Case Study on Home Construction - Byrne Homes

Intro

In October 2019, we started working with Byrne Homes from Auckland, New Zealand. The company clientele is made up of people who are ready to find their own home 🏡. By contacting Byrne Homes, they receive a full range of services from design and topographic surveys to finishing works, as well as interior design, and subsequent warranty repairs. Byrne Homes is a small team where each employee has their own professional tasks and no time to search for clients. With this in mind, the company decided to entrust us to work on advertising, having previously introduced us to the business.

Initial Data

• Client’s website – byrnehomes.co.nz
• Advertising System – Google Ads

The work process for the project

Before setting up Google Ads ads, we went over the client’s completed brief and after that, we were able to determine priority services as well as advertising formats. As the company works with clients from Auckland and the surrounding area, a GEO was established in Auckland with a radius of 60 km. For promotion, they used search advertising, a display network (GDN), and video ads on YouTube. In the process, we tried different bidding strategies, keeping the most effective ones.

Objectives

We had to use Google Ads to find people who were ready to order the construction of a house. Given the fact that Byrne Homes offers services in the mid-high price segment, we set out the following goals:

• Engage an interested audience with ads during searches.
• Bring back people who hadn’t ordered any services to the site via remarketing.
• Set up GDN ads for users whose interests nearly match the company’s activities.
• Attract new customers with video ads on YouTube.

Actions Taken

We always strive to make advertising something profitable for the customer. After all, the only thing better than a new lead is a cheaper new lead ☝. In order to optimize the cost of advertising, we made the following decisions:

• Use dynamic search ads and all available ad extensions. This allows us to make ads more informative, enlarge the snippet, and increase the CTR, which in turn reduces the cost of conversion.
• Emphasize ads for premium quality and for the corresponding price range of the company’s services. This allowed us to minimize non-targeted traffic and bring people to the site who are looking for this exact price range.
• Use different bidding strategies for different campaigns. Try Target CPA, Maximize conversions, and Manual CPV. In doing this, we choose the most effective strategy for each individual campaign through trial and error.

Implementation

We set up three types of campaigns: Search Ads, GDN (Display Network), and YouTube.

Search Ads

Focusing on Byrne Homes’ main services, we have created 4 search campaigns, which were divided into ad groups according to search queries. This led to the following structure:

🔎 New Builds:

• Build Developments
• Build Property
• Building Companies
• New Builds
• New Construction

🔎 Renovations:

• Bathrooms
• Kitchens
• Remodelling – General
• Renovations – General

🔎 Brand campaign with queries for Byrne Homes, Byrne Homes Build, and so forth.

🔎 Search remarketing. For people who have already clicked on the site, we created ad groups with more general queries on the same topic:

• Brand queries
• Building Companies
• New Builds – General
• New Construction – General

Conversions were established for the following targeted actions:

• Calls through call tracking
• Submitting a form from any page of the site
• Clicking or copying an e-mail
• Calls from a search ad

We paid special attention to ad extensions and used the following:

• Quick Links: Design & Build services, contacts, company portfolio, company homepage, awards page and mentions in the media, as well as a download of the company brochure.
• Phone number.
• Specifics and Qualifications: ‘Thoughtful projects’, ‘Homes in a New Condition’, ‘Premium Quality’, ‘High-Quality Homes’, ‘Award-Winning Builders’, ‘Designed to Stand Out, ‘Innovative Technologies’, ‘Rebuild Your Space’, ‘The Best Home on the Street’, ‘Personalized Design’, ‘Family Business.’
• Promotions: 100% free consultation.
• A structured snippet.

For search campaigns, we used Maximize conversions strategies to attract the maximum number of users and Target CPA to show users ads who are more likely to take the targeted action.

GDN

We set up three campaigns with GDN:

1. GDN remarketing for anyone whose visit to the site didn’t result in a conversion.
2. Smart GDN – smart campaigns which automatically show requests.
3. GDN campaign with targeting:

• Keywords (the same keywords as in search advertising campaigns)
• Audience (for events – for anyone planning to buy a house soon, the audience of interested buyers in the category of ‘architecture services’)
• Site themes (Construction and repair, Construction materials and tools, Construction consulting and Contracting works, Architecture, Real estate construction, Designing municipal structures, Housing construction, Custom houses)

YouTube

📹 We configured In-Stream ads with the option to skip. We used an image video clip of the company.

The YouTube campaign was divided into 4 types:

1. With impressions on websites and mobile apps. A manual Cost Per View strategy was used.
2. With impressions on websites and mobile apps. A Maximize conversions strategy.
3. No mobile apps. Manual Cost Per View Strategy.
4. No mobile apps. Maximize conversions strategy.

Video ad targeting was configured for three types of audiences:

1. For keywords that were used in the search campaign.
2. Audiences: according to events (Planning a home purchase) and audiences of interested buyers (Home improvement, Architectural services, Design and renovation services, Homes for sale, Painting services).
3. Site themes (Kitchen and dining room, Repair and maintenance services, Architecture, Home Improvement, Real estate, Design, Construction business, Home Construction, Home repair and decoration, Roofing, Piping, Bathroom rooms, Individual projects).

Results

By trying different strategies and tracking the campaigns’ effectiveness, we achieved the following indicators. Work on the project took 10 months to complete and generated 116 conversions with an average price of 71.20 New Zealand Dollars (NZD).

Campaign results:

• Search campaign for new homes: 88 conversions at $54.84 NZD.
• Search campaign for renovations: 13 conversions at $119.27 NZD.
• Brand search campaign: 5 conversions at $4.06 NZD.
• GDN: 3 conversions at $147.16 NZD.
• GDN remarketing: 3 conversions at $62.34 NZD.
• SmartGDN: 3 conversions at $101.18 NZD.

Conclusion

PPC advertising doesn’t have a lower value than its original setting. In fact, we need the initial setup to understand the audience and the ability to calibrate Google Ads for subsequent campaign optimization. While working on Byrne Homes, we managed to find the optimal combination of settings and choose strategies that brought in the desired result as leads on the site and new customers 💪.