Real estate advertising in Baku in Azerbaijani language in Google Ads
Increased leads volume by 55% in 4 months, while reducing CPL by 78% — how have we achieve it?
Search engine advertising, media ads, SEO
We were pinged by a client with requests for SEO, as well as for search and media advertising in Google Ads. For SEO check out the results at the end of the post, and for advertising here’s what we did and what the results of our actions were.
The specific issue was to run ads in the national language – Azerbaijani. Unfortunately, Google does not support this language neither in its interface nor in targeting. That’s why you can’t run ads in it in the usual ways.
We contacted Google support several times, but they always had the same answers, this language is not supported, write ads in other languages.
At the same time, we often found media ads in Azerbaijani in our searches. After talking to our colleagues, we decided to act carefully but systematically. We constantly rewrote our adverts and added new variations of titles and descriptions in different languages. At about 10 attempts we managed to pass moderation with text variations in Azerbaijani.
Next, we had to go through the same moderation process with banners and videos in Azerbaijani. This was a bit easier, as we could use videos with voiceovers and subtitles (embedded in the video stream) in Azerbaijani, but the nominal text of the ads could be in English or Russian.
An important note, Google scans not only the text of your ads, but also the landing page – if the page is in an unsupported language Google may also reject the entire ad.
Since we had to change banners and videos every week or two we decided not to change the texts systematically and to publish media ads in Russian, but the text on the banners/videos and the voiceover on the videos were in Azerbaijani. In this way we easily passed moderation and had time to change the promotions every 7-14 days.
An example of one of the last videos in Azerbaijani that we passed moderation with.
Ad campaigns setup after moderation in Azerbaijani language
After we went through the nuances of moderation we started with our standard setup:
1. We worked out the list of keywords in 4 languages: Russian, Azerbaijani, Turkish, English. We saw that the main languages in Azerbaijan and Baku in particular are these four, so we worked out the list of keywords, negative keywords in each language.
For geo-queries containing the city of Baku in different languages, we ran search advertising for the whole world, as the client sells property above the middle class, and it can be considered as an investment by people from other countries.
For general searches to buy a flat, housing estate, etc. we launched advertising on Azerbaijan, although in fact we looked – 90% of requests come from the capital Baku.
2. We launched media campaigns of the following types:
- Discovery – text and banner ads on YouTube and Gmail.
- Video – showing True View video ads on YouTube with optimisation by actions on the site after clicking and viewing the ad.
- Display – display text and banner ads on Google’s advertising network.
- Performance Max – this type of Google campaign combines the entire Google advertising inventory, search, youtube, gmail, partner sites.
For targeting we used the created look-a-like audience based on the uploaded list of customers from our client, there were names, email and phone numbers.
The banner campaign was the fastest to launch, but after a month Discovery and PMax were bringing in most of the leads. However, we encountered fraud from advertisers, website owners on the google ad network. When most of the media bids were brought by a campaign like Maximum Effectiveness, the share of spam in the leads reached 35%.
The solution was to leave it at minimum bids and budget and shift the budget to Discovery, where only YouTube and Gmail are available. We also manually created a list of trusted sites for displaying banners and relaunched the Display campaign with targeting only on them. That’s why PMax is currently working with limited bids, and most of the leads from media advertising come from manually selected sites.
3. In parallel with setting up and optimising ad campaigns, we set up call tracking. In this we were helped by our constant partners Ringostat service, with which we have been co-operating for many years. During the initial analysis of the site and setting up conversions we noticed that the number of clicks on the phone number is 2 times more than leads, so we assumed that the number of qualified calls will be almost equal to leads and call tracking is definitely needed, as almost half of the conversions we are losing without it.
Of course, the sales department processes all the calls and then makes a summary table on the quality of calls and their traffic sources.
However, for our purposes of learning ad campaigns and the account as a whole, we needed all conversions to be passed to Analytics and Google Ads.
Dynamic call tracking setup
Since February, we have had call tracking working, and indeed the number of calls was equal to the number of leads. Now we have been tracking all the main conversions we need.
It remained to deal with micro-conversions – the developer’s social networks were listed on the website, not actual condominium for sale. We saw that there were quite a lot of conversions to social networks, people went to get more information, ask questions, etc.
The nuance was that the links led not to the pages of a particular advertised estate, but to the general pages of the developer. After talking to the client’s developers, we heard that the task was not a high priority and would not be completed soon, so we decided to fix the situation ourselves.
Using Google Tag Manager, we set up a couple of scripts that changed the links to the social networks of the advertised house exactly on the pages we needed.
all types of conversions setup
call tracking
+55% of leads
-78% of costs
Thanks to the above actions we managed to increase the number of leads by 55% in 4 months, while CPL decreased by 78%. We consider this an excellent result and will try to improve it every month!
SEO
Regarding SEO, competitors were analysed and a promotion strategy was written, which gave such results after 3 months.
Increase in visits from free search results by 5 times
Growth of domains referring to the client’s website by 4 times
Increase in the number of referring external pages to the client’s website by 2.5 times
The example shows that any difficulties can be dealt with and moderation can be passed if the truth is on your side. If you have a need for real estate advertising both in Google Ads and in SEO, contact us, even if the moderators say it’s impossible 😉
