We've all been there. Owners want more leases, so they start taking things into their own hands. This typically leads to them searching online for "luxury apartments in x-city" and them asking why your ads don't show every time on Google's Search Engine Results Page. If they don't ask that, then they're likely to ask why one of your main competitor's ads appeared and yours did not. They want a simple answer, but sadly it's not that simple. Their location, previous online search and click behavior, campaign optimization strategy, and prior engagement with your Google Ads all play a part. Clients don't enjoy being told "it depends" in response to their question, but it does. Nevertheless, there is a great way to answer this question with analytic information.
Within Google Ads, marketers have insight into not only how many times your ads showed or how many clicks and calls were generated, but also how often your ads and your competition's showed for specific searches. Think of the screenshot shown above as a "digital market survey"- it provides detailed performance metrics about where your property stands in the online Google market based on your keyword strategy. Within this report, we display how often your ads show as a percentage of possible impressions as noted in the first column. The report also shows how often your ads were seen at the same time as your comps, how often your ads showed above your comps, and how often your ads outranked your competition on the Google Search Engine Results Page. These KPIs not only allow marketers to make adjustments to outperform your competition, but they can also inform clients about your campaign's presence in the market. This data helps answer the industry famous question- "Why aren't our ads showing when I Google us?" In the example above, this campaign's ad is showing for 85.99% of all searches it is eligible for. This is an incredibly strong Impression Share and is clearly dominating the market based on the competition shown, but it also shows clients that we are not showing for 14.01% of impressions.
By combining this type of information seen in our "digital market survey" with your weekly market survey, you can better inform ownership of where you stand in terms of the immediate market as well as the online market. Not only will this help answer the age old question of why your ads don't show every time (or maybe they do based on strategy, budget, and competition), but it will help multifamily marketers make more analytic adjustments to their digital marketing strategy to beat the competition.