Multifamily's Google Ads Market Survey

Do you ever Google your targeted keywords and find that you see your competitors'

ads instead of your own? Well first, when your digital marketing agency launches a new PPC account for you, they should ask for your IP address. This allows them to block ads from showing to you when you search for keywords related to your PPC account. In doing so, they ensure that your search behavior won't negatively impact the performance of the campaigns, decrease your click through rate, waste impressions, or even cost your property ad dollars. Second, the result of seeing your competitors' ads likely makes you want to know how to beat them in the Google Ads auction. So, how do you find out how your multifamily pay per click campaigns are performing vs. those of your comps?

For years, multifamily has relied on the infamous market survey. Monday "call arounds" still exist for many while others have evolved to more automated, market driven data platforms to keep them informed of pricing, occupancy, and leasing velocity in the market. Wouldn't it be great if a market survey existed to show how your Google Ads account was performing compared to your competitors? It turns out a "multifamily digital marketing market survey" exists today. Our team has access to show how our campaign(s) overlap, outrank, or show above or below our competition's ads. Informing our clients of the main KPIs in digital marketing are important, but we also find it necessary for us to inform one another of how the property is performing in the market- online and locally. While it's important to stay focused on your own keyword and PPC strategy, knowing how you stack up against the competition can lead to some insightful shifts in strategy based on your leasing velocity, traffic needs, and current occupancy. If you have any questions on how these can impact your strategy, feel free to contact us at dk@streetdigitalmedia.com.

Multifamily Website Landing Page Experience To Have Greater Impact On Performance & Ranking

Multifamily properties spend thousands of dollars on custom and template websites each year. Even more dollars are spent to drive prospective renters to those websites via PPC, paid social media, display, reputation management sites, and ILSs. While many developers, owners, and multifamily marketers spend countless hours on creative calls with their website developers to make sure the aesthetics of their websites are in-line with their brand vision, many fail to address the functionality of these sites. Page speed, landing page experience, HTTPS ranking boost, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID) are rarely, if ever, discussed in the build out of custom websites. While some of these terms may seem like a foreign language, the importance of addressing these with your web developers will help lead to better performance for your multifamily digital marketing strategy in the long run. Furthermore, increased website functionality, faster load times, and better landing page experiences on your websites can lead to cost savings in the Google and Facebook auctions for your online paid ad campaigns.

In an effort to create a "better web," Google is pushing forward on making landing page experience (defined as "how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page") a core factor in website ranking in the near future. While no immediate changes are necessary, multifamily marketers, owners, and web developers should plan on addressing this adjustment as we plan and budget for 2021. In their announcement of the change, Google notes "by adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they are looking for." The welcomed change will simply create a better search environment for prospects. Better performing, safer, and faster websites with appropriate content will be rewarded by ranking higher in a prospect's search. Google's announcement brings necessary attention to the performance and not just the look of multifamily websites. By ensuring that your sites have a better landing page experience and faster load times, you will be rewarded within the organic and paid search results. If you have questions about your current website(s) performance or would like additional information, please email dk@streetdigitalmedia.com.

Google Ads Focuses On Image Extension Testing. How Multifamily PPC Strategies Would Benefit.

Google has decided to continue moving forward with its closed beta testing of Image Extensions within Google Ads. First rolled out on mobile and now being tested on desktop, Image Extensions allow advertisers to show a thumbnail photo alongside their Google Search Ads. If rolled out to advertisers in the future, Image Extensions would enable multifamily marketers to upload property photos to their multifamily pay per click campaigns. When a prospect conducts a Google search where your PPC ad appears on the search engine results page, an image of your property would show within your ad next to your ad copy. Much like Price Extensions, Image Extensions could help qualify traffic before prospects click on your ads given renters' ability to see what type of product your apartment community offers on the SERP. Ideally, this would lead to more informed clicks to your property website. Prospects who click on these ads would be more knowledgeable about your product-type before they land on your website. Thus, a wiser spend of your PPC ad dollars.

If rolled out of beta, multifamily marketers would not be solely limited to one photo. According to Search Engine Land, Dynamic Image Extensions would allow multifamily marketing teams to upload their own photos or they could allow Google to automatically pull in images from your property website. Image Extensions would be a welcome feature to the multifamily industry

and likely lead to a wiser spend of

PPC ad dollars.