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Scape Australia

Semester 1 Bookings up +185% YoY

The Problem

Scape is Australia’s largest student accommodation home to over 17,000 residents across 35 buildings across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane & Adelaide – with an additional 10 buildings in development, Scape’s residential conversion targets in 2024 increased to match.

With this, Yango was tasked with driving increased qualified leads to site in order to drive more domestic and international bookings.

The Insight

We were after long term, sustainable growth to support the growing portfolio, so quick wins alone were not an option. Yango had to consider the full consumer journey and how it could support potential residents every step of the way.

The Solution

Yango recommended a blended media approach, where Organic and Paid channels work together to achieve great overall results, enabling efficiencies up and down the marketing funnel. Our aim was to build a strong foundation for sustainable revenue results using SEO and Paid Search, which was complimented by Programmatic media activations, to get eyes on the website in time for the start of Semester 1.

We would then take the learnings from this process and use them to create an effective long term blended media strategy. With the market becoming more fragmented, this blended media strategy would allow Scape to create a consistent brand narrative across multiple touchpoints.  Enabling them to reach international and domestic students when they are at their most receptive, ultimately improving long term bookings and revenue.

Students moving in

The Execution

 

SEO

With our original goal of driving qualified leads to site in order to convert for long term growth in mind, we wanted to create an excellent experience for customers on site. This would help support other traffic driving channels to achieve more effective results.

 

To achieve this, we:

  • Conducted relevance and technical SEO audits 2 months prior to campaign launch
  • Used competitor analysis to find keyword gaps and mapped these to pages which should be optimised for these terms
  • Reviewed website content and keywords against Google’ helpful content guidelines, checking for E-E-A-T, relevance, semantics, user intent, and topic coverage.
  • Found and helped fix site speed issues, such as compressing large images, and reducing unused JavaScript and CSS.
  • Found and helped fix indexing issues, such as redirecting broken links and removing non-indexable pages from the XML sitemap for search engines to be able to read the site effectively.
  • Worked with Scape and their web developers to implement these changes across the website, with some of the quickest wins being implemented over the course of a month.
  • Created new building profiles in Google Business profile, and optimised existing profiles in order to provide more information for the user in the search results and drive more clicks.

 

Paid Search:

Controlled automation is our unique best practice strategy which requires setting up accounts to maximise the benefits of automation, while retaining control through manual monitoring which minimises risk and allows us to focus on business objectives instead of ceding control to automation entirely.

The restructure was split into two phases, and finalised ahead of time to ensure the accounts were at the point of optimal performance and out of any learning phases before Scape’s most important period of the year (Semester 1).

 

The first pillar was completing an in-depth audit of the accounts, which involved:

  • Reviewed existing AU & International PPC keyword strategy and search terms to identify gaps and opportunities to further improve performance inside the accounts.
  • Removed conflicting keywords.
  • Implemented shared budgets to move budgets around based on business objectives and ensuring the campaigns were working towards one bid strategy (Target ROAS for Value Based Bidding).

 

The second involved building out bespoke ads to match each ad group theme and/or Scape Property, which in turn improved the account’s quality score (something lacking across the previous campaigns), resulting in more bookings through higher ad relevance and improved cost efficiencies.

 

Once finalised, our approach was well-positioned to:

  • Adapt to sudden market changes (such as stricter visa laws) by utilising the automation features which search engines offer.
  • Shift budget into locations that are struggling or had heightened demand to improve overall bookings.
  • Ensure all messages align with a brand’s positioning/current business objectives (e.g. reflects brand tone, adjusted for a sale, etc.).

The Results

Overall website bookings were significantly up from 2023, increasing by 185%. Traffic to site was also successfully scaled, without losing efficiency. Overall conversion rate also increased by 0.9% percentage points, which means that traffic was more qualified and converted at a higher rate YoY.

The improvement in results came extremely rapidly, with us seeing uplifts in all major metrics. Comparing the Jan-March 2024 YoY:

 

Organic Search
  • 142% increase in Organic Search bookings in Google Analytics.
  • 1270% increase in session key event rate YoY (percentage of sessions that triggered a conversion)
  • CTR increased from 3.7% to 5.9%
  • 111% increase in purchase events YoY across the quarter
  • Average keyword position improved by 14.4 positions across site
  • 8% more keywords ranking on page 1
  • Google Business Profile sessions increased by 9.3%
Paid Search
  • 241% increase in Paid Search bookings in Google Analytics from only a 53% increase in Paid Media Spend.
  • 264% increase in total conversions in Google Ads
  • 84% increase in conversion rate
  • 27% increase in impressions share
  • 61% decrease in cost per conversion

These impressive results not only drove short term gains for bookings for Semester 1, but also supports long term growth as it is easier to maintain performance through continued optimisations. We also can take learnings from user behaviours to inform future paid search budgets, allowing us to move budget around based on key periods of demand throughout future semesters.

What can we do for you?

If you have a campaign to run or challenge to solve, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch and leave your details, or feel free to call us direct.

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