Cyprus real estate niche: four steps to a fivefold increase in the number of leads

We have already explained why the real estate niche is quite complicated for marketers. This case study reveals the peculiarities of promoting the business of selling apartments abroad (in Cyprus). It’s not about magical pieces of advice — it’s about sharing the case study on how we reduced the cost per action (CPA), effectively used satellites, got leads from the Google Display Network and entered new regions.

Project peculiarities

Prime Property Group specializes in the sale of villas, apartments, and other properties in Cyprus. It’s not just an intermediary company, but also one of the largest entrepreneurs in Cyprus.

Important: Most often, people buy the property in Cyprus when they obtain citizenship under the state investment passport program.

Marketing in such an expensive niche has its own specific features:

1. Managers of the company persistently process the lead within a year after the request receipt.
2. Companies pay a four-day stay in Cyprus for potential customers.
3. Satellite sites are actively used here.

We think that the project had features that initially complicated promotion. For example, due to the project specificity, we couldn’t implement call tracking and callback widget, as well as fully track the actions on the site.

Important: we didn’t consider some ways of addressing. Note that the share of requests through the site form is low.

Promotion tasks

1. Generating leads of Cypriot citizenship and permanent place of residence.
2. Being present in the search results as an element of branding.
3. Generating leads in the "Real Estate Purchase" segment.

What we did

• connected media tools: Yandex advertising network, Google Display network, remarketing;
• tested new geotargeting;
• tested landing;
• optimized behavioral indicators.

1. Connecting media tools: Yandex advertising network, Google Display network, remarketing;

We started with the search — used thematic queries in for all areas.

This is how the structure of search campaigns looked like:

Once the cost per click had increased, we suggested that despite the lower conversion rate, the total price of addressing from the media sources may be comparable to the cost per action in the search results. Our assumptions were true. As a result, we drove more than half of the leads using Yandex advertising network and Google Display network:

Which targeting worked better? We focused on the keywords related to Cyprus and immigration, but the audience targeting of interests was more effective:

2. Testing new geotargeting

Thanks to the activity of the client's team, we started testing geotargeting. Prime Property has a multilingual website and service that is not influenced by the client's location. So, we were not limited by the original geotargeting settings.

The most interesting conclusions:

• try Yandex.Direct not only for the CIS countries but also for the rest of the world: there is no much traffic but it is cheap. Besides, Russian-speaking users are still using Yandex services and visiting Yandex advertising network sites. We were pleasantly surprised by the cost per click for the campaigns of "Other Regions" in Yandex advertising network;
• for the CIS countries, the main corporate website was more effective in the area of passports and permanent residence permits, for other countries (Great Britain, India, European Union countries) — one-page landing worked better; 
• campaigns for brand names of the competitors work perfectly.

3. Testing landing pages

The client decided to create special landing pages for the investment citizenship and permanent residence. As a result, we got three landing pages (each of them had two language versions). The use of landing pages,  together with the main website, resulted in about 30% more requests.

4. Optimizing behavioral indicators

Considering the difficulties with tracking the target action and low CR on the main site, we decided to optimize our behavioral performance. We set up a "Session duration is more than 60 seconds" goal which corresponded to the lead generation goals in Google Analytics both on the landing pages and the main site. Thanks to this, we were able to upload enough data into the Google Ads automated conversion optimizer in the Google Display Network campaign. With an average cost of $265, the average cost per action of campaign activities in the Display Network was $91.

Results and conclusions

We managed to reduce CPA and fix it at the stable and low level for this subject.

Weekly dynamics of the number of leads and CPA:

Monthly dynamics of the number of leads and CPA:

If we compare the last three months of promotion to the first stable three months (where CPA was lower than $1000+), the result is a three-fold decrease in CPA (-68%) and a fivefold increase in the number of leads (+357%).

By the campaign type:

Based on the results of work on this case study, we recommend using opportunities that may seem non-standard.

In highly competitive topics with expensive traffic, appreciate this traffic — increase conversion (even if you need to make some additional sites) and discipline the sales department.

The client’s feedback

The project's team

• Alex Aychew — PPC Team Lead;
• Dmitry Samoilov — Middle PPC Project Manager.