps you top of mind and can often be the nudge they need to get in touch. Our detailed London HNWI targeting guide covers these strategies in much more depth.

Here's a flowchart that shows how these layers should work together to qualify a potential buyer before they even see your ad.

What's the biggest mistake I can make after someone clicks my ad?

Sending them to your homepage. It's the cardinal sin of paid advertising, and almost every single estate agency does it. It's lazy, ineffective, and it completly disrespects the user's intent.

Think about it. You've just run a hyper-specific ad for a "penthouse for sale in Knightsbridge". The user clicks because they want to see that penthouse. And where do you send them? To your homepage, with a generic search bar, pictures of your team, and listings from all over London. You've forced them to start their search all over again. Most won't bother. They'll just hit the back button and click on your competitor's ad instead. You paid for the click, and your competitor gets the lead.

Every single ad group should point to a dedicated landing page. If the ad is for penthouses in Knightsbridge, the landing page should ONLY show penthouses in Knightsbridge. The headline should match the ad copy. The imagery should be stunning. The only call to action should be to "Request a Brochure" or "Arrange a Private Viewing". Remove the main navigation, remove links to other parts of your site. The goal of the landing page is singular: convert that specific interest into a qualified lead. No distractions. This level of focus is what separates campaigns that generate a 600%+ return from those that barely break even.

I've seen campaigns where simply switching from a homepage to a dedicated landing page has doubled the conversion rate overnight, effectively halving the cost per lead. It's the single most impactful change you can make once you've got your keywords and targeting sorted. If you need more help with this, you might want to look into how to scale your Google Ads campaigns in London, as landing page optimisation is a huge part of that.

How do I know if this is actually working?

You need to track the right things. Clicks, impressions, and Click-Through Rate (CTR) are vanity metrics. They tell you if your ads are being seen, but they don't tell you if they're making you any money. You need to focus on business metrics.

The key metrics to have on your dashboard are:

• Cost Per Lead (CPL): How much you're spending for every form submission or phone call.
• Lead-to-Viewing Rate: What percentage of your online leads turn into actual, qualified property viewings. This tells you about the quality of the leads.
• Cost Per Qualified Viewing (CPV): This is the killer metric. It's your total ad spend divided by the number of qualified viewings it generated. This is the number you should obsess over.
• Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): The ultimate measure of success. This is the total commission generated from the ads, divided by the total ad spend. A 5x ROAS means for every £1 you spent on ads, you generated £5 in commission.

Tracking this properly requires setting up conversion tracking correctly in Google Ads and your CRM. You need to be able to follow a lead from the initial click all the way through to a completed sale. It takes some work to set up, but without this data, you're flying blind. You'll have no real idea which keywords, ads, or campaigns are actually driving your business forward. I remember one campaign we ran for a luxury brand where we focused obsessively on the entire funnel, which allowed us to generate over 10 million high-quality views and engagements because we knew exactly what was working at each stage.

This all might seem like a lot of work, and honestly, it is. But this is what's required to compete at the highest level of the London property market. The agents who do this properly are the ones who are quietly generating high-quality, high-commission leads every single month, while their competitors are complaining that "Google Ads doesn't work".

I've put the main recommendations into a table for you below to give you a clear action plan.

Putting all this together is a specialised skill. It requires constant testing, analysis, and a deep understanding of both Google's ad platform and the unique psychology of the luxury buyer. If you're a busy agent, you likely don't have the time to manage this process with the level of detail required to get a serious return. This is often when it makes sense to bring in an expert who lives and breathes this stuff every single day. If you're tired of wasting your marketing budget and want to see how a professional, data-driven approach could transform your lead generation, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy consultation. We can review your current efforts and show you exactly where the opportunities are. Figuring out how to find the right partner is a challenge in itself, which is why we put together a guide on vetting PPC experts in London to help you make an informed choice.