In the internet age, digital advertising (especially Apartment Google Ads) is the cornerstone of apartment marketing. However, understanding the results you receive from a digital marketing supplier can be daunting, even for experienced marketing professionals. If you’ve ever opened a Google Ads report and felt overwhelmed by charts, numbers, and acronyms, you’re not alone.
This guide will walk you through how to read a Google Ads report, identify the key metrics most relevant to multifamily, and utilize the data to make informed decisions and determine if Google Ads is effective for your apartment community.
What Conversions Really Mean (and Why They Matter)
At the core of any Google Ads campaign are conversions. In plain terms, a conversion is any action you’ve chosen to track. To complicate things, Google Ads also calls these Goals in the dashboard, and they are called Key Events in Google Analytics.
In the case of multifamily, conversion actions should measure bottom-of-the-funnel actions.
For apartments, these things often include:
- Form submissions (e.g., “Schedule a Tour” or “Contact Us Forms”)
- Phone calls from your ads and your website
- Email clicks from your website
- Applications submitted online
The bottom line is that accurate tracking is critical for measuring conversions in your Apartment Google Ads campaigns. If you use a CRM, be sure to ask for a phone number to specifically track calls from your ads. This way, your website and CRM will be able to distinguish different incoming tracking sources, allowing you to record your Google Ads conversions most accurately.
When you read reports, always start with conversions to get the best idea of how your ads have been performing. Keep in mind that all conversions aren’t created equally. Scheduled tours are further down the funnel, so they are worth more than phone calls or contact us form submissions.
Apartment Google Ads Campaign Types and What to Expect
Google Ads offers several different campaign types. All campaign types function slightly differently from one another and can generate leads in different ways. Here are the most commonly used campaign types, and how they work:
1. Search Campaigns
- What it is: A Search Campaign is a campaign that displays ads through Google Search. These are the text ads that appear when you perform a search right in Google. Your Google Ads manager has complete control over the keywords you target, and they should be adjusted when you start to see which keywords are converting well.
- Why it matters: Search ads give users the most control over what keywords to target and where your ads will appear. Search can be highly effective at generating quality targeted leads or driving brand recognition for a new lease-up.
2. Performance Max Campaigns
- What it is: Performance Max (often shortened to PMax) runs ads across all of Google’s advertising networks—Search, YouTube, and Display—using AI learning to figure out what is most likely to generate conversions. Ads are created on the fly by Google, which uses a curated list of headlines, descriptions, and images that your Google Ads manager sets up. Google will mix and match those assets and, over time, determine which ones work best.
- Why it matters: When set up correctly, PMax campaigns tend to drive the most leads at the best cost per conversion. While Google’s AI has gotten very good at identifying qualified prospects, they don’t provide us with all of the data to know exactly what is working.
3. Display Campaigns
- What it is: These are banner and image ads shown on websites across Google’s Display Network. Google’s Display network includes third-party sites and Google-affiliated websites like YouTube and Weather.com.
- Why it matters: Display is best used in tandem with search to broaden the reach of a given campaign. If you are using PMax, you are already using Google’s display network, so it would be redundant to set up a Display campaign.
Key Metrics for Apartment Google Ads Success
When you’re reviewing reports, pay attention to these numbers, which will help you know if a campaign is successful:
- Conversions – how many leads, tours scheduled, and application competitions you actually generated (assuming you aren’t tracking other lower-quality conversions). This is the most important metric for any given campaign.
- Cost per Conversion – how much you’re paying for each conversion. A high cost per conversion is often indicative of issues in a campaign’s current setup, but it can also be a result that your community is in a highly competitive market, and conversions simply cost more.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) – a measure of how relevant your ads are and how well they correlate to what people are searching for. This helps your ads manager know if the ads that are triggering for the keywords you’re targeting are in sync. Since not all Google actions are clicks, this metric is referred to as Interaction Rate in your Google Dashboard.
- Cost per click – how much you’re paying for a given click. A high cost per click usually indicates that a market is extremely competitive, and that budgets will have to be raised to generate the same results as you can achieve in less competitive markets with a lower cost per click.
- Conversion Rate – the percentage of clicks that turned into leads. A poor conversion rate can be indicative that the keywords you are targeting are being triggered by irrelevant searches and can also indicate that you need to make your website easier to use.
Understanding How to Use Data to Improve Google Ads Results
Imagine you’re running three campaigns:
- A $30/day Search Campaign
- A $60/day PMax Campaign
- A $20/day Display Campaign
Over the course of a week, each campaign generated the following traffic:
- Search generated 10 leads with a cost per conversion of $21
- PMax generated 15 leads with a cost per conversion of $28
- Display generated 2 leads with a cost per conversion of $70
From this, you can see:
- Search generated fewer leads than PMax, but those leads came at a more efficient cost.
- PMax generated more leads than Search, but those leads were more expensive.
- Display isn’t doing very well, generating the fewest number of leads at the highest cost.
The smart move? It depends. Search and PMax are clearly driving the most volume, and you’ll want to keep spending in both of them. Display is underperforming, and you might want to consider allocating some of the budget into Search, or even pausing it entirely.
Final Takeaway
Apartment Google Ads reports shouldn’t have to feel difficult to decipher. By focusing on conversions, understanding how each campaign type behaves, and comparing how much you’re spending with how many conversions you’re getting, you’ll get a good sense of which of your campaigns are doing well and which are struggling.
Once you have a good sense of what’s driving leads, tour requests, and applications, you’ll know if Google Ads is a productive piece of your marketing puzzle.
From the desk of Ellen Thompson, Co-founder and CEO of Respage >> Since its founding, Respage has helped over 10,000 communities attract, engage, and retain residents. Its platform assists properties in generating leads, automating leasing, and managing reputation and social media. Thompson is also the Founder of Results Repeat, a digital marketing agency that has helped hundreds of companies create a digital presence and use SEO and paid marketing to generate more business online.
