MoveAgain: growing visitor numbers

PREPARED BY STUART HALL, 14 MAY 2014

How to move the needle…

How to drive traffic to

MoveAgain with minimal budget, and maximum

impact?

Optimise what you’ve got!

Visitor traffic to the MoveAgain site which launched in March 2014, already benefits from the four sister sites which focus on rental properties in France, Spain, Portugal and Turkey

Each of the sister sites on their home page has two specific routes to the holiday sales site, the top menu tab marked ‘Holiday Homes For Sale’ and the top news piece under ‘Latest News’

However, this is not optimised – instead visitors are taken to a landing page with minimal content, no clear ‘CTA’, and a link that goes to the main homepage of MoveAgain rather than the relevant country section

Plus there is little visibility for the four sites or MoveAgain on Google search, a key channel for attracting visitors

Combination approach to growth

For more rapid cost effective growth I proposed a Google paid search approach based on optimising the value of current traffic from MoveAgain’s four sister sites

Benefit of PPC is that can control costs and measure results, in run up to peak search volumes

These can be adjusted according to different demand, in France holiday purchase search volume peaks in the months of August and September

In Spain search volumes are much higher overall, and search peaks in January as well as in late summer

Use Google to reach customers

Delivering visitors based on matching their intent with the

relevant website is a key advantage of using Google paid search

The benefits of PPC for MoveAgain

With poor SEO MoveAgain does not appear on the all-important first page for holiday property

searches

But why not use PPC? A significant % of people don’t make a

distinction between organic results and paid search

The benefits of PPC for MoveAgain: visitors with intent It’s quick to set up, and create the keywords and

find the best budget to get maximum number of visitors with ‘intent’

Using the Google Adwords dashboard it automatically creates a list of suggested keywords, and cost per click, to get started with

Main key is to ensure keywords also used in the ad content itself, as price bid plus ad quality (which includes the relevancy of the site and landing page quality) determines the ad ranking

“It’s worth noting that for keywords with high commercial intent (such as 'holiday homes for sale‘) around two-thirds of visitor clicks go to sponsored results”

Hubspot PPC expert webinar ‘5 Ways to Leverage PPC in the Holiday Season’

Visitor acquisition strategy

So to best use the four sister sites, changes need to be made in terms of the (location and design) current ‘property to buy’ landing pages

This would include sending country visitors straight to a country specific landing pages on the MoveAgain site, and removing the landing page on the sister sites

The landing page CTA can be to sign up for a free Buying Guide, as the first step to retaining new visitors

This country specific approach would also allow creation of specific Ad Groups within Google Adwords, with more precise keywords based on user intent

Targeting landing pages: PPC costs and benefits France example For example the 20 top long tail keyword phrases for buying

property in France the average cost per click per day is £0.76, with 510 impressions and 9.79 clicks on average

This Google adwords (search & display network) example results in an estimated cost per day of £7.49. Over the month this totals £227, driving approximately 300 visitors

Overall the aim is to choose keywords that are most cost effective to delivering visitors at an affordable budget

In the significantly more competitive search market of Spanish property the aim would be to find keywords with lower search volumes, and thus delivered cost effective visitor numbers

Maximising visitor growth

Peak search volume for buying holiday homes are months of August and Sept in France for example

So suggest from campaign optimisation pov a seasonal campaign strategy is worth considering to deliver max ROI

Within that Google Adwords also allows you to ensure targeting at the best time of the day and week

Aim also to use the most cost effective keywords, striking the most profitable balance between search volume and cost per click

Google Display Network’s value

Using Google PPC is that you can also take direct advantage of listing ads on hundreds of independent top websites that are part of Google display network, which also now includes Google+ paid ads

A neat growth hack that happens as a result of the inclusion in the display network is that you are able to insert ads directly into potential customers’ Gmail accounts

This is based on emails on the subject of holiday property sales, so again delivering on intent and relevancy

Acquisition, conversion , retention

Using Google’s conversion tracking on MoveAgain’s PPC campaign, you can track which keywords and clicks lead to certain actions - newsletter signups, downloads, purchases. This can show you the most effective keywords

Also with benefit of conversion metrics you can much more effectively prioritise your SEO marketing workflow, make sure that new content on MoveAgain sites is keyword optimised

All in all ensuring that PPC’s value is not to just acquire visitors, but to use the data on what works to drive improvements on the 4 sister sites and MoveAgain to drive conversions, and retention, for greater longer term ROI as well as cost effective short term growth

Success for MoveAgain sellers and buyers

Using a combined acquisition approach of driving optimised traffic from four sister sites for in time for peak demand for MoveAgain

Plus PPC Adwords campaign targeted to four country landing pages

With a strong conversion ‘CTA’ around country specific Buying Guides

Will deliver success for MoveAgain, with increase in seller property listings and more engaged buyers