Google Ads for Real Estate in India: Campaign Structure, Negative Keywords and MahaRERA Rules

The first rule of how to run google ads for real estate properly is that intent decides the campaign, because intent decides both bid value and what the landing page should say. We recommend three Search campaigns before you touch anything else.

Campaign one covers project-name and developer-brand searches. These people already know you, so the cost is low and the intent is high, and you want to own that space so a competitor or a portal does not sit on top of your own name. Campaign two covers location plus configuration searches such as '3 bhk flats in baner' or 'new projects in pune west'. This is where you meet buyers who have not picked a project yet. Campaign three covers budget searches like '2 bhk under 1 crore wakad', where the buyer leads with price and needs to see that your inventory fits.

Keeping these separate lets you set different budgets, different targets and different ad copy. A budget search should show a starting price in the ad. A brand search should push the site visit. Mixing them forces one message onto three different mindsets.

Performance Max and Demand Gen are tempting on day one because they promise reach with little setup. Our view is that they should wait. Without clean conversion tracking, these formats optimise toward whatever signal you give them, and if that signal is a raw form fill, they will find you more of the cheapest form fills, including people who will never visit a site.

Once your conversion tracking is clean, use them for remarketing and for lookalike-style reach built from your better audiences. Search captures people who are already looking. The automated formats are for widening the funnel after you know what a good lead looks like. That order matters more than the platform features.

Inside each campaign, build tight ad groups per configuration and locality. A '2 bhk wakad' group and a '3 bhk wakad' group should have their own keywords and their own ads, so the headline can say exactly what the buyer typed. This is the core of any real estate google ads strategy that holds up: relevance at the ad group level, not clever bidding on top of a messy account.

Use sitelinks for the things buyers actually want next, which are floor plans and site-visit booking. A buyer who can reach the floor plan in one tap is a better lead than one who bounced off a generic homepage. For the click itself, send traffic to a lead form or a fast landing page with click-to-WhatsApp, because most Indian buyers would rather message than fill six fields. Our performance advertising work treats the landing page as part of the ad, not an afterthought.

If you are weighing ad platforms before committing, our comparison of Google and Meta for lead generation is a useful companion, but for high-intent property searches, Search is usually where you start.

Real estate search terms are full of people who are not buyers. Renters, students, job seekers and contractors all type words that overlap with yours. A negative keyword list built before launch is the cheapest optimisation you will ever do, and you should keep adding to it from the search terms report every week.

The table below is the starting list we recommend. Treat the conditional ones as decisions, not rules: a loan calculator term is junk for one developer and useful for another. Google's own guide to negative keywords explains how the match types behave.

A form fill is cheap to count and easy to inflate. A qualified site visit is what a developer actually pays for. So the measurement approach we recommend is to optimise Google Ads toward qualified site visits imported from the CRM, and to send those back to Google as offline conversions.

In practice, that means the lead lands in your CRM, the sales team moves it through stages, and when it reaches Site Visit, that event is passed back to Google. The bidding system then learns what a real prospect looks like. This is the work behind our conversion tracking setups, and it is also why Performance Max only makes sense after this loop works.

If your leads sit in spreadsheets or scattered inboxes, you cannot do this. A CRM with project-wise pipelines, such as ArthaLeads, gives you the stage data to send back. Whatever tool you use, the principle is the same: the signal you feed Google decides the leads you get.

In Maharashtra, compliance is not a footnote. According to MahaRERA, housing project advertisements, including digital and social media ads, must show the MahaRERA registration number, the MahaRERA website address and a project-specific QR code that leads to the project's MahaRERA page. An April 2025 circular says these must be clearly visible, in a font at least as large as the largest font used for contact details.

Registered agents face a double requirement: they must show both their own agent registration number and the project registration number. MahaRERA has penalised hundreds of projects for missing registration numbers or QR codes, and it works with ASCI on ad violations. So a beautiful ad with a tiny or missing number is a liability, not a creative choice.

Practically, put the registration details on the landing page and in creatives that go out through Google's display and video formats, and check the current circular before launch because requirements can be updated. We are marketers, not lawyers, so have your compliance owner sign off the final template.

Run through this short list before the first rupee is spent, then review it weekly.

Good google ads for real estate is mostly discipline: separate by intent, block the wrong searches, measure site visits and stay inside the compliance rules. None of it is exotic, but most accounts skip at least two of the four.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your structure, our lead generation team can review your account and tracking setup, and you can start with a growth audit.