Goggins Real Estate is one of the top-selling agencies in western Massachusetts. We took over their Google Ads program in late 2018 and ran it as their entire paid-traffic engine through 2021. Hyperlocal search targeting, a forced-registration funnel, monthly Data Studio reports — and zero hours of broker time after the initial scope call.
"I am spending zero time on this because you're doing it all. We talked some at the beginning about what we needed and what our goals were. The rest of the time, unless I want you to do a special campaign for a special project, I don't have to do anything. I saw a definite correlation between when you started working with us and a jump in our leads — and I've been managing leads for the last six years."
Goggins Real Estate is one of the top-selling real-estate agencies in western Massachusetts, headquartered in Northampton. The principal contact, Rachel Simpson, is a broker with a marketing background — she came into real estate from a website-copywriting career, so she understood the funnel but needed a paid-traffic engine she didn't have to operate.
She'd previously tried another marketing group for Google Ads. Her words: "It just wasn't a good fit — we didn't see the results that we were hoping for. We had hoped that we maybe would have seen something more specific and more tangible than what we ended up with." The brief when she brought us in: produce attributable, measurable leads, and don't make me do anything.
Goggins is one of the top-selling agencies in western Massachusetts. The audience walks into the funnel already searching — "Northampton homes for sale," "real estate broker Northampton," "houses Easthampton MA." We built a Google Ads campaign around those head-of-funnel local search terms and pointed every ad at a property-search landing page on gogginsrealestate.com instead of a generic homepage.
The site has a forced registration mechanic — after a visitor views three property listings, they hit a wall that requires an email and phone before they can keep browsing. The Ads campaign poured qualified, high-intent traffic into that wall. Lead volume tracked the campaign curve 1:1: the moment campaigns started, registrations spiked, and the correlation held for the entire engagement.
Every month we shipped a Google Data Studio report covering spend, clicks, conversion rate, cost per conversion, and the geographic distribution of conversions — all by zip code, so Rachel could see exactly which neighborhoods her budget was reaching. The report ran on autopilot; Rachel got a link, opened it in 90 seconds, and knew where the dollars went.
Goggins used to allocate "a good sum" of their marketing budget to newspaper and print media. At open houses they started asking every visitor how they found the listing. The answer was always "online — I saw it online, I saw it on your website." Never print. We retired the print spend and reallocated it into the Google Ads campaign. Same budget, dramatically better attribution.
Rachel's words on the call: "I am spending zero time on this because you're doing it all." After the initial one-hour scope conversation, the campaign ran without her involvement. Reports landed in her inbox monthly. Special campaigns for individual listings got a 15-minute brief and shipped within 48 hours. The whole system is built for an owner-operator who is also showing houses and running the office.
The campaign kicked off in late 2018 / early 2019. When COVID hit in March 2020, real estate marketing flipped overnight: no open houses, no in-person tours, all traffic moved online. The Goggins funnel was already there. Print media was already retired. Virtual tours and online listings became the entire funnel, and the Ads campaign was the engine pointed at them. Three full years later it's still running with the same architecture.
Real-estate display ads convert at a fraction of search ads because intent is the entire ballgame. For year one we ran search-only campaigns targeted at high-intent commercial keywords in Hampshire County, MA. Remarketing only entered the mix once the property-view audience was large enough to be statistically useful.
An aggressive wall (register on view #1) torches the funnel. A passive wall (register on view #10) collects no data. The three-view threshold was the right number for the local market: enough exploration to surface real buyer intent, not so much that the visitor felt baited.
Goggins is a Northampton/western-Mass agency. The Ads geo was zip-code-tight around the office, not statewide. That kept the CPC low, the CTR high, and the conversions geographically meaningful — the agency could service every lead the campaign produced.
Rachel didn't need a real-time dashboard. She needed a clean monthly report she could read in 90 seconds and forward to her partners. Google Data Studio (now Looker Studio) was the right tool: native to the broker's stack, free, and trivial to extend when she asked for a new dimension.
The print budget wasn't disposable — it was a significant chunk of the agency's marketing line. The decision to kill it was driven by attribution data, not opinion. We asked every open-house visitor where they heard about the listing. The answer was never "the newspaper." Killing that line freed the budget the Ads campaign needed to scale.
One-hour conversation with Rachel to lock targets, geographic scope, and conversion definitions. Stood up the Ads account, built keyword groups around Northampton + Hampshire County high-intent search terms, and shipped the first campaign live within the week.
Iterated on bid strategy, negative-keyword lists, and landing-page mapping. Killed print spend after attribution data showed zero contribution. By Q4 2019 the cost per conversion was consistently in the low double digits.
March 2020 lockdown shifted real estate fully online overnight. The campaign was already there. Virtual tours and online listings became the entire funnel; the Ads engine kept pouring qualified traffic in. Full-year 2020: 833 conversions, ~$11,000 spend.
209 conversions in Q1 alone. March 2021 hit 10.4% conversion rate at $0.63 average CPC. Engagement going on year three. Rachel recorded the testimonial video that became the source for this case study.
We take on a small number of engagements each month. If you need Google Ads, AI workflows, or a receptionist that doesn't miss — book a call and we'll walk through what's possible.