Google Rolls Out Discovery Ads. Goes After Paid Social Advertising.

The demand for e-commerce has skyrocketed with millions of Americans, and billions worldwide, working and spending more time at home than ever before amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The lock down has forced companies to adjust their business models, alter their supply chain, and offer more digital accommodations for the exponential increase in online shopping. With our lives propelling into the future of a more virtual world, Google has adjusted its online marketing platform as well. First introduced last year, Discovery ads have now been rolled out to all advertisers within Google Ads. Interestingly, the expanded marketing opportunity appears to be Google's attempt to offer a counter option to social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram. As described by Google Ads when creating a Discovery ad campaign, Discovery allows you to "get clicks to your website from customers most likely to make a purchase with visually rich personalized ads that show across YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and more." The new option allows advertisers to get their ads in front of their audiences based on user intent as identified by Google, much like the ads marketers run on Facebook and Instagram. The reach of Discover ads, shown below, extends to YouTube, Google's Discover app, and Gmail based on online user behavior.

Historically, Facebook has had a leg up on Google for non-search digital campaigns in that it shows visual ad creative to targeted audiences in-stream (i.e. in your Facebook and Instagram feeds where your customers' eyes and attention are). Google has offered visually creative display ads for quite some time, but ad placement is largely limited to being above or to the side of where online consumer attention really is. The new Discover ads give marketers a new platform to place visually stimulating ad creative in-stream- a great option for multifamily marketing campaigns given that real estate is so visual and product dependent. The direct comparison to social media ad campaigns can be seen in Google's own announcement of Discover ads by quoting digital marketing agency IProspect. In the blog post, IProspect claims Discover ads "deliver positive performance further down the funnel with up to 48 percent lower cost-per-action compared to social ads."As the digital marketing landscape continues to get more competitive, resulting in increased CPCs and CPMs for PPC and Facebook ads, Discover ads could prove to be a welcomed addition to the online marketing options multifamily marketers have at their fingertips. Testing and evaluation are soon to come as the summer leasing season gets underway.

Google My Business To Roll Out Self-Booking Virtual Tour Appointments

Google has been on the forefront of enabling small and large businesses to communicate COVID-19 related updates on their Google My Business listings. For the multifamily industry, properties can inform prospects of in-person and virtual tour policies within a specific COVID-19 section of a property's GMB profile. While multifamily communities in many states are re-opening to various degrees, while abiding by state social distancing guidelines, virtual tour capabilities will likely continue to play a large role in leasing efforts for the foreseeable future. Google recognizes that and is here to help.

Online Tours In Search & Maps

Google is taking additional steps that will allow multifamily properties who are verified with Google My Business to add "online appointments" to their profiles. In one of their most recent announcements, Google claims "in the coming weeks (this feature) will be visible on merchants' Business Profiles in Search and Maps." This will better inform prospects of your community's tour capabilities when they are searching for apartments in your market.

Online Appointment Bookings

Perhaps more importantly, Google has announced it is expanding online appointment bookings directly within a business's Google My Business Listing. With humanity's shift to a more virtual world, Google is making the ability to book appointments more available for business who have transitioned their services online i.e. online virtual tours. This roll out will enable multifamily virtual tour providers and self-booking CRM's to offer online bookings directly on your properties' GMB profiles. The booking feature has the ability to create a friction-less user experience by automatically uploading a virtual tour appointment to a prospect's Google Calendar. Even better, the calendar invite will include information on how your prospects can join the virtual tour with your preferred video platform. Check in with your CRM and/or virtual tour providers to see how they can assist in rolling out this feature for your communities as it becomes available. Enabling this enhancement will help utilize your Google My Business profile as a key part of your multifamily marketing strategy, while creating less friction for your prospects during their apartment search.

When To Focus On The Negatives: How Negative Keywords Can Help Your PPC Strategy

It's not uncommon for multifamily operators to wonder why they aren't seeing their apartment pay per click ads when they complete a Google search. This conversation often leads to multifamily marketing agencies providing the list of keywords your pay per click strategy is bidding on to assess performance and strategy. While keyword lists help provide an abundance of information and insight into your campaigns, they often times only tell part of the story.

Enter negative keywords. While infrequently discussed in pay per click/search engine marketing conversations, negative keywords are instrumental to optimizing a successful PPC strategy. Take this example: You are operating a high rise apartment in Uptown Dallas with 1 bedroom apartments that start at $2,000/month. Given your location, you see +apartments +uptown +dallas in

your keyword list for your pay per click strategy. While this is an appropriate keyword to bid on for this community, if not monitored correctly with appropriate management and negative keywords, your strategy can lead to clicks associated with search queries like "apartments in uptown dallas under $600" or "cheap apartments uptown dallas." Google correctly recognizes these searches as being consistent with the terms you want to bid on- apartments, uptown, dallas. By not including "under $600" or "cheap" in your negative keyword list, however, you end up showing your ads to prospects who are not able or who are not interested in living in a community at your price range. It's incredibly important when reviewing your multifamily search engine marketing strategy and performance to make sure you keep a close eye on your negative keywords and the search queries that have generated your ads. This can help create some great opportunities to increase performance and to drive qualified traffic to your apartment community website.