Helping Sweetspot Achieve Property Rental Targets
About project
Sweetspot rent high quality properties to students in Nottingham, Exeter and Oxford. They hired Mahon Digital Marketing in September 2017 to improve performance of their existing Adwords account.
Due to the highly seasonal nature of their business with properties becoming available at the beginning of the academic year, and rented out as soon as possible afterwards, for much of the time website content is very slim.
This has had the effect of organic traffic being limited and taking some time to restart each October. PPC promotion has therefore played a key role as the source of the majority of traffic and booked property viewings
Period : Jan 20-March 12
Client: Sweetspot
The first season, October 2017 – April 2018 saw a 400% increase in the number of tracked bookings and a significant reduction in cost per booking over the previous year.
Solutions Overall approach
Our approach was to focus primarily on the client’s CPA targets and within budget constraints, maximize traffic to generate as many property viewing bookings in as short a time as possible. Making full use of the ever expanding features within AdWords allowed us to maintain click through rates and compete with the other players in the marketplace.
Restructure
At the point Mahon took over, the account had been running for two years, so there was data available to base our review and initial restructuring on. The first step of the project was to review the existing campaigns in light of the cost per booking being extremely high in the previous two years. Those which had potential for running to target were kept active, and new campaigns were created to cover the Oxford properties and also Brand terms, as the site wasn’t in position 1 in the SERPs for some key search terms.
To improve the performance of the existing campaigns we undertook a review of and optimized:
- Campaign targeting
- Ad group structure
- Keyword relevance
- Keyword match types
- Keyword bids
- Ad copy
- Ad extensions
- Network traffic
- Search query data
- Negative keywords
The general strategy already in use, of running campaigns across the UK with keyword phrases containing the city names, and other campaigns geotargeted at the cities in question using keywords without the city name was quite logical. Our review highlighted a number of keywords with poor relevance however. This was addressed through a combination of pausing some keywords or adding negative keywords to filter out irrelevant search terms.
Ongoing optimisations
The seasonal nature of this account means that each September prior to relaunching, we have incorporated newer features that have been introduced to Adwords in the intervening period.
Features implemented and taken advantage of since Mahon Digital took over account management to improve performance and expand the variety of trackable leads include:
- Price extensions
- Callout extensions
- Call tracking
- Cross device conversions
- Structured snippets
- Review extensions
- Expanded Text Ads
- Remarketing
- Device level bidding
Several new campaigns have also been created, tested and optimised:
- A remarketing campaign to target site visitors who didn’t book a viewing, which has proved effective
- A display campaign aimed at students in the relevant areas
- A campaign to promote the few remaining properties that tend to remain unrented in the New Year, after the majority are taken in the October-December period
As well as implementing the above and refreshing and trialling new ads, we optimise bids constantly, based on ad positions and conversion costs, and monitor search query reports regularly for less relevant search terms to block.
