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Rightmove is the UK’s number one property website with more than 90% of all UK Estate Agents using the site to advertise their properties. Rightmove is also ranked in the Top 20 most popular websites in the UK ahead of well-known brands such as Yahoo and Friends Reunited. For the past 18 months, I Spy Search have been managing the paid and natural search marketing campaigns for Rightmove, developing strategies to help the site maintain its prominence in the online property sector.
Brief
Aside from having to deal with the general issues and competition facing all sectors in the paid search channel, Rightmove’s paid search campaign also needed to battle against increasing difficulties in the property market as a whole. This meant I Spy Search had the difficult task of delivering highly cost efficient results, whilst increasing search engine coverage and visibility. The challenge was to create an optimisation strategy to increase the number of property detail requests sent to estate agents through Rightmove, whilst keeping the campaign up to date with new locations and regions. The key objectives that were used to quantify the campaign were as follows:
- Generate highly qualified traffic to the Rightmove website
- Increase the volume of property detail requests
- Include new locations as soon as they become available to expand the campaign
- Maintain cost efficient results for highly generic and costly keywords
- Protect and promote the Rightmove brand during market uncertainty
Strategy
As banks and building societies become cautious of issuing mortgages as a result of the credit crunch, property buyers are facing increasing difficulty raising the capital needed to buy a property. This created a tough obstacle to overcome as search volume for ‘property for sale’ related keywords decreased. On the flip side, the rental property market grew as a result, leading to increases in volume for ‘rental’ keywords. This led to a change in emphasis for the PPC strategy as demand for rental properties increased. I Spy search used the following steps to ensure that the campaign was developed to its greatest potential and adapted to this market shift:
- Campaign structure was developed to effectively assign lettings and sales keywords into their appropriate campaigns for each new location
- Ad copy was tailored to each location and property type - ensuring ‘flats to rent in london’ delivered a highly targeted ad, positively affecting the quality score
- Keyword inventory was created to include generic and location variations, as well as the development of negative keywords to pre-qualify traffic
- Landing pages were created for every keyword to deliver bespoke results. This included search results pages for houses or flats depending on the property type searched for and also the location searched for
- Detailed monthly and weekly reporting was used to gain a full insight into the effectiveness of strategies employed and to develop key learnings to roll out across the campaign
- Budget allocation and planning was weighted towards top performing areas and to generate the highest possible number of leads and push the ROI as far as possible
- Continuous update of locations and sub regions ensured PPC campaigns continued to grow
Results
Between March and October 2008 I Spy were able to increase conversion volume and improve efficiency by developing a bespoke optimisation strategy. Through expansion of the PPC campaigns to include new locations such as Scotland, Manchester and Liverpool, the campaign was able to grow and develop key geographical targeting learnings. Key highlights are as follows:
- PPC Traffic to the site increased by 190.9%
- PPC Click to Conversion rate improved by 44.5%
- Average cost per conversion through paid search decreased by 51.2%
- PPC Conversion Volume increased by 320.3%
- CTR improved by 35.4% due to continuous testing and optimisation of ad copy
Weekly and monthly conference calls, along with frequent face to face meetings ensured the results and learnings from the paid search campaign were fed back to Rightmove and informed the marketing strategy for the business as a whole. Results were analysed with actionable insights provided to drive the campaign forward.
Rightmove’s Head Of Consumer Websites, Hannes Buhrmann, commented on the effectiveness of the relationship between I Spy and Rightmove, “At a time when all eyes are on marketing budgets and cost-efficiencies, it was essential we had full confidence in our search agency to deliver consistently good results and maintain market share in such a fast-changing sector. Through their knowledge of our business and use of competitor analysis, the search marketing campaign was able to respond quickly to any changes in demand to ensure all angles of the campaign were being exploited to their full potential.”
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