The student housing industry is set to see a rise in competition as new supply hits the market. Yardi forecasts 46,285 new beds will be added by the end of 2024, a 30% increase from the 35,610 beds delivered in 2023.

As the demand for student housing is tampered with by rising supply and increasingly cost-conscious families, how you market and position your student property will be more important than ever in the years ahead.

If you’re tasked with leasing student properties in high-supply markets and aren’t meeting your expected targets, here are five marketing strategies you can apply to ramp up pre-leasing activity.

Optimize Keyword Targeting in Paid Search

Paid Search advertising is highly effective for reaching prospects actively in the market for student housing. With one of the highest lead conversion rates, traffic from this channel tends to be the most qualified. To get the most out of this channel,  ensure you have a tight keyword strategy in place to avoid wasting ad dollars on really broad search terms if you are in a highly competitive multifamily market. Consider increasing your search budgets during seasons when your two buying personas tend to search more (November and March for parents, then spring and summer months for students) and adjust your location targeting accordingly.

Reach Students Living Near Campus With Hyper-Local Targeting Strategies

Increase your brand awareness among current students with local targeting strategies. While state and national targeting is typically the most effective location targeting strategy for reaching parents and incoming freshmen, local targeting can be an effective way to increase leasing activity among college students looking for new accommodations for the next semester or school year. When it comes to local search optimization, maintaining an up-to-date Google Business Profile can be key to increasing visibility in Google Maps and local search listings in Google. In addition to optimizing your Google Business Profile, consider leveraging radius targeting in Display and Paid Social advertising to ensure your property is discoverable throughout the school year.

Increase Visibility With Social Media Advertising

Social media is important to students. They use it as a source of information and as a way to connect with family and friends. 

Simply publishing content on social media, however, means running the risk of reaching audiences that are not interested in off-campus housing. Invest in ads so you can make use of targeting options such as location and interests that guarantee you’re reaching your buyer personas. Consider advertising on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to ensure you’re reaching as many interested people as possible. While Facebook is widely used by Gen X parents, Instagram and TikTok cater to both students and younger parents. YouTube spans both of these age groups.

With 2.9 billion monthly active users, YouTube exposes your ads to a wide range of audiences but can be coupled with keyword targeting to ensure your ads are sure to reach a high-intent audience.

Leverage the Rise of Connected TV Popularity

Another video platform that is gaining popularity is Connected TV, especially for those within your current student and parent age groups. As more households get an Internet-connected TV device (87%), CTV usage is projected to be at 110 million among Gen Z and millennials. The good news for marketers is that almost 75% of these CTV viewers say they don’t mind watching ads on CTV as long as content remains free over paying for ad-free content. Non-skippable and with impressive targeting capabilities based on viewing habits, interests, and demographics, CTV ads are highly personalized and can, therefore, offer high conversion potential.

“Sell” the Right Lifestyle Messaging

One of the reasons students opt for off-campus housing is that it’s more private, it’s less chaotic than in-campus dorm life, and it offers more freedom. Highlight how your student housing can provide all of these – and more – to the student prospects. Talk about your amenities and how convenient their student life will be living in one of your units. Make these pieces of information known by publishing them on your social media channels and website.

Set Your Property Up For Success in a Competitive Market

While the reopening of schools has brought back a consistent flow of students seeking accommodation, the competitive landscape underscores the importance of strategic marketing efforts. By implementing targeted strategies such as local targeting, social media advertising, video advertising, paid search, and emphasizing lifestyle benefits, property owners can effectively position their offerings to attract discerning students and parents. In an increasingly competitive market, differentiation through effective marketing will be key to maximizing occupancy and profitability in the student housing sector.

Let us help you shape your student housing marketing strategy. Book a call today.

The post Student Housing Marketing Strategies to Turn Around Occupancy Quickly appeared first on Conversion Logix.

If you manage marketing initiatives for large-scale residential locations like apartments, senior living facilities, and student housing communities, you know how important yet challenging it can be to find and reach the right target audience for your brand.

Effective ad targeting can be a huge win for your team; reaching the best possible audience for each ad dollar spent can mean the difference between a profitable lead-generating campaign or a community with low traffic numbers struggling to convince lukewarm prospects to commit to a lease.

Today’s property management companies need reliable and strategic targeting capabilities that can account for the online and offline approach your target market is engaging in in a post-pandemic world.

To equip residential teams with this capability, we launched Precision Mobile Targeting (PMT) in 2018, a mobile advertising service that targets prospects as they visit a strategic mix of locations in a local area. This year we are excited to announce a new expansion to the service with PMT+. 

What’s New

PMT+ gives property management operators the ability to target prospects after they leave a target location, expanding the reach and effectiveness of their location-based targeting campaigns. The service operates like a retargeting campaign, but instead of serving ads after a prospect visits a website, it targets them after they visit a physical location.

Why Upgrade to PMT+

• Increase ad engagement. Conversion Logix clients using PMT+ experienced a 137% increase in CTR (click-through rates) on average compared to traditional PMT campaigns.
• Meet prospects where and when they will engage. Modern marketing requires meeting the prospect on their schedule. PMT+ expands the window of time you can market to your audience, increasing your chances of reaching prospects when they are most likely to engage with your brand.
• EHO-friendly hyper-targeting. Gain all of the benefits of strategic location targeting with none of the risks. Our team of digital marketing experts is trained to design EHO-friendly campaigns that convert.

Get Started With PMT+

If you are already a Conversion Logix client, you can launch your next PMT+ campaign within five business days. To add this strategy to your campaign, contact your Conversion Logix account manager.

New to Conversion Logix and interested in learning more about our PMT and PMT+ services? Visit this page to learn more or schedule a consultation with a strategic campaign advisor.

The post Conversion Logix® Expands Location-Based Targeting Service With PMT+ appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Casting a “wide net” when marketing a lease-up may seem like the quickest way to reach your occupancy goals, but sometimes, narrowing the focus of your marketing efforts can yield better results. Recently, we partnered with a new development in Portland, Oregon, that had a below-average lease-up marketing budget but successfully hit full occupancy within twelve months. 

The secret to their success: investing in high-intent local traffic to maximize their budget and deliver qualified leads.

In this case study, we’ll walk you through the strategies our team activated to target local renters, build awareness, and generate enough leads to secure 100 leases within one year.

A Multichannel Local Marketing Strategy to Generate Leads

This community needed a strategic marketing campaign to fill a 286-unit lease-up with a moderate-sized media budget in Southeast Portland. Without a strong online presence in search engines or social channels, digital advertising offered the best way to scale the community’s reach within a short period. 

As with any lease-up, discoverability and brand awareness were critical to their success. To maximize their ability to be found and remembered, our team focused the client’s budget on local targeting strategies within a variety of channels to deliver multiple impressions to high-potential prospects.  

The Conversion Logix team drove brand awareness among apartment seekers through social and display advertising networks while capturing local search traffic through our Paid Search and Google Business Profile Accelerator services. 

The campaign generated 20,074 direct and post-view website sessions, proving the impact of a multichannel strategy. 

To ensure prospects remain engaged after visiting the site, we launched two applications (Spotlight and Schedule Genie) from our software suite, The Conversion Cloud® to promote concessions and automate tour scheduling. This approach resulted in 567 leads. With access to the community’s lead list and rent rolls, we were able to attribute 100 leases to the leads generated through The Conversion Cloud. 

The Advertising Strategy: A Detailed Look

Search Strategy

Our search experts developed a Paid Search campaign focused on local radius targeting and neighborhood keywords. The team also published weekly posts to the community’s Google Business Profile to increase the listing’s visibility in local map searches. 

Display Strategy

The Conversion Logix media team drove brand awareness through Display banner ads featuring the community location and images of the property. They paired this with a Display retargeting strategy that re-engaged previous website visitors to market to prospects throughout their leasing journey.

Social Strategy

Our social team launched a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign targeting local renters while promoting property photos, the community’s location, and unique selling points.

Converting Website Visitors into Leads: A Detailed Look 

To convert high-intent prospects into leads and tours, we launched two lead generation applications through the Conversion Cloud on the community’s website: Schedule Genie and Spotlight.

• Schedule Genie, a self-scheduling application to generate 305 tours
• Spotlight, a promotional application to highlight concessions adding, yielding 262 claimed offers

Key Takeaways

1. When facing a limited budget for a lease-up, search, social, display, and lead capture tools offer the best marketing mix. 
2. Campaigns targeting a local area drive conversions at a higher rate compared to regional or national targeting strategies.

Capitalizing on a multichannel strategy and incorporating lead-generating applications on your site can significantly increase your engagement and leads generated.

If you’re ready to adapt these strategies to your particular situation and accelerate your marketing, schedule a call with a campaign advisor today!

The post Portland Lease-Up Attributes 100 Leases to Local Targeting Strategy appeared first on Conversion Logix.

At the beginning of September, Google notified users that they will be limiting the number of search terms visible to advertisers within search terms reports in the Google Ads platform. In their official announcement, they stated that the new search terms reports will “only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users”. A Google spokesperson said they were making the change “in order to maintain our standards of privacy and strengthen our protections around user data” and are “continuing to invest in new and efficient ways to share insights that enable advertisers to make critical business decisions”.

What is Google’s search terms report and how is it used by advertisers?

Google’s search terms report is a report inside of the Google Ads platform that shows advertisers the terms search engine users search for when an advertiser’s ad is triggered. It allows advertisers to compare their keyword targeting choices with the actual queries searchers typed into Google and identify opportunities to improve their targeting. More specifically advertisers use this report to identify opportunities to reduce costs by adjusting keyword match types and adding negative keywords to ad groups.

What are match types and negative keywords?

Match types allow advertisers to limit how closely related a search query has to be to a keyword in order for an ad to show to a searcher. Exact match keywords only target queries with the exact words a searcher types into Google as well as close variants (misspellings). Phrase match targets searchers who type in very slight modifications to a keyword by adding a word or phrase alongside the exact keyword. Broad match keywords can target search queries with related words and phrases that are interchangeable with the exact wording of a keyword. 

Negative keywords tell Google to avoid presenting an ad for search queries that contain a given keyword. Negative keywords are used more often when advertisers use broad match keywords because they are the most likely to target irrelevant queries.

Will this change impact our advertisers?

Conversion Logix has reviewed this announcement and believes that it will not significantly affect our ability to deliver great results for our clients.

While we will have less insight on specific negative keywords that might be needed, we can use cumulative data across our ~1,000 multifamily housing accounts to understand what updates are needed for our keyword lists. 

Because our company uses a phrase and exact match keyword strategy instead of a broad match strategy across our campaigns, we’ve already reduced our risk of targeting the wide-ranging search terms that often require extensive negative keyword lists.

It is our understanding we will still be able to see how many searches are ‘hidden’ from our view which will give us insights into the variety of search terms that trigger our ads. For example, if we see there is a large percentage of searches that Google isn’t showing us, we should be able to glean that we are getting a high number of lower volume searches and our keywords may need to be refined. We can utilize this data alongside the performance of the specific campaign we are optimizing to understand what changes may be needed.

Conclusion

This new change to search terms reports will provide advertisers with less visibility into search terms that get a low volume of searches in an effort to increase privacy standards in Google’s advertising platform. This could potentially limit advertisers’ ability to identify irrelevant queries that trigger ads to show in the search results. Advertisers who use a highly targeted approach in their ad campaigns won’t be as impacted by this loss in visibility. Companies like ours that have a deep source of knowledge and data in a given industry will be able to find alternative ways to identify negative keywords and improve targeting despite the change.

The Conversion Logix team will continue to provide exceptional service and reporting to our Paid Search clients. Should you have any questions about your Paid Search campaign, please schedule a call or consult your designated account manager.

The post Google Announced a Change in Search Terms Reporting appeared first on Conversion Logix.

It’s 2020, and with the fresh start of a new year, marketers in all verticals are paying attention to what’s shiny, new, and trending. What’s truly effective, though, when it comes to the competitive multifamily residential marketing space? Dive in and take a closer look at five of the top 2020 marketing trends—and how some of the hottest fall short for the multifamily market. 

Voice Search

As search itself has become more intelligent, voice-activated searches have surged in popularity. In fact, Google has estimated that in 2020 50% of searches will come from voice and images. While this is a trend that is shaping Amazon, e-commerce, and local business marketing, it shouldn’t consume your energy. Apartment search is still a highly visual process and seekers are using traditional search methods on desktop and mobile to find what they want. Optimizing your current paid search campaigns and keywords will help you capture more searches, both traditional searches and voice searches. But for 2020, avoid spending precious resources to create long-tail keyword phrases for apartment seekers using voice-search.A

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI tools in content creation and marketing are becoming more common. While AI and automated tools offer a great deal of promise for the future and may shape apartment searches, human touch still plays a big role in the work done by copywriters, designers, and digital advertising experts to create and optimize effective campaigns for residential communities.

Chatbots

Automation offers many ways to improve the way apartment seekers experience your website, the first place they may truly connect with your community. Many consumers are seeking ways to easily and quickly handle the steps in the leasing journey. Automated tools like tour schedulers and application portals can help accelerate the process. 

Yet there are places in the leasing journey where automation doesn’t offer improvement. Unlike tour scheduling and application portals, online chat experiences provide website visitors with a way to engage in a quick conversation when they have questions or need help.

And as use of chatbots increases, we’re seeing some areas where they fall short. 

Chatbots provide an automatic response triggered by a keyword or phrase. These programmed responses often don’t give apartment seekers the information they want, and they don’t bring a prospect closer to taking a tour or signing a lease. 

Human chat conversations, on the other hand, can address nuanced questions and provide a level of personalization that chatbots simply cannot. That’s why we offer Live Chat, a tool powered by a live team that can engage prospects in conversations that convert.

Self-guided Tours

Busy work schedules often mean that apartment seekers struggle to book tours during business hours when leasing staff are on site. As a result, self-guided tour offerings have increased in popularity. This trend has proved popular in the single-family space, where over 75% of prospects who book a tour chose the self-guided option (according to a recent analysis by Anyone Home). 

Is the multifamily market next? Self-guided tours do introduce new risks, including lower close rates when prospective tenants don’t truly connect with communities and new people on community premises without help from a leasing agent. There are downsides for both parties—the leasing agent and the apartment seeker—when no community expert is on hand to highlight key features and amenities. Without help from a leasing agent, apartment seekers are unable to receive answers about the residence or community and may leave questioning if the apartment is truly a good fit. When your leasing team is removed from the tour process they are unable to field prospect questions and turn inquiries into opportunities that highlight great aspects of the community.

Influencer Marketing

For certain audiences and brands, influencer or affiliate marketing is the most effective way to reach (and compel and convert) thousands. It doesn’t work the same way for the rental market. Social proof—rave reviews from your residents rather than outside affiliates—will always be important. Investing in influencers to drive interest in your community is budget that could be spent—and measured—more effectively elsewhere.

Conclusion

In 2020, effective digital marketing for multifamily communities should continue to focus on precise targeting, lease-driven strategies, and performance you can measure for optimization and higher ROI. Interested in learning more about how our expertise and powerful conversion tools can help you fill your community? Reach out to talk with one of our experts or to schedule a demo.

The post Five 2020 Marketing Trends That Don’t Work for Apartments appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The biggest tech companies in the world are in an arms race over voice technology. Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, have all made an investment in voice assistant software and products. The rise in voice search technology has stirred interest and excitement in the apartment industry. As smart home tech continues to grow, strategies for how communities can take advantage of this technology to reach prospects have been top-of-mind for marketers this year. So what do you need to know about voice search and the role it plays in apartment marketing?

Voice Searches Are Still the Minority

While voice search is a trend marketers should look out for in 2020, it’s important to recognize that people haven’t yet adopted voice search as the primary way they search for things online.

According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, 20% of Google searches are now coming from voice assistants and Gartner predicts 30% of the searches will happen without a screen by 2020.

The majority of searches in Google are not yet coming from voice search and don’t look like they will be in the next year. 

Apartment Seekers Want Options

Finding the right apartment is a big life decision. The average renter spends 25-30% of their monthly income on their home. When most people are faced with a big purchase decision like finding an apartment, they tend to spend a long time in the search process and are even more likely to turn to a phone and a computer to evaluate their options. While most traffic coming to apartment sites is coming from mobile devices and a big portion of conversions are happening there, desktop website visitors on apartment sites are more likely to convert than those on mobile. 

When most people search for an apartment they want to evaluate their options. Voice assistants often present a single answer to a query or a very limited number of options. Most people searching for an apartment aren’t looking for one “right” answer and want to see the other apartments out there. This is one of the reasons voice search isn’t likely to overthrow traditional mobile and desktop searching for apartments in the near future.

Apartment Searching is a Visual Process

Another reason that voice search devices aren’t likely to replace traditional searching, people want to see visual examples of the community and their floor plans in their search process. After visiting a home page, most apartment seekers visit the floor plans page and then the gallery when they land on an apartment website. On devices like an Amazon Echo or a Google Home, searchers aren’t able to see what communities look like, which doesn’t provide the user experience these searchers are looking for.

Even though voice search likely won’t replace traditional searching for apartment seekers, it is a trend worth paying attention to. Voice searching for an apartment on a voice assistant speaker isn’t likely to become commonplace but voice search on phones (Siri or Google) and desktop computers (Cortana) has the potential to become the way a portion of renters start their apartment search.

The good news is, a lot of the steps that can help you improve your voice search rank, can also improve your ranking in traditional text searches. We’ve listed three steps in this article that your community can use to optimize for voice search while simultaneously boosting your paid and organic text search results. 

How do you increase your chances of showing up in a voice search?

Bid on “Apartments Near Me” in Google Ads

Over the last few years “apartments near me” has grown in popularity when people use Google to search for an apartment. Google reported a 130% year over year increase in the number of “near me” searches. This trend is also playing out on voice search.

One in five voice search queries are for local searches (Internet Trends 2016) and according to Search Engine Watch, ”mobile voice-related searches are 3X more likely to be local-based than text-related searches”.

If your community isn’t already using Google Ads to bid on terms like “apartments near me” for people in your local area, this will dramatically boost your search traffic for both text and voice searches. 

Optimize for Long-Tail Queries

Think about the way most people use voice assistants today. They either use voice assistants to make commands “give me directions to…” or ask questions. When people ask voice assistants questions they use different language than they do when they type a search query into the search engine. While a typical text search query contains 1-3 words, a voice search query is more likely to contain 2-5 words and more voice search queries contain 7-9 words than text search queries (Moz).

If your community is trying to pick up more voice searches in their Google ad campaigns, experimenting with longer tail keywords can help you reach this audience.

For apartment communities, this may look more like, “Show me the best luxury apartments in Phoenix” as opposed to “luxury apartments Phoenix”.

The good news is, Google has become better at identifying related longer tail keywords in your Google Ads campaigns. You can adjust this further when you set up your keyword match types.

Match types determine how many variations of a keyword you want Google to bid on in the platform. If you want Google to only show your ad for the queries that match your keyword word for word, you can select “exact match” as a match type. When you start using match types like “broad match”, “broad match modifier”, and “phrase match” you increase your chances of showing up for the longer tail keyword queries that someone might ask for in a voice search. It’s important to note that broad match types can pull in unrelated searches for your community so you want to be thoughtful about testing and reviewing broad match keywords in your strategy.

Improve the Visibility of Your Google Business Profile

Voice assistants pull from your local listings and review sites. Optimizing these listings can make the biggest difference in improving your ranking for local voice searches. To start, you should make sure your community has a complete and accurate Google Business Profile, Facebook Page, and Yelp Listing. Google often uses your Google Business Profile to provide answers to local search queries. If your Google Business Profile contains keywords and categories with apartments and your local area, you are more likely to appear as the first result in a local voice search query. Showing that your listing is engaging is another way you can improve your chances of showing up first in local searches. Posting frequently to your Google Business Profile listing can increase your profile engagement, signaling to Google that they should show their listing in more searches.

Conclusion 

Even though voice search isn’t the most common way apartment seekers search for apartments, the steps communities need to take to optimize for voice search can significantly benefit them across all their search efforts. Bidding for local search terms, updating and posting to your GBP listing, and experimenting with capturing longer tail keyword searches, all have the potential to improve a community’s search presence for both voice and text searches. As voice search continues to gain popularity, the number of people using devices to search for all things, including apartments will likely increase. Use the tips outlined above to improve your chances of showing up in the search results when these searchers turn to voice assistants to find an apartment.

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The post Voice Search Marketing Strategies for Apartments appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Google Business Profile listings are one of the most effective ways for businesses to be discovered and engaged with on Google. We’ve marketed for thousands of clients nationwide from apartment communities, senior living communities, student housing communities, and local businesses, and have seen first-hand how effective GBP listings are for local businesses.

Across a sample of 409 clients, we found that 28% of their website sessions came from GBP listings. These listings don’t only deliver more traffic than the typical organic search listings, they also deliver higher quality traffic. Website sessions coming from Google Business Profile listings convert 29% more than the average traffic source.

Google gives businesses plenty of opportunities to promote their company and improve their Google Business Profile, but most local businesses don’t take advantage of them or don’t know they exist. In this blog post, we’ll explain how Google determines which listing to show to searchers, how you can use GBP posts to drive local search traffic to your website, and how you can use GBP to convert searchers into leads.

How to Rank Higher for Local Google Searches

While Google takes the searcher’s location into account when they present local search results, the searcher’s proximity to your business location doesn’t guarantee your listing will be presented prominently, or at all. Google considers more than your location and the type of business you have when presenting local search results.

What Google Recommends

According to Google, “Local results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence.”

Google states that businesses can improve relevance by including complete and detailed business information in their Google Business Profile listing.

When it comes to prominence, Google says it pulls in “information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories)”, your “Google review count and score”, and “your position in web results”.

Aside from filling out your profile, the other action items Google recommends are difficult to measure, and not entirely in your businesses’ control.

What Industry Experts Suggest

Last year, Moz put together an industry study to understand the signals that make up Google Business Profile listings and found that behavior signals like click-through rate, mobile click-to-call, check-ins, scrolling through the listing, and clicking on posts all play a role in signaling to Google that a listing should be presented in local search pack results. While the study found that things like the completeness of the profile, positive reviews, and the relevance of the listing’s category all mattered to local results, the most actionable strategy the experts recommended is to take an active role in updating your GBP profile with posts.

According to Moz, the number of posts a business publishes on their Google Business Profile is one of the top 30 difference-making factors businesses can use to stand out and rank higher in local searches.

At the end of the day, updating your Google Business Profile with posts proves to Google that you are actively maintaining your listing and are more likely to keep users engaged on Google.

What Are Google Business Profile Posts?

GBP posts are short updates you can publish from your Google Business Profile. They look like a post on a typical social media profile and expire after one week.

There are a few different types of posts businesses can choose from: update, event and offer posts.

Update Posts

The most commonly used post format is the updates or “What’s New” format. This post format allows you to submit a headline, image or video, description and call to action linking to the landing page of your choice. This type of post can be adapted to suit anything your business is looking to promote.

Event Posts

Event posts let you submit a photo or video, event title, event start and end date/time, an event description, and a call to action button with the landing page of your choice.

Offer Posts

Offer posts let you add an image or video, an offer title, the promotion start and end date, a description for offer details, a coupon code, a link to redeem an offer, and the terms and conditions of your offer. The start and end dates are especially helpful for businesses running promotions that only last a few days.

Where Do Google Business Profile Posts Show Up?

When someone searches locally for a business in your category or for your brand, your Google listing can show up in the local search panel on mobile and desktop, in the map view of Google Maps, and in the local finder view. Your weekly posts show up inside your listing underneath your call to action buttons on mobile and under your company description on desktop. Only the most recent week’s posts will show up in your listing on desktop. Older posts live on inside a “view all” button on your listing and can be accessed on desktop and mobile.

How to Get More Leads From Your GBP Posts

While GBP posts are a great way to engage searchers in the market for your business, the experience that you direct a prospect to once they click on your GBP post is just as critical as the post itself. Every GBP post in Google comes with a range of call-to-action buttons and the ability to add custom links. Each of these links gives your business the opportunity to do two things, track the success of your Google Business Profile using UTM tags and provide prospects with a compelling call to action when they land on your site.

Apartment communities with the goal of scheduling tours will see better results if they link to a self-scheduling tool like Schedule Genie when someone clicks on a post or the “schedule appointment” button on their GBP profile. Dealerships running a weekend sale can publish an offer post that links to a tool that lets prospects claim the offer on their website. Providing prospects who engage with your Google Business Profile with interactive lead gen tools once they land on your site can boost your lead conversion rates and help you identify how effective your profile is at generating leads.

Google Business Profile Posting Made Easy

If you know Google Business Profile posts are something your business needs to do, but you don’t have the time or creativity to post to Google every single week, check out our new Google Business Profile posting service, GBP Accelerator. Our team of digital marketing experts will post to your profile twice a week and track your results. If you are looking to get more out of your Google Business Profile with deep links to self-scheduling or promo claiming tools, give The Conversion Cloud a try.

The post Drive Local Traffic to Your Business With Google Business Profile Posts appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Innovation. That’s not the word most marketers think of when they hear “Out-of-Home Marketing”. Those old billboards and in-window flyers may seem outdated, and hard to scale. Now, what if I told you that Out-of-Home Marketing has an expected growth rate of 12.6% and can be used to reach your audience in new ways. Welcome to the world of DOOH.

What is DOOH?

DOOH stands for Digital-Out-Of-Home and refers to digital marketing that is displayed out in public areas. Examples include the digital billboard you would see in Times Square, on highways, and in malls. Out of home marketing is one of the oldest forms of advertising. The rise of the digital age has given new life to the medium with some cool new benefits.

Benefits of DOOH:

DOOH ads are typically located in high traffic areas, such as movie theaters and major transit centers. With multiple people being able to view an advertisement at the same time, impressions are racked up much more quickly than other digital marketing channels.

Unlike watching an advertisement online, viewers can not skip or exit out of a digital billboard ad. Compared to old fashioned print billboards, digital is much cheaper to set up, maintain, and update. It also comes with the added benefit of playing multiple ads in one loop.

Customization is also an advantage of DOOH. If there are times with less foot traffic in front of your ad, you can get a lower rate for those hours or completely pull your ad during those times. There are many unique ways a marketer can use DOOH, such as showing a rendered tour of an apartment community in front of where it is being constructed. Advertisers have even started to incorporate AR to engage viewers.

How Are Metrics Collected?

One of the biggest ways DOOH differs from In-home marketing is the way impressions are measured. Depending on where the ad is displayed, these methods can vary. For example, movie theaters use ticket sales to know how many people are in the auditorium that the ad is playing in. Digital billboards can use sensors and cameras to measure impressions. On the more advanced side, some billboards have face tracking and can give not only an exact amount of impressions but information about the demographics that viewed your ad as well. 

Depending on where you are, there are even ways for billboards to read data from a bystander’s phone to deliver a more custom ad experience (some countries treat this as a privacy issue so make sure to double-check what the laws are where your content is displayed). The most common way impressions are measured is by using data collected from 3rd party agencies to give you an estimate of how many people will pass by your sign. For example, if you are posting on a billboard that is on a highway with 10,000 daily drivers, then those will be the impressions counted. 

How do you Keep Track of Conversions?

So how does a marketer measure if the leads that are coming in are conversions from their DOOH impressions? After all, you can’t track them with a cookie. Well, the most commonly used way is to simply measure your campaign’s lead numbers before and after the DOOH advertisement goes live. Using QR codes on your ad can help track users to achieve more accuracy with conversions.

Why Invest in DOOH?

It takes at least 6 impressions before a prospect is ready to become a warm lead. The more chances you have to leave an impression on them the better the chances they will see what you are offering. DOOH can be a cost-effective way to reach those that may not normally see your content in organic/paid internet searches. The added benefit of being able to interact and engage prospects in a physical space makes it easier for them to remember you and your message.

Conclusion:

DOOH has put a new spin on one of the oldest forms of marketing. Taking advantage of this revamped marketing channel while it is still growing is a great way to supplement your current marketing strategy. Using DOOH will keep your brand in mind both in and out of the conventional digital landscape.

The post What is DOOH? appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Google is removing average position as a performance metric in Google Ads at the end of September. What does this mean for advertisers?

Not as much as you might think.

For years people have used average position to evaluate whether their paid ad campaigns are effective at ranking at the top of the search engine. So why did Google do away with this key performance indicator?

Why Google is Sunsetting Average Position

Average position became a crutch that businesses relied on to measure performance, but as a KPI, it has its faults. Average position looks at how ads rank across your entire campaign for a given period of time and presents you with an average number. 

By basing your position indicator as an average, advertisers aren’t able to effectively pinpoint how often your ads are showing up at the top of the search engine. If 80% of the time, your ads ranked in the number one spot, but 20% of the time they ranked in the 4th spot, your average position would be skewed to reflect a higher number, giving the impression that most of your ads ranked worse than they actually did. What advertisers really want to know is how often their ads are showing up at the very top of the search engine. Google’s new metrics give advertisers a better way to evaluate this.

What is replacing Average Position?

Last year, Google provided advertisers with new ways to measure how their ads rank in the search engine. Savvy advertisers are now using metrics like top impression rate and absolute top impression rate to determine if campaigns are getting the visibility they need. New and improved metrics like absolute top impression rate get at what advertisers really wanted to know from average position, “How often are we showing up first and how often are we showing up in the top three spots?”.

Here’s how Google defines these new metrics.

Top Impression Rate:

“Search top impression rate ‘Impr. (Top) %’ is the percent of your ad impressions that are shown anywhere above the organic search results.”

Absolute Top Impression Rate:

“Search absolute top impression rate ‘Impr. (Abs.Top) %’ is the percent of your ad impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results.”

If one of your ad campaigns has an absolute top impression rate of 75% you can be confident that the ads in your campaign ranked number one in the search engine most of the time, which is what you really wanted to know all along. Between these two new metrics, advertisers can get a more precise idea of how well they’re performing in terms of ad rank.

The Downsides of Focusing Too Much on Ad Rank

It’s important to note that while ranking at the top of the search engine gives you better visibility with searchers, it isn’t the most important aspect of a good search campaign. At the end of the day, you want your search ad to result in the prospect taking action. Whether you want them to click into your website and convert into a lead or call your location straight from the ad, you want the searcher to take the next step in the customer journey. Bidding strategies like max click bidding or maximize conversions help advertisers optimize for those things that matter most, generating leads and sales.

In an effort to allocate more of your budget towards reaching those prospects who are the most likely to convert, your absolute top impression rate could fall as a result. This is because Google is more focused on getting your ad out to a more targeted list then it is at making sure you show up as the number one listing for everyone who searches for your list of keywords. Strategies like this can often lead to better click-through rates and more leads, which to most brands, is well worth the trade-off for ranking first for every search.

Conclusion 

Google is always releasing new tools to help advertisers track campaign performance and optimize for lead generation. Replacing average position with new ad rank metrics is just one of the many changes the Google team made to the platform this past year. If you’re curious about some of the other changes Google announced this year, check out our last Google update from Google’s Marketing Live Event. 

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At Google’s annual Marketing Live conference, they announced big updates in 2019 with changes to Search, YouTube, Shopping and their new Discovery ad units.

Google Launches Gallery Ads

Google’s formula with search has been if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. They rarely make changes to the product that made them famous. At this year’s Marketing Live, they announced that their Gallery ads will be rolling out to all advertisers later this year. This is their play to steal budget away from Facebook and move organic listings even further down the page. These highly visual ads will appear at the top of the Google Search engine and act like the Carousel Ads we’re used to seeing on Facebook. We’ll be testing these as they become available later this year.

Smart Bidding Just Got Smarter

Google’s smart bidding now includes max conversion value bidding. This strategy allows Google to optimize for ad traffic that is likely to engage in high-value conversions. Google uses the conversion values you set in Google Analytics and machine learning to prioritize these actions for you.

In an effort to cater to more local businesses in the ad platform, Google announced that advertisers will now be able to optimize for the phone calls and store visits conversions that are currently tracked in the ad platform. This opens up the capabilities of conversion based optimizations to actions outside of a brand’s website.

YouTube’s Bumper Machine Automates the Creation of 6 Second Bumper Ads

Bumper ads have always been a tough sell for advertisers. Advertisers have struggled to condense their 15-30 second video ads into a 6 second spot. One of their biggest complaints is how difficult it is to communicate a brand’s messaging in a memorable way with such a short time period. Google is hoping to make their ad placement easier to use by helping advertisers automate the video editing process. Google’s new bumper machine uses machine learning to identify the best places to cut video content so it can fit into their bite-sized 6 second ad format. The machine learning technology uses visuals of humans, motion, brand logos and video quality as signals to determine what to include in the shorter version of the ad.

Google Rolls Out Discovery Ads

Last fall, Google unveiled Google Discover, a one-stop spot for users to discover new products on Android. Google claims that 800 million people use Discover every month. According to Search Engine Land, Google uses website activity, device details, and location history to personalize the content that appears in the feed. At Marketing Live Google unveiled that they plan to roll out more placements for Discovery ads later this year. These ads will serve on the social and promotions section in Gmail, the homepage of YouTube, and the Discover feed. The ads will appear like native ads in each of these placements. In Gmail, they will feature a short headline and description. On YouTube and Discover, they will display as banner ads with a featured image, headline, and description. The YouTube ads will include a call to action.

Stay tuned as we release more information about these new Google Ads features in the coming months.

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