Google Ads Now Tracks Store Visits

Google store visits

If you own or operate a location-based business, you’ve likely dreamed of the day you can attribute marketing dollars to real-life foot traffic. Google started working on making this dream a reality in 2014, but the feature only rolled out to a limited group of high traffic companies. Over the last few months, Google started making a larger feature roll out to small businesses and enterprises. Advertisers can now track the campaigns, keywords, and devices that lead to store visits in Google’s ad platform. Up until this point, advertisers have been able to attribute ad campaign success in Google Ads through website traffic, website events, online purchases, and phone calls. While these metrics do a great job of measuring the intent of searchers to visit a location, store visits allow businesses to see how this online intent actually translates to foot traffic.

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Social Video Marketing Strategies for Student Housing

Video Marketing Strategies for Student Housing

College-aged students live on their mobile devices. Most spend their time watching videos and using social networking sites. Student housing communities have a variety of choices when it comes to marketing on social media video sharing platforms. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat all have a share of this market’s attention.

Each of these platforms has its own purpose and communication style. In this blog post, we show you where your target market is engaging with video content, the opportunities, and limitations that these platforms provide student housing marketers, and strategies for getting the most out of these communication channels.

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Search Marketing Strategies for Student Housing

Do you know what students type into Google when they search for an apartment? Do you know why some student housing ads get more clicks and impressions than others?

Most multifamily professionals know search marketing is an important component of a student housing marketing campaign, but they don’t know how student housing search marketing campaigns differ from general apartment search marketing campaigns, or what communities can do to stand out from others in the search engine.

By the end of this article, you won’t be like most multifamily housing professionals. You will have a better idea of how students search for apartments and what types of search ads they click on. You will know why some student housing search campaigns perform better than others and how your student housing community can use paid search campaigns to generate more traffic.

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What Student Housing Needs to Know About Gen Z

student housing gen z

As technology evolves, behavior evolves with it. The multifamily industry has been keeping tabs on the millennial generation in recent years as they enter the workforce, rent homes, and build families. While most of the multifamily housing industry has limited exposure to the upcoming Gen Z generation, student housing properties are staring at a new target market. Are the behavior patterns really that different between teenagers born in Gen Z and Gen Z/Millennials in their early 20s?

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Apartment SEO vs. SEM in 2019

If you took a sneak peek into thousands of apartment websites’ analytics accounts you might find that they tell a similar story. Most of their website traffic is coming from Google. Google is arguably the most important marketing channel for apartment marketers today, but it’s also one of the most difficult to compete in.

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New Google & YouTube Ad Features

New Google Ad Features

We know it can be difficult to keep track of the growing list of changes Google makes to its ad platform. One of the greatest benefits we provide our clients is our ability to stay on top of every new change and opportunity that emerges within the ad space. Out of all the changes that Google made in 2018 these are the four we think you will find interesting and impactful going into the new year.

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Luxury Apartment Marketing Guide

Luxury Apartment Marketing

The national apartment market is predicted to grow by over 450,000 units in 2019. According to Fannie Mae’s Director of Economics & Multifamily Research, this will be one of the largest supply increases in the past decade. Most of this growth will be concentrated in ten metros, and as many of you have might guessed, most of this new supply will be for luxury Class A units. (Multifamily Executive)

The industry trend towards new luxury development has been going on for years.

In 2012, only half of all new apartment builds were considered high-end. In 2017, 79% of all new multifamily construction were luxury builds (Yardi Matrix). 

A recent Bloomberg article aptly described the situation, “Tenants are gaining the upper hand in urban centers across the U.S. as new amenity-rich apartment buildings, constructed in response to big rent gains in previous years, are forced to fight for customers.” 

Luxury communities are competing against more properties than ever for a small, high end portion of the rental market.

If you’re in charge of marketing a luxury community, you might be feeling the affects of this increase in supply. Now more than ever, luxury communities need to take a strategic approach to their marketing efforts.  As a leading multifamily marketing agency, we’ve developed and executed successful apartment marketing strategies for many luxury communities. In this guide, we share ideas, advice, and observations from experts throughout our agency to give you our best insights into how to successfully market a luxury community.

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Should I use AMP to Improve My Google Ranking?

AMP Pages to Improve Google Ranking

If you aren’t keeping up with mobile optimization trends, you won’t rank as well in search engines or ad platforms. You’ve likely heard by now that Google penalizes site designs that aren’t responsive to mobile. As a result, many companies have adapted their websites in the last few years to become mobile responsive. But what many companies don’t realize is a mobile-first experience has come to mean more than, “does it work on mobile?”. What mobile first really means is, “does your site work better on mobile?”. In an attempt to stay ahead of the mobile movement, some companies have gone as far as restructuring their site to prioritize mobile page speeds above all else. What are these companies doing to beat out their competition? “AMP”ing their landing pages. What is AMP? How is it giving companies a competitive advantage? Should my company be using it? Don’t worry, we cover the answers to these questions and more in this article.

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Pet-Friendly Apartment Marketing Ideas

pet friendly apartment marketing ideas

The American Pet Products Association’s 2017-2018 National Pet Owners Survey found that 68% of U.S. households own a pet. Last year, RentPath revealed research claiming that 66% of renters are pet owners. In an effort to cater to this growing renter base, many communities have adopted pet-friendly pet policies. Most of these policies allow renters to have up to two pets and they require additional pet rent and a pet deposit. 

While much of the pet market is pet-tolerant, not as many communities encompass the true definition of pet-friendly. If your community embraces this pet demographic, there are many ways you can signal to pet owners that your community is a good fit for them. Here are some pet-friendly apartment marketing ideas your community can use to get the attention of pet owners.

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YouTube Performance Study: Selecting the Right Video Content for Your Apartment Community

Youtube for Apartments

Over 70% of U.S. adults watch videos on YouTube, a greater percentage than any other social media networking site. Of those in the 18-24 age bracket, the number jumps up to 94%, and still holds a majority among those 50+, with 56% of these adults claiming to watch YouTube (Pew Research Center).

Despite the allure of a large audience, it’s not enough to just post up an ad and hope for the best. Certain types of ads work better than others, and the right video ad can improve your reach, and lower your cost-per-action on your campaign.

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