Maison International

See how a New York Real Estate Company increased their return on search marketing spend by 800%, and opened up an entirely new Italian speaking market.

Background

Maison International is a full service apartment rental agency based in New York. The apartments are concentrated in New York and the surrounding area and at any time there may be thousands of apartments for a potential customer to choose from. These range from fully furnished, loft apartments, unfurnished vacation apartments, corporate and holiday lets.

The company’s web site, www.nyc123.com carries details of all the available apartments including pictures and prices.

The company was using a number of search marketing techniques already including pay per click but did not have a measure of the success rate.

Maison International employs staff that speak multiple languages. Maison International was using a specialist Pay Per Click (PPC) agency in New York to manage their English language web marketing.

The Challenge

Initially, Maison International wanted to focus on using the linguistic abilities of the staff, unique in the New York apartment rental market, to try to determine whether the ability to speak other languages could be powerful in attracting potential customers to the site.

The site is vast, carrying details of many apartments. The apartment details are driven by a custom-made content management system with apartments being added and removed from the database on a daily basis. The translation of this apartment data is a major task, and would require on-going updates with a translation interface to the content management system to ensure details are kept current and accurate. This is a significant cost and the return on this investment is unknown.

1. The language-speaking market potential was unknown;
2. The cost of a full localization was considerable.

The Solution

Search Laboratory recommended a partial localization of the site. This involved translating a few introductory pages along with a contact form. This saved the large on-going expense of a full localization of apartment details and instead:

Provided an introduction to the services of the company and explained that the inventory of the site (the apartments) were described in English only.
Explained that staff that could speak the customer’s language were on hand and could help them through the apartment rental process. This is an important service when renting abroad when the process, rules and regulations can be alien to the user.

Search Laboratory initially recreated the English PPC as it was felt that this was not being maximized. This involved the creation of an organized structure of a large number of keywords, from ’loft ny’ to ’new york furnished housing’ and ’manhattan corporate lets’ with every combination in between; a total of over 2,900 highly targeted keywords.

We then moved this structure into Italian initially. It is important that the English keywords are not simply translated. Instead, we used in-country Italian marketing specialists to expand out the keywords within the structure designed by Search Laboratory.

The Results

The benefits were significant and almost immediate.

More enquiries
The number of enquiries increased dramatically and are now fully tracked.

800% reduction in CPC and CPA on the English language PPC
The cost per click (CPC) that we achieved through optimization of the English language campaign was reduced to less than 30¢. This had been over $2.60 using the previous agency. The cost per acquisition (CPA, or cost per enquiry on the site) achieved by Search Laboratory and Maison International was under $5.50 in English.

Fig 2. Average cost per click reduced dramatically over time.

Instant exposure to Italian market
Running the PPC in Italian created instant interest in Maison International from the Italian community both in the US and abroad. The results were instant. The Italian came in at a fraction of the cost of English due to the search volume and reduced competition in the market.

Highly cost effective
The CPA for the Italian campaign settled at $1.50. This means that it was costing Maison International $1.50 for a warm lead from their website containing full contact details of the prospect.

Conclusion

The client’s web site showed significant improvements, even in the first two months. All keywords are managed using Search Laboratory’s proven methodology and systems meaning that while the client is spending the same on PPC as previously, the keywords used and the management is much more effective.

For more information and to find out how search Laboratory can increase your on line performance, please contact us now .