26.8% reduction in CPC over a period of 3 months!

Milliyet Emlak was the first real estate listing website in Turkey. It features various house listings, construction updates, upcoming housing projects, and so much more – covering pretty much everything in the real estate sector on its website. After well over a decade in this business, the company has grown and innovated to adjust to the ever-evolving digital world to enhance customer satisfaction.

Amazingly 2X Growth on
Non-brand Organic Traffic!

Challenges:

Ad spend is more or less linked to conversion rates directly. Increasing ad spend increases impression rates, which invariably boosts the conversion metric. Conversely, reducing the ad spend usually causes a dip in conversion as well.
Our biggest challenge was reducing CPC (Cost Per Click) and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) without affecting the current conversion in any way. Even though we knew exactly what to do, how to go about accomplishing it was a challenge in itself. We needed a convenient way of making frequent changes to the CPC. To tackle this problem, the Boost Team created a self-updating dashboard to see real-time performance metrics on Google Spreadsheets using the Google Analytics API.

The Approach:

Device (Mobile – Desktop and Tablet): Since we found a significant disparity between the conversion rates on different platforms, the Boost team started by bifurcating mobile and desktop into discrete ad campaigns. The analysis that showed significant behavioral differences between these two sets of users made this decision fairly straightforward.

User Location: The objectives, intentions, and behavior of users varies by location. In Milliyet Emlak’s case, this is partly due to non-uniform brand recognition and partly due to location-specific services/listings on offer. Keeping this in mind, the Boost team customized and split ad campaigns by city.

User Search Query: All search terms cannot be treated equally and our analysis showed vast differences in conversion, depending on the search terms used by visitors. Since generic search queries had much lower conversion rates compared to more specific ones, we split campaigns by search query as well.

In order to use the technical language in the best way, we had to improve the incomplete parts of the infrastructure. From page speed optimization to the content creation side, we took great pride in all the improvements we have made.

Hard work always pays

Results:

In a span of three short months, the Boost team delivered what it had set out to do – reduce the CPC and CPA without affecting conversions – effectively reducing ad spend without compromising on sales and conversions. CPC, is the rate charged by advertisers every time someone clicks an ad. Hence, lower the CPC, lower the cost to your company. We saw a 26.8% reduction in CPC over a period of 3 months, with a steady downward trend.