PPC Home Builders Results.

Overview & Challenges

For many years, the client, a local home builder, has provided high quality, energy efficient homes to Wisconsin home buyers at a great value. When the client contracted with Merkatus Media however, it faced two huge challenges — competition and market forces. The home building industry has been competitive for years. The decline in the housing industry had been well documented. New home starts earlier in the decade exceeding 2 million per month, and new home starts bottoming out in 2009-2010 at less than half a million per month. To complicate matters, the client faced varied and stringent competition. On one hand, a number of national home builders with immense resources provided stiff competition. On the other hand, a large number of niche local builders already had an established online presence.

Although the client had an excellent local reputation, prior to partnering with Merkatus Media they had little PPC experience. After using a different PPC firm and finding themselves unsatisfied with the results, they came to us with an online presence that was not very well established. They just needed someone to spread the word about their fantastic home values to the right clientele. Their goal was to be competitive in the online marketplace and generate quality leads for costs that were comparable to other advertising mediums. Most importantly, this home builder wanted to get the lowest cost per lead possible.

Mobirise

40%

OVER 40% RETURN ON INVESTMENT

70%

DECREASE OF 70% BOUNCE RATE

The Strategy...

Because getting the optimal performance out of the budget was our priority, Merkatus Media was very deliberate in developing the client's PPC account. We started from scratch, not incorporating the strategy of our predecessors at all. Merkatus Media worked closely with the client to make sure that on-site conversions were easy and that conversion tracking was fully functional out of the gate. We created small, tightly grouped campaigns with specific geographic parameters. Our depth of experience in this vertical market enabled us to launch very relevant keywords and assume appropriate negative keywords from the very start. Even we, however, were surprised with just how well many of these terms performed in Wisconsin. Because of the volatility in the market during this time, constant repositioning was a necessary component of the client's success. The three main features of our ongoing strategy were targeting appropriate keywords, regularly refreshing ad text, and focusing heavily on quality scores. The biggest single step towards achieving out sensational numbers for the home builder was our second batch of keywords. Based on research and polling of actual search queries that brought traffic to the website, we added thousands of long-tailed keywords that matched how users were searching and specifically targeted the geographic areas in which the client was building. This drove down costs per click and increased impression shares. We worked with the client to frequently update ad copy, incorporating special offers, seasonal trends, and uncovering the features in the homes that potential clients were most interested in learning about. This not only helped with click thru rates, but by pointing clients towards important features of the homes, we improved bounce rates and conversion rates. 

Finally, because of the nature of the real estate market, we have on-going projects to improve and protect quality scores, which means more and smaller ad groups with highly relevant ad copy adjusted to fit specific keywords. This laborious, detailed process is responsible for the continuing growth and improvement in the account. At times, the client adjusted their budget, restricting the amount we could spend, or opening up the budget, but almost without fail, we saw costs per conversion fall month after month.

Results...

For the first three months after the account was fully launched, we were able to generate 442 leads at a cost of $19.22 each through PPC. That was a marked improvement over the results of their previous PPC firm. These are certainly fantastic lead costs in the home building industry, where leads typically range between $100-$200 each depending on the market, and this placed the client in an advantageous position. Using that as a springboard, the client only moved towards more and more leads at lower and lower prices. The improvement has continued, and in the most recent four month period, the client generated 1036 online leads at a cost of $5.57 per lead—more than twice the leads at barely more than a third the cost per lead of when we started. April was the greatest PPC month in company history, with 292 conversions at a cost of exactly $5 each.

POWERED BY MERKATUS | MEDIA 2018