Ambition
Launched in January 2015, OnTheMarket was the first major new entrant to the UK property portal market since 2008; swiftly positioning itself as a legitimate challenger brand with the capacity to compete with the duopoly of Rightmove and Zoopla.
Since launching in January 2015, Semetrical have been delivering multi-channel digital marketing solutions in partnership with OnTheMarket, including strategic and tactical paid media solutions to rapidly build consumer audiences, support continued growth of brand awareness and delivery efficiently high volumes of good quality leads to its estate and letting agents across the UK.
OnTheMarket’s long-term goal is to create an agent-backed alternative to the market-leading UK property portals. It has already firmly established itself as the third biggest UK residential property portal provider in terms of traffic metrics.
For January 2019, it had specified an objective to deliver record levels of website/app traffic and to generate record levels of leads for its agent shareholders and customers.
We have worked very closely with an integrated Semetrical team since before the launch of OnTheMarket.com in 2015. From the very beginning they highlighted the full potential of investing in cross-device search marketing channels to attract the most valuable audience of active property-seekers. They outlined the potential of PPC to deliver cost-effective traffic and leads to our diverse estate and letting agent membership all over the UK.
Strategy
Our bespoke in-house technology ensured that all the latest properties listed on OnTheMarket.com were immediately accommodated through paid media support.
Semetrical understood the core strategic and logistical challenges of rapidly scaling an already efficient and successful paid media campaign whilst transitioning from the seasonal low period (December), to the seasonal high (January) without sacrificing KPI metrics.
Our unique insight and understanding of the market highlighted how property search volume would start to escalate exponentially from Boxing Day through to the New Year and throughout January. We therefore aligned and scaled our paid media budgets and bid strategy accordingly during the short period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, enabling us to maximise the full potential of January from day one.
At the same time, our bespoke in-house technology ensured that all the latest properties listed on OnTheMarket.com were immediately accommodated through paid media support, allowing for full inventory coverage alongside efficient bid and budget management from 1st January 2019.
Achievements
Since developing our bespoke technology to dynamically build scalable PPC campaigns that enabled full UK coverage from day one; Semetrical have continued to successfully deliver against varied strategic and tactical paid media objectives for OnTheMarket, resulting in significant reinvestment into our services. Recent YOY performance improvements help highlight the efficiencies that we continue to deliver through our ever-evolving approach to paid media channels. Managing an increased paid media investment of 215%, we improved campaign click-through and conversion rates by 25% and 33%, whilst delivering 317% more customer leads year on year.
After only one year following launch, OnTheMarket.com was successfully established as one of the top 3 property search portal businesses in the UK and by 2018, after a successful float on AIM they now operate as OnTheMarket PLC.
Fast forward to January 2019 and Semetrical’s paid media support helped achieve their objective of delivering unprecedented OnTheMarket.com website traffic totalling 23.5M visits. Semetrical’s paid media campaigns accounted for 20% of all traffic and 17.5% of leads delivered in the month.
317%Increase in conversions YOY
25%Increase in CTR YOY
215%Increased paid media investment
After just 12 months, OnTheMarket was already established as one of the top 3 property search portal businesses in the UK. We are focused on creating the agent-backed alternative to the market leader and continue to work closely with Semetrical to grow our traffic, our leads and our agent base.
