Why valuation clicks are expensive
An instruction is worth a great deal, and every agency knows it. That makes “free house valuation [town]” and similar terms one of the more contested auctions in local advertising — you are bidding against every competing branch, all of whom value the outcome as highly as you do.
You can win those clicks. The question is what each instruction costs you by the time you have paid for the clicks that did not convert, and whether the same money spent on branch-level visibility would have produced more.
The contest most agencies are not entering
The map pack for “estate agents in [town]” is decided on relevance, distance and prominence — a verified profile per branch, Google reviews, complete information — rather than on budget.
Most agencies are barely present there, for one specific reason: their reviews are on Rightmove and Zoopla, and portal reviews count for nothing on Google. A branch with four hundred portal reviews and eleven Google ones sits below a smaller competitor in exactly the results a vendor sees when choosing who to invite round.
That gap is closable with a review routine at completion and a finished profile per office. It costs process rather than budget, and it competes for the same vendor the expensive clicks were chasing.
Where ads genuinely earn their place for an agency
- A new branch opening, with no local reviews or history — nothing exists for Google to rank yet.
- A specific instruction drive in a target postcode where you have little presence and want visibility in weeks rather than months.
- Lettings and property management, which are often less contested than sales valuations and where the lifetime value of a landlord justifies the click.
- Defending your own brand name if a competitor is bidding on it — check whether anyone actually is before spending on this.
The sequencing that usually works
Get each branch's profile verified and complete, start a Google review routine at completion, and publish a genuinely distinct page per branch. Those three things take weeks and cost no media spend.
Then use ads for the gaps that remain — the new branch, the postcode you are weak in, the lettings push — rather than as the whole strategy. Agencies that run it the other way round tend to pay repeatedly for visibility in towns where a finished profile would have earned it.