The POMCAST
A digital marketing podcast focused on local lead generation strategies and insights. Your search for in depth discussions, tips and tactics has led you to the right place.
The POMCAST
Mastering Multifamily Marketing: Google Ads and Paid Media Strategies for High Occupancy
Ever wondered how the top multifamily properties keep their vacancy rates low and renewal rates high? Tune in to the latest episode of The POMCAST, as we unravel the secrets behind effective multifamily paid media lead generation. Discover the advantages and challenges of marketing individual properties directly versus leveraging Internet Listing Services (ILS) like apartments.com and Zillow. We’ll also reveal why controlling your traffic through platforms like Google and Microsoft ads can provide you with better-quality leads and how a hybrid approach combining direct marketing and ILS can supercharge your efforts.
Explore the most effective apartment lead generation channels with us, where we discuss the balance between SEO and paid media. Learn why Google search ads, especially call-only ads for mobile users, are game-changers in driving valuable traffic. We'll also share insights on why YouTube advertising with custom intent lists can be a cost-effective method to engage potential renters and how Bing could be your secret weapon for cost-efficient search marketing. We delve into the limitations of display advertising and the often overlooked potential of Bing as a complement to your Google strategies.
Lastly, we dive into the nuts and bolts of optimizing Google Ads for multifamily properties, from smart keyword strategies to effective remarketing campaigns. Hear about the best practices for managing campaigns for different apartment types and the crucial KPIs for optimizing your property marketing. With practical tips on video content creation and targeting, this episode is packed with actionable insights designed to elevate your apartment marketing game. Don't miss out on mastering the strategies that can help you maintain optimal occupancy while attracting high-quality leads!
Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com
Subscribe for more insights on SEO, PPC, and digital marketing.
Follow Us:
www.LinkedIn.com/company/itspremieronlinemarketing/
www.instagram.com/itspremieronlinemarketing/
Podcast Directed and Produced by: www.hiredgunsagency.com
Welcome back to the Palmcast. How's it going, mike? Good to be here? Of course it's good to be here. It wouldn't really be a Palmcast yet unless you're here, mike, you're the star of the show.
Mike Shaug:You're the best.
Shaun Raines:POMCAST episode four. People are really loving this content because the audience already knows this, it's watched the first, even if they're watching the short clips that have come out of the first three episodes. Finally, somebody's making content that isn't just laying on the surface. And today we're actually gonna make some of those multifamily folks even happier, because today's episode primarily focuses on multifamily paid media lead generation and we've broken it up into several sections. So for the audience listening and or watching the first place, what are kind of the primary goals, for those that maybe are new or need a refresher in the primary goals of apartment marketing, Absolutely.
Mike Shaug:But you have obviously apartment communities, townhomes build to rent communities all have the same goal they want to lease their community and be full as they as they can. They want to lease their community and be full as they can. Typically the occupancy target that most properties try to go for is 94% to 96% and then when they are at that level they can increase rental rates and kind of increase the profitability of the community In terms of apartment marketing goals. Pretty straightforward we want to have as low of a vacancy rate as possible and we want to have a high renewal rate. But on average, about 40 to 50% of any tenants that live at any apartment communities they move on, they go somewhere else. So you are at any given time trying to refill half of the building or half of the community. So that's why marketing is so important. The goal obviously is to drive as many leads so the onsite teams can convert them into leases.
Shaun Raines:Very interesting. I want to go also into individual property versus internet listing service. There's obviously some things that people need to know there, so could you break that down a little bit in terms of the difference there?
Mike Shaug:Absolutely so. A lot of different apartment communities, especially like independent single mom and pop shop owned apartment communities, leverage systems like ILSs, which is, you know, in the automotive world we have auto trader. In the apartment world we have apartmentscom, zillow, and basically the sales tactic is the same. It's hey, give us a bunch of your money and we will do a much better job of marketing and driving traffic to our website, and then we're going to farm those leads back to you. Obviously, that's a strategy that has been around for a very long time. Back when we worked together, about 15 years, auto trader was like the biggest thing and now it's not. So this is something that is still a pretty strong investment for a lot of communities and sometimes it makes sense to invest somewhat in apartmentscom. But for most apartment communities you can absolutely market for yourself through Google ads, through Microsoft ads, youtube.
Mike Shaug:The whole gambit and the benefit of going direct to yourself versus ILS is that at least you are controlling the traffic. It's coming to your website, it's going into your system, your CRM, and you're not dependent on a third party that can essentially shut off your traffic or leads at any time. The other benefit is you can remarket to that traffic. If you're driving traffic straight to your website, you can follow up with them with banners or video remarketing. So that's why, if you're going to make an investment of, say, $1,000 and you're choosing, hey, do I just give this to apartmentscom and they can drive traffic and leases for me, or do I drive traffic directly to my website through Google ads, facebook, for through SEO, you definitely want to drive that traffic directly to yourself and the reason why is, say, apartmentscom driving traffic to their website for any properties in the Austin area. You're not going to be the only property there, so you don't want to be spending money to promote your competitors projects, which is essentially what these types of internet listing services do.
Shaun Raines:Are there thoughts around doing a hybrid, where you're doing a little bit of both, or is it sometimes one or the other? I know you've referenced a little bit of like auto traders an example in the automotive industry on this side and multifamily. How common is it that people are actually combining both of these?
Mike Shaug:I would say it's pretty common to do a bit of both, and that's fine. I, of course, am very biased as a digital marketing guy. I think that all the resources would be better spent with us, but in some markets it makes sense to do a little bit of both. It's kind of like a media buy through a website where people are looking for apartments. So it's not like the traffic is not valuable, but in terms of traffic quality, the traffic you drive to your own website for someone looking for a one-bedroom apartment downtown Austin is going to be far more valuable than a visit that I get from apartmentscom or Zillow after they've seen a bunch of different competitors and whatnot.
Shaun Raines:Very interesting. So there has to obviously be some maybe preferable you might use the word best, but certainly most ones that you might recommend or things that people need to be aware of around marketing channels specifically for multifamily lead generation. Would love for you to kind of maybe explore a little bit of some of those channels that are that you find to be more effective, and then perhaps even detail a little bit of why you think they're successful.
Mike Shaug:Yeah for sure. In terms I, the way I think about driving traffic is where can I drive the highest quality traffic in the most controllable way? So the highest quality traffic that any website is going to get is organic traffic, which either comes through a Google business profile, through the search results yeah, that's just the highest quality of traffic. It tends to convert about 3x better than everything else. So that is a very important channel for driving leads. But obviously SEO takes time. It takes time to build momentum. There's a ton of competition. You have everyone trying to rank for the exact same keywords, including those ILS websites that people give so much money to, so they can compete with you from an SEO perspective as well. Because of that, obviously, it's good to have both SEO and paid media. So on the paid media side, I would say that the most valuable traffic that you can drive and there's a lot of different campaign types and traffic types you can go with definitely Google search would be number one. You can still not beat the value of someone going directly into Google and saying, hey, I'm looking for a one bedroom apartment in Midland, texas or downtown Austin. That's someone that's raising their hand. They're saying, hey, I'm here, I'm looking for this now, and obviously you have the ability to control the keywords that you're selecting. You can go super general and go for someone that's very vague in their search, like apartments near me, or you can actually spend your budget investing in the keywords that are closely aligned with your product, for instance, luxury one bedroom apartment downtown Austin or something like that. After Google search and it's kind of another ad format, you have the standard search ads. After Google search and it's kind of another ad format, you have the standard search ads.
Mike Shaug:Then what we really like to use is call only. Call only is a really awesome channel that we've been using ever since launch of the company and basically it gives the customer the ability to call and that's the primary call to action. It's a big phone number. It only targets you if you're on a cell phone and you can also visit the website, but most people click to call and the reason why that's super important is the number one source for lead generation. For pretty much any industry we work with is the phone, much more so than it is the form. So if you're giving the person the opportunity to just go straight to the action that they're going to take anyway and 73% of apartment traffic is mobile, so obviously a phone call is the most natural conversion event to happen, so call only is an awesome complement to standard search campaigns.
Mike Shaug:After that, I would say the next level that we'd love to use is YouTube, and what's really cool about YouTube is you can target YouTube with keywords now. So, for instance, in the past YouTube was really thought of as just very top of funnel awareness only, not super value from an actual ROI standpoint. But that's really changed over the last few years. Google has enacted something called custom intent lists, where you can take your top performing keywords and target people on YouTube that just did that search. About 75% of people don't click on ads in any given search, so that means that most of the time three quarters of the time you are losing that opportunity to engage with them if they don't click on your ad or if you're not ranking for that keyword that they look for. So a way to stay in front of them at a very low cost is to target those keywords to YouTube. So if they don't click on your ads and they continue their search, the next time they do a cat video watching session your ads can be present. So it's a super relevant way to go after someone. It's much better to leverage the keyword data that is coming from the customer, potential customer, live than to go with an audience signal like hey, I think they like. I think they're foodies or movie people or whatever.
Mike Shaug:There are a lot of different ways you can target your audience. Keyword targeting is still definitely one of the top categories and then, of course, you can layer in all of these other cool audience types like remarketing or similar audiences in YouTube. So there's a lot of really cool stuff. But the reason why I'm talking about it so much is CPCs. For Google search and call only go up about to 22% every year and they have been reliably for the last six years. Youtube CPCs are substantially lower. So if you have an average cost per click in New York for a one bedroom apartment, you can get that same traffic for a dollar or half of the cost. So you're driving a lot of traffic.
Mike Shaug:And I would also say if someone watches a 15 second video and then goes to your website, that's someone that's really engaged. I feel really much more engaged through video than I do through a standard text ad, even though text ads drive the most ROI, the value of that impression through video is super high, so that's why we really like YouTube. We like remarketing as well.
Mike Shaug:Something that we don't do a lot of right now is display, which is banners targeted against audiences that you think would convert well for you, everyone that is interested in real estate in a 20-mile radius or 10-mile radius. The reason why we don't like doing that very much is because there's a tremendous amount of bot traffic on the display network right now. So when we do banner advertising, we really like to leverage remarketing data from people that have been to the website. Let's stay in front of them with a banner. You can obviously do that through YouTube as well, but those would be the top categories of traffic. The next one on the list would be Bing. It's cheaper than Google. There's still about 17 to 20% of search volume is happening on Bing, so it's definitely a worthy I wouldn't say it's a worthy competitor to Google, but it's a worthy compliment. It's another place where you can get basically the same ROI, much lower CPCs, and a lot of competitors are not adopting Bing, so it's another great place for apartment communities to drive leads.
Shaun Raines:So clearly what you're saying. There is Bing can be a competitive advantage because not everyone's using it, but would you also say that's probably for people that have budgets that are robust enough that you can actually play with these additional channels? So prioritizing you already mentioned with Google and your favorability of call-only ads, which is great, and great insights on YouTube as well, obviously when you can have access to the acquisition of traffic at a lower cost, but obviously YouTube owned by Google. It's so many of the same people traveling in between those sites that are extremely valuable. So Bing, great piece as an additional. It can be a very competitive, nice competitive advantage, but also one where, if you have a limited budget, you may not introduce Bing Great question.
Mike Shaug:I would say that the threshold where Bing I would consider would be properties that have a budget greater than $5,000. You want to. What you don't want to do is spread your budget too thinly across a lot of platforms. That's what we see a lot of people doing. A lot of our competitors will have kind of all-in-one packages that'll get you a little bit of Facebook, a little bit of Google and some Bing, but most of the lead performance tends to come from the search campaigns on Google and Bing.
Mike Shaug:But the problem is, if you have a small budget and you're splitting it in so many different directions, you're not going to be able to have enough campaigns to effectively drive the type of traffic you need. You're probably going to have like just a few campaigns. And the other thing is your daily active budget is going to be too low. So if you take, let's say you know, a $1,000 budget and you split it three ways, divided by 30 days, that's not a whole lot of money. You'd be much better. You're much better off kind of getting to a good level of spend. So you have, like you know, on the low end, $30 a day to ideally like $150 a day on Google, and the reason why is the data that you're going to get is going to be a lot more continuous. Because your uptime is going to be much more continuous, You're going to get campaigns that optimize much better.
Mike Shaug:Not surprisingly, the Google platform likes larger budgets. Smaller budgets sometimes can struggle a little bit on Google in terms of managing that airtime all the way throughout the month. So I definitely recommend for most communities, if you have a small budget let's say anything under $5,000, keep it all focused on maybe 2 platforms at the most. Do not focus on Google and maybe a bit of social and wait on Bing or YouTube until you have maximized that investment and maybe have a little bit more to go.
Shaun Raines:What would your recommendation be in that same part of the conversation in terms of budget and let's just stay with, you've got a, right now, $5,000 monthly budget. Would you advise somebody to go with the? Let's just say they choose Google as their primary search engine based on your recommendation and they're going to do maybe that secondary channel in that budget. Would you say that they should probably allocate um part of that budget then into social, or is that where you guys would go? Or would you say YouTube before social?
Mike Shaug:In my opinion, I favor the Google platforms much more than Meta's platforms, and it's nothing against Meta. They just really had a tremendous amount of scrutiny put on them for basically the last four years, where essentially, it was alleged that evil foreign actors influenced our election through Facebook and, as a result, basically every administration has gone after their targeting abilities. On Meta, we used to be able to target people based on the office that they were in, like in a building or in densely populated areas. We could target by income level, gender, all of these other things, and you can't do any of that now. You can target remarketing to people that have been to the website, which tends to perform the best on social, and we do like it. If you have a larger budget, I would definitely say do some lead gen ads on Facebook. But the issue is and again, I'm not talking against Facebook I wish we had some of our, I wish we had some better targeting and I hope that we get some better targeting back for housing.
Mike Shaug:But currently, right now within Facebook, there are some very restricted audiences that you can go after and if they catch you using something like first party data or something like that, they will actually restrict your account. So there's just a tremendous amount of restriction right now in the targeting and within digital marketing. It's so important, especially within apartments where you have two people doing a search, for one person is looking for a $1,000 studio and one person's looking for a $5,000 studio, so they're both gonna search for apartments near me. So you need to be able to leverage audience exclusions and all sorts of other things to basically tell Google hey, this search is more of what we want based on the product that we have to offer, and you just don't have that ability with Bing as much as you do with Google with YouTube. Bing Meta is just a lot more restricted. Hopefully that changes. We like it a lot more for auto and for other channels where there are less restrictions, but the restrictions are definitely an issue.
Shaun Raines:Thanks for sharing. On that, I'm similar. But moving a little bit into YouTube, what kind of targeting capabilities exist there? Can you speak a little bit to what they can be looking forward to and the abilities within YouTube? And then also I'd like to know your thoughts on content creation, because I'm sure that there are people that are thinking, okay, well, how, who's going to make it? What type of content?
Shaun Raines:should we be making if we're going to go into the YouTube environment, but there's a handful of different ways that you can advertise inside of YouTube, so love it if you could share a little bit about that.
Mike Shaug:Right. I mean you can buy banner space within YouTube. That's great. I don't. That's not what I would recommend doing.
Mike Shaug:I would recommend doing pre-roll video, 15 to 32nd videos and just kind of touching on content first, because it is so important. There's a couple of different options. There's the good option, which is we hire a company, pay them three to $5,000 to do a shoot of the building, the amenities floor, the gym, the grill area, the rooftop deck, all the reasons why someone would want to be there. Shoot a few floor plans that are staged. That's always great too. And then you have this big, basically reel of footage that you can slice and dice into different short mini commercials. So you can take a piece of that rooftop deck, add it with kind of a front card of a specific price concession that the community has, and then just some lifestyle shots with voiceover or something. That's the best case scenario where you have footage to basically edit into mini commercials. The less good option for people that don't have the ability to do that kind of video is to leverage YouTube video builder or there are many other tools where you can put basically certain slides in for the text you want to say. You can do voiceovers or, you know, have some kind of narration you can put in music. Usually it's a little limited in what you can go with, but you can kind of make a reel of images that kind of looks like a video and it works. It's nice, but it's obviously better to have higher quality shooting In terms of targeting and this is just kind of Google targeting as an option.
Mike Shaug:Targeting lever number one is keywords. That's the highest level of intent. It's I'm looking for this thing. So for YouTube you have keyword targeting. That tends to be the best. The other one is remarketing. I've been to the website before and you created a remarketing audience for everyone that looked at the two bedroom floor plan page or the townhomes page and we're remarketing to that person and following them around with videos across the web or banners.
Mike Shaug:Then you have interests, right, and that. This is where it gets super just vague, and this is where it tends to not work out as well. It's where people that are interested in housing, architecture, foodies, film and art, like all that stuff we all that that is all of us in some degree right. So it's very imprecise that type of targeting for interest targeting or contextual targeting, where you're targeting people that are on, say, a specific lifestyle page for a specific publication, you're just guessing a lot about what that person's intentions and upcoming buying behavior is going to be, so it doesn't work as well.
Mike Shaug:However, that is a huge audience that is leverageable in display and in YouTube, and that's what we tend to recommend. We recommend that you maximize the better audience targeting features before you go over there, because there's so much search volume and there's so many people that have been to your website that if you opt to not remarket to someone so you can target people that are interested in politics, you're really leaving that low hanging fruit to kind of die and you're not going to be able to capture it because you're focusing at the top of the funnel instead of the bottom of the funnel.
Shaun Raines:Yeah, that makes sense. One last bit on content creation. Obviously you guys are more than capable and your bread and butter is around the advertising piece campaign setup management, getting all the best results possible. Do you guys also offer assistance to clients that need help with content creation?
Mike Shaug:So we don't do shooting but we will do the editing. Typically, clients that have video have the footage and once we agree with what we want the mini commercial to look like, we can kind of splice it together. But we don't have teams that go on site, unfortunately.
Shaun Raines:So if they need to capture, you guys probably make a recommendation like, hey, these guys can help you and then if you guys need to help edit and cut.
Shaun Raines:OK, that's great. That's good to know, because some people they might know how to actually get a shoot done. If not knowing that, you guys could make a recommendation of like here's how you get that done. When it's done, you can send over raw clips to us or raw files to us. We can help you guys get that all put together. I think that's incredibly important. Obviously, within the YouTube environment, content is still king. Isn't that a crazy thing, mike, after all these years?
Mike Shaug:I know. Micro content seems to be man since TikTok, Following our evaporating attention spans, yeah.
Shaun Raines:I know, literally killing all of our attention spans in the effort of I don't know what, but as it relates to businesses and in the case of multifamily, of trying to utilize all these different advertising channels and opportunities. There's something to be said for the short form stuff as well as the long form, and when they're looking for you know solutions or people that can provide them. That's why I wanted to find out what you guys would recommend on that. Yeah, go ahead.
Mike Shaug:Just kind of a last topic on that. Like it's good to have different lengths running, because typically you're going to get the best first engagement with a shorter form piece of content. And what you can do within YouTube that I also love is something called sequences. So, for instance, let's say you have three different versions of the same video, one's 15 second instance, let's say you have three different versions of the same video, one's 15 second teaser, one's 30 seconds, and then the other one is like two minutes long. What you can do is leverage the first wave of creative for the short form against everyone and the people that watch it all the way through or engage in any way. Then you serve them the second one or the third. Typically people tend to skip after about 20 seconds, no matter what. So you want to make sure that most of your footage is below that threshold If possible. It's going to convert a lot better.
Shaun Raines:Okay, good, good to know. I want to also circle back. You mentioned a few minutes back on keyword and intent and intent categories. A few minutes back on keyword and intent and intent categories, I wondered if you would speak a little bit more and break down. I know that there are multiple categories and within the apartment world and multifamily world I'm sure it's similar to other industries that you guys serve as well. But I think it would be helpful to kind of hear that breakdown of where those categories are and perhaps, maybe, if you would recommend that $5,000 budget, how much they should play If they have bigger budgets, smaller budgets, how that factors in of what you guys would recommend in terms of those categories.
Mike Shaug:Yeah, absolutely so. This is kind of more to Google search, microsoft ads, seo. As it relates to apartment communities. There are five keyword types and four that every community really needs to focus on, and I'll start kind of top of funnel and work my way down. The first is what we consider the apartments general or generic category, which is apartment Dallas or apartment near me or new apartment or new community? Super vague that says what categorically but it doesn't really tell us what kind of floor plan they're looking for, doesn't usually tell us where they're looking for near me. I mean, that's just a very vague sort of search. That's where the vast majority of search volume is. It's at that broad level. It's people that are just starting their search. They're kind of throwing Google a prayer and saying, hey, show me, show me what you know, what I want, so apartments near me, and then hopefully the search engine results answers your question satisfactorily. We tend to see that at that top tier level. It's awesome if you can rank a website organically for that level of keywords because it's super competitive. Typically, ilss are what dominate that. However, because Google for local business categories prefers to rank local businesses over ILSs, in the apartment category you can absolutely rank for apartment near me over an ILS for sure if the user is near to you. So from an SEO standpoint it's good to invest some effort there, but we don't like to spend a lot of our paid budgets there.
Mike Shaug:We tend to prefer to work on the next three categories which? The next one is apartments, geo right, which is one bedroom apartment, dallas Texas. One bedroom apartment Highland park. You know it's the product, it's it's what and where, essentially right. And the next category and it kind of it kind of intermingles. You have the floor plans keywords, which is the next category. That's the product keyword you want to go with. You have the floor plans keywords, which is the next category. That's the product keyword you want to go with. You always want to have a mix of keywords that are floor plan specific plus the geo area. Adding in the geo indication or the neighborhood where the property is located or near to just is a massive increaser of intent. So that brings them a little lower in that.
Mike Shaug:Funnel Apartments plus geo Dallas apartments. It's much better than that generic category. It's much more focused. The next one down would be floor plans and then finally, the last one is brand and we don't spend a lot of money on brand because you want to have a little bit of brand defense. Typically, 5% to 10% of your paid media investment will go to brand, because when you spend money on your own brand traffic, the CPCs for your competitors that are poaching your traffic go up. So even if just to make it more difficult for people to eat your lunch, it's wise to invest some money in brand. And then, of course, this one comes up all the time People always talk about well, what about apartments with a lagoon, which we actually manage, a community in Florida that has the largest man-made lagoon in, I think, the country or the world, so that would be a niche term apartments with sky roof, or basically stuff that most communities don't have like super high end luxury features.
Mike Shaug:Apartments with indoor basketball court, apartments with saltwater pool, apartments with west-facing views and all of those are amenities at one community that we manage in Manhattan that they're very particular about and some people do look for it. Usually not that many people are looking there. So we tend to focus people more on the floor plans and apartments, plus geo keyword categories, as being a much better driver of the volume of traffic that you need and conversions. But every community is different, so you need to structure the budget and the campaign around what they are specifically offering, around their specific floor plans and whatever the specific niche terms might be.
Shaun Raines:Does the? I'm kind of fascinated by the, these niche terms that would, you know, obviously be appealing to people who are looking for things that are like just a little different. Does that have any relationship to, then, how the targeting gets done at all? Do you change things up a little bit, or is there not really much of a relationship between the two?
Mike Shaug:So you know, the more someone geo-indicates, the less restrictive I have to get with their targeting. We typically are very tightly targeted around our communities because we find that about 70% of the leads in a normal leasing season come from within like a 10 mile radius. Typically, that is typical. That's 70% of people. The other 30% are people that are moving from out of town. That massively skewed for a short period of time.
Mike Shaug:After COVID, where literally the entire country basically relocated twice, a ton of people came to Austin. They moved into one building, then they moved into the one that they're going to be staying in for a few years. So in that you definitely want to be open to targeting people that are outside of your area, but what you want to do, what you don't want to do, is have a national targeting that basically says hey, if you're in the United States and you're bidding on the keyword apartments near me, we want to show up for you. That is so stupid, you will waste so much money. However, if someone is in LA and they're searching for you know, hell's Kitchen two bedroom apartment, then my client in Hell's Kitchen would love to show up for that search. So there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. However, I will say this and this is kind of a funny situation and a lot of people don't know that there are, I think, seven or 11 cities in the country named Houston. One of them is in outside of Warner Robins in Georgia. There's one in New Mexico. That's crazy to think about, but that's an actual. That one is less of a problem than, say, del Rio. We have 23 Del Rios. There are so many different city names where you'll have a main city like Chicago in Illinois, and then you have Chicago in other parts of the country. And here's the problem If you have a national targeting and you have a community that, say, is in Del Rio in Texas and you have a national target, you're going to show up in the other 22 cities. So you have to be very careful.
Mike Shaug:It's always important to look at how many cities or how many other communities have the same name. That's another problem is, a lot of times community owners are not the most creative people. I have worked with eight windermere at preserves. I don't know what a windermere is preserving or whatever, but I've worked with eight different communities. The last one was in Philadelphia and you know Vornado, vortex, like all of these different, like very strange, very specific names, and there's like five different communities in different States that have the same name. So you just have to be aware of that. You've got to look for what's the geo I'm in.
Mike Shaug:How could Google confuse this with another city? Because they want to, because they want to spend your money? And how many other cities does this property have? A really great example would be a community that we had in Maryland I'm not going to say the name because they had a huge issue with rodents, infestation, insects, and it was interesting because we actually had another property that had the same name in a very different part of the country, and Google would auto fill like XYZ apartments, you know, rat infestation or whatever. So it's it's super important that you try to make sure that Google focuses your spend allocation as close to the property as you can and that you do everything that you can to try to think ahead of all the other places where Google could waste your money.
Shaun Raines:Yeah, wow, that's. That's quite the story right there.
Mike Shaug:We've seen it all here at.
Shaun Raines:Premier, I can imagine, before I leave some of these areas around targeting. I don't know if you have any thoughts there on segmentation. I know you've been talking a little bit about that. You've also mentioned retargeting here, perhaps personalization strategies. But before I move on from targeting, any other thoughts there that you think are important, maybe that are maybe best practice related.
Mike Shaug:Yeah, there's a guy named Joseph Dane from Client Boost and he popularized a term called the iceberg effect and basically what that means is when you have all of these different types of targeting audiences, income levels, when you have too much of it and it's not focused, it can kind of be a huge problem. And you'll think that it's this very small part of the problem. It's really all of these other things. So segmentation and correct setup is super. A great example of something I see done wrong 90% of the time with our competitors is they will have a floor plans campaign that has the keywords for studio bedroom apartments, one bedroom and two bedroom and the problem with that is that Google is going to go after all of those people, but most of the time the studios and one bedroom apartments lease up really quickly and because you're you know, but you'll still have one bedrooms, you'll still have studios and you need to always market for them because you have that turnover, you want to make sure that you have all the keyword product types or floor plan types separated into their own campaigns so you can say, hey, I want to spend $1,000 on two bedrooms this month and 500 over here. So that is definitely a best practice. The other one is when, especially with remarketing and this one frustrates me so much, especially with remarketing, and this one frustrates me so much is when I look into an account and I see all users and that's it. All users is going into the remarketing campaign. I'm like what the hell is this? Usually what it is. It's anyone that's been to the website. It's people that have bounced immediately. It's everyone. It's not bucketed into audience buckets. So the best practice for audience remarketing audiences is hey, let's have all users, but let's have that's. That's the catch-all. We're not going to use it, it's just going to sit there. The one we're actually going to use, if it's all users, is all users that have been on the website.
Mike Shaug:For our website standard time on site or more, which is typically about a minute and a half. So meaning you're not going to remarket to people that just left the website. You could set a much lower threshold, maybe 30 seconds. Some of us search websites really quick, but you want to have a time threshold in there that says we only want to stay in front of people that have been on the website for 30 seconds or more. So that's one area of qualification and that would be massively helpful. But you're going to also want to create an audience for converters Anyone that fills out a form, a chat or clicks on a phone call. You want to make a bucket for converters because you can import that into your Google ads account and you can basically take that audience and say hey, google, other people that are like this converter category, we want you to find more of them. So that's a super valuable audience signal that comes from your traffic. Find more of them. So that's a super valuable audience signal that comes from your traffic. And then the other one is definitely segment your audiences into yes, have a floor plans, all catch all audience, but have a one bedroom, two bedroom studio audience. Individually, the audience sizes will be small, but if you can have basically an evergreen retargeting campaign for everyone that is interested in studios and you're hitting them with really high quality, creative and a great offer, that's far more valuable than hey, we're Windermere, something or other. We have floor plans, we have one through three bedroom floor plans.
Mike Shaug:It's like no one cares about what they're not interested in. They want to be remarketed to very precisely. And in other industries, like retail apparel. The remarketing is what you looked at, it's the car you looked at. It's the shoes you looked at that are following you around. But in apartment marketing it's super broad, it's hey, you came and spent one second on our website. We'll show you all of this stuff. And it's just not very effective and it doesn't work very well. And the reason why that frustrates me is people don't believe in it. We have a lot of customers that'll come on board and they'll say hey, we don't want to do YouTube. Youtube is trash because it wasn't implemented correctly. They think that ILSs are better than Google because no one sets up their Google ad accounts the right way. So yeah, I think that answered that question.
Shaun Raines:Yep, I think so. Yeah, that's fascinating. So I want to ask you a little bit about KPIs, for I guess property managers or people in a multifamily you know what ones would you say they should be focusing on when they're evaluating how well paid media is going for them or which ones they even care about.
Mike Shaug:So focusing, I guess, primarily on, like Google ads and Microsoft ads. You're going to want to have a CPC, ideally focused, not higher than $3.50. Ideally you're going to want to be in the $2 to $2.50 range and that's for search. When you add in display traffic it completely muddies that. So we really just do our CPC benchmarks on search keywords. So definitely want to be in that sub $3.50 area, regardless of where you are in the country. The next one is you want to have a CTR of like 8% or higher Industry standard, I think, or the national benchmark right now is like 4%. You want to target well above that because obviously if you write more relevant ads they're going to convert better, you're going to get more leads and leases. So that would be the CTR benchmark.
Mike Shaug:On the other kind of comparative metrics, I mean there are a lot of other KPIs that we talk about, like impression share. Most properties have a 10% impression share and that's all they can afford, because if they wanted to get it to a 50% impression share they would have to spend $50,000. So impression share is something we report on but it's not something that we really benchmark to. But it's a good thing to correlate because sometimes we can find out what the impression share is of a competitor. So that's where it will be valuable. But the other main metrics that we really hang our hat on are cost per conversion and conversion rate. The industry benchmark right now for cost per lead for Google ads is about 70 bucks. We try to be under 40, um, and really try to be under 30 as much as we can. And then the conversion rate. You want to have a conversion rate of 10% or higher. That would be. Uh, those would be the KPIs that we tend to look for. Uh.
Shaun Raines:I like that and I think it's important. Even, um, you know, when you're talking about reporting on impression share, that has to be really critical for helping set expectations, with people to it or they don't realize some of those key performance indicators that should matter to them. That just kind of helps set the tone, if you will, when you realize a highly competitive especially, I suppose, for people who are in larger markets, more metro markets, yeah, um, where it gets even more competitive that I see an LA are way more expensive than Naples, florida or Saratoga.
Mike Shaug:The tier one markets Miami, chicago, la, new York City, philadelphia, boston. Those are very competitive markets and you can see CPCs creep up really, really quickly.
Shaun Raines:So that's why you want to kind of have that $3.50 rule how would you tell people to balance that need for quick you know occupancy while maintaining, you know, a rent at the level that you want you know, obviously, if you're in a business where you want that rent as high as you can get it. But how do you balance that need for quick occupancy and keeping the rents where you need them to be and want them to be?
Mike Shaug:Right?
Mike Shaug:Yeah, that's a great question, cause a lot of times what communities will do? They will have rents, especially when the lease up is happening. They need to fill the building. They need to get some revenue to meet debt service. That's the thing is there's a bank and there's a mortgage on that property and you got to pay that mortgage within a certain amount of time. So you need to fill the building. You need something.
Mike Shaug:But the part with apartments that is complicated is pricing varies all the time and you need to make sure that you are competitively priced for the product that you have to offer. If your apartment has a lot of awesome features, like a gym that they would have to pay $50 to $100 to go to, but you have it on premise, you can charge more. If you have onsite parking or garages, you can charge more. But the worst case scenario is a community that wants to charge top of market rents and they don't have the product to back it up. But in a lot of lease up situations a lot of communities will just get as many people in there as quickly as possible and they'll double the rents next year. But the problem that that creates is you basically have two lease ups, you first got all the people in and then you're having to replace them. So having you definitely it's a very fine balance. You want to price as competitively as you can without shocking people when their renewals come around.
Mike Shaug:So for like, basically there there's two different stages of property. Right, you have occupied, which is where they're 90% plus full, and then you have a lease up phase and they have different rules. In the lease up phase you should be spending a lot of money to fill that building as quickly as possible. Every two bedroom unit that you don't have full is $5,000 or $4,000 that you're not getting that month. You are losing it that month because you still have that debt service. So what we recommend is to go pretty aggressive in the lease up phase. You definitely don't want to be the most expensive product in the market. Try to get your pricing as well as you can get your rental concessions in there. That goes a long way, especially when the market is kind of squeezed like it is right now. But yeah, so a lot more marketing upfront on the lease-up side.
Mike Shaug:Once you hit that occupancy number, you can massively reduce your investment. So if you have a lease-up budget of, say, like $8,000, you can probably bring it down to three and that'll give you enough traffic. And what the hope is, if you, when you started your marketing, you did the right thing and you did SEO as well. You invested in your backlinks, you invested in content for the keyword you want to show up for, you invested in technical SEO and you got your website as fast as that CMS allows, you are going to have this very slowly building amount of traffic and hopefully, by the time you hit the end of release up season, organically you're getting 3000 visits a month for free and that will obvious that, because organic traffic converts about three X better than search, google search, paid traffic, you want to make sure that you're investing there and that you always invest there. The way I like to contextualize the value of organic traffic is it's about like every organic visit is about 3x the value of what your CPC is. So if the average CPC for one bedroom apartment is $4 in Manhattan, then every organic visit is like $12, because they're going to convert at a much higher rate.
Mike Shaug:Yeah, so it's definitely super important to invest in SEO, but the way we like to talk about SEO and SEM is SEM is hunting. You always need it. You always need to get specific types of traffic. You are always going to have to fill the stubborn two-bedroom units that won't lease up as easily as the studios and the one bedrooms, because they're more expensive. And that's where paid search comes in. It's fast, it's hunting.
Mike Shaug:Seo is farming. You plant the seed, you water it, you pray to the Google gods, you read all of the bullshit that they put out about their algorithm updates, you decide what you believe and what you discard, and then you're constantly iterating. You're constantly massaging copy on the website, you're getting links, you're getting more citations and hopefully that collection of effort will build you up to a level of traffic that can help with your lease replacement next year. So come on with properties at all levels. We do a ton of lease ups and we also do a lot of stabilized properties, and there's definitely SEO is a valuable strategy for any property of any size. Essentially, what that'll guarantee is that you can reduce and control your Google ad spend and your other marketing channels by having a lot of organic traffic that's coming to your website for your brand terms. So that's kind of the hybrid approach. That's the best case scenario where you have both types of traffic running for you.
Shaun Raines:Another fantastic episode, mike. Really really great insights shared here for the multifamily industry Listen audience we have. Once again, we found a good home for this episode to rest. So we appreciate your comments, your questions. We appreciate your feedback, so please feel free to share it, especially if you're consuming this over on YouTube. Drop a comment. You can actually reach out and let us know what you think of this episode in ways that give us insights and kind of our feedback loop, of the things that resonate with you and that you want to know more about. So don't hesitate to engage with the content and let us know what you're thinking. If you're over there on YouTube, like and subscribe to the channel and so you'll know when we're dropping new episodes and other micro pieces of content. And thank you for tuning in to the POMCAST. We'll be back real soon with another episode. Thanks, john, thank you, mike.