Moving with a Changing Property Market
OnTheMarket features hundreds of thousands of UK properties listed by thousands of estate agents competing on a hyper-local basis. Semetrical has a long-standing relationship with OnTheMarket since its initial launch in 2015, in which we played an instrumental part in supporting its transition from a new business start-up to a PLC in the first three years.
Ambition
Historically, our core activity for OnTheMarket’s digital growth had focused on Paid Search and Display. As demand in the property market increased throughout 2021 and 2022, Semetrical set out to provide additional value to OnTheMarket estate agents through hyper-targeted paid media campaigns across Google Search, Google Display, Facebook, Pinterest and Programmatic Display channels, in order to deliver high-value, low CPA leads across a wider range of property sectors.
The target audience for these campaigns included:
- UK buyers or renters searching hyper-locally in cities, towns, and villages across the United Kingdom
- New home searchers interested in new build developments (frequently first-time buyers)
- Existing homeowners looking to value/sell their property locally
Strategy
To support Sale and Rent properties per location, paid search remained instrumental given the search volumes associated to local intent-driven keywords.
By dynamically targeting users in locations aligned to properties, we gathered more data to inform keyword selection and bidding strategies for PPC campaigns, enabling us to provide extra value to them within their new homes and valuation themes.
However, our testing highlighted that Facebook was a key marketplace for users to initially discover new properties, particularly given the greater visual impact, which could not be replicated in the SERPs. Expanding our campaign selection across similar paid digital channels provided us with more opportunities to test visual assets, increasing conversion rates.
Individually tracking performance across thousands of properties a month was required, as we needed to optimise per property to hit KPI thresholds. Automation, data feeds and heavy data crunching were integral to making the campaigns a success. By conducting regular reporting and optimisations, our campaigns became more efficient and we could further expand the scale of our campaigns and local targeting.
"2021 through 2022 has proved to be our biggest year yet with OnTheMarket, trialling more campaign tactics across more paid media channels than ever before."
Results
Alongside a greater level of integration with the OnTheMarket team (and their clients), we’ve demonstrated great improvements in CPA and conversion rate for existing campaigns, as well as making a positive impact on new tactics such as Property Valuations.
Results achieved between Q1-Q4 2021:
- 59% reduction in CPA
- 62% increase in conversion rate for New Homes YoY
- 45% more leads
- 47% improvement in New and Exclusive Homes CPA YoY
- 64% increase in overall CTR YoY
Efficiencies made from H1 2022 vs H1 2021:
- 18% increase in conversion rate
- 37% increase in New Homes conversion rate
- 24% reduction in New Home CPA
- 18% increase in New Homes leads
- 74% reduction in Valuation CPA
Shortlisted for Best Use of Search – Real Estate & Property (Large) at the UK Search Awards 2022
“We have worked very closely with an integrated Semetrical team since before the launch of OnTheMarket.com in 2015. From the very beginning, they highlighted the full potential of investing in cross-device search marketing channels to attract the most valuable audience of active property-seekers. They outlined the potential of PPC to deliver cost-effective traffic and leads to our diverse estate and letting agent membership all over the UK.
After just 12 months, OnTheMarket was already established as one of the top 3 property search portal businesses in the UK. We are focused on creating the agent-backed alternative to the market leader and continue to work closely with Semetrical to grow our traffic, our leads, and our agent base.”
Patsy Walton, Head of Marketing at OnTheMarket
