Summit Homes Group Digital Marketing

The beginning of a partnership

In a fiercely competitive tender process, Distl emerged successful among prominent digital agencies in Perth, securing the opportunity to spearhead Summit Homes Group‘s Google Ads, Facebook Ad campaigns, and SEO efforts. Our partnership began with an intensive three-month period dedicated to reviewing and auditing their existing strategies, setting the stage for the implementation of our tailored approach.

Across all accounts, we executed a comprehensive rebuild and restructure, enhancing the performance and efficiency of SEO, Google, and Facebook campaigns. Instead of a focus on reach and awareness, our strategy aimed at delivering higher lead volumes while reducing the cost per lead, resulting in significant positive outcomes.

The housing market challenge

The year 2022 posed several challenges for the housing market, widely covered by the media. A pervasive sense of distrust toward home builders, prolonged lead times for new home builds, and the unfortunate closure of several local home building companies created a challenging environment. Additionally, a material shortage and subsequent price increase compelled the building industry, including Summit Homes Group, to raise prices despite other unfavourable market conditions.

Australia-wide, the following trends were observed:

• A 6.3% drop in house prices in capital cities.
• A 16.5% decrease in home sales in capital cities.
• The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) raised interest rates on eight occasions throughout 2022.

Google ads results

In 2022, we achieved a remarkable 15% increase in pay-per-click (PPC) leads compared to 2021 across all Summit Homes Group brands, including Summit New Homes, Summit South West, Summit Renovations, Summit Granny Flats, and Summit Developments. This substantial growth demonstrated the effectiveness of our optimised Google Ads campaigns in driving lead generation.

Paid media results

Despite a 29% reduction in the budget, our Facebook Ads campaign for Summit House of Brands achieved impressive year-on-year (YoY) improvements. The total lead volume increased by 511%, reaching 4,092 leads in 2022. Cost efficiency also improved with an 88% YoY reduction in cost per lead (CPL), reaching $69.24 CPL. Furthermore, the click-to-lead conversion rate experienced a remarkable YoY improvement of 1,336%, rising from 0.11% to 1.58%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategies in generating leads and optimising campaign performance for Summit Homes Group.

SEO results

The housing sector has been significantly impacted by market pressures, leading to a noticeable decline in search volumes for all home builder-related terms, averaging around 30%. Despite this prevailing trend, Summit Homes experienced a positive shift in most target keywords due to significant improvements in rankings. Notably, competitive benchmark search terms such as ‘homebuilders Perth’ and ‘new home builders’ that were previously not in the top 10 in 2021, now hold the first position in Google search results.

We implemented heat mapping to analyse user interactions on their website, and the analysis revealed issues with user navigation from the home page to key internal pages. To address this, quick links were added for home designs, display homes, and house and land packages. These strategic improvements led to a 19% increase in visits to the home designs page, a 48% increase in display homes page visits, and 153% increase in house and land packages page visits.