Making ambitions of being the best in sector for paid advertising a reality.
McCarthy & Stone, industry leaders in the building and selling of owner-occupied retirement homes, appointed Delete to manage and deliver all their paid campaigns and take their results to the next level.
We focused on high-impact, creative strategies across a variety of paid channels and platforms with the aim of improving brand perception, increasing new enquiries, sales leads, ROAS and ultimately client revenue.
These platforms included Google Ads, GDN, YouTube, Facebook and Bing and saw us employing innovative tactics such as:
- GEO restructuring in paid accounts.
- Creative Facebook retargeting.
- New landing pages creation and form optimisation.
- Using paid campaigns for organic audience growth.
The final results were above and beyond the client's KPIs.
GEO restructuring innovation.
To maintain the visibility of highly competitive, yet vital retirement property keywords, we decided to integrate all past purchasers and enquiries from McCarthy & Stone’s CRM with a map and overlay it with a list of selling developments, focussing on the locations we needed.
We were then able to distil the catchment areas of each location which gave us the opportunity to maintain the top positions for the important retirement property market keywords, while only targeting the actual catchment areas for each development.
increase in conversion rate
+ 65.11%
reduced costs per lead
- 48.82%
Boosting conversion rates with new landing page templates.
User testing of new landing page templates was also strategically carried out in parallel with our GEO restructuring. 35 hours was spent testing old pages with 51 participants involved to represent all of McCarthy & Stone’s core customer profiles.
From this we gathered 86 actionable recommendations which resulted in the roll out of new and refined landing page templates. The results speak for themselves:
+ 21.38%
Increased paid campaign conversion rate
- 30.99%
reduced costs per lead
2,128
Sales leads per year
Using Facebook giveaways for organic audience growth.
We knew that an effective way to capture new audiences was to grow organic followers.
So by creating weekly ‘giveaways’ targeted at users who liked the McCarthy & Stone page, liked or commented on posts, or who were friends of existing followers with similar interests and age filters, we quickly improved McCarthy & Stone's Facebook visibility and organically grew follower numbers.
We also used our learnings about the catchment areas from our GEO restructuring to shape precise geographical targeting for each week’s giveaway.
228,995
People Reached
+ 15.36%
Page Followers
Getting creative with Facebook retargeting.
We enhanced McCarthy & Stone’s Facebook retargeting to improve conversion rates.
Using McCarthy & Stone’s Ads and Adwords accounts, we were able to develop innovative lists, including those of users who clicked on a Facebook ad, to capture specific audiences and their interests. These lists of users would then receive specific, brand-led ads, which encouraged them to return and complete their enquiry.
+ 31.59%
Increase in conversion rate
+ 84.98%
Page Followers
Form optimisation.
McCarthy & Stone’s in-house team explained that only 20% of form viewers went on to complete forms and 37.2% of these weren’t going on to convert. 13.2% of these forms also triggered validation errors.
To combat this, we collaborated with agency Experience UX to create effective new prototype forms that were rolled as an A/B test experiment.
Although the successful forms still had an error generation rate of 13%, our analysis showed that 70% of users who trigger an error now go on to complete.
+ 167.35%
Increase in conversion rate from paid campaigns
- 81.04%
Reduced costs per lead
Impressive overall results.
Beyond the impressive individual results these approaches achieved, our overall aim was to deliver a 6% increase in leads in 12 months.
We exceeded this KPI by 1,031% and overall we gained the client:
increase in SALES leads
+ 66.53%
reduced cost per enquiry
- 42.54%