The Domain at Columbia may not be the closest student housing property to campus, but the movie theater, poolside hammock area, and fully furnished apartments should be enough to drive people through the door. The Domain is one of the newest properties in the market, after all. However, this year The Domain has had some concerns about gaining traffic to the actual property and driving online traffic to apply for and sign leases because of trends from the year before.
In June Catalyst implemented a remarketing campaign for The Domain. Remarketing banner campaigns provide a way for brands to stay in the minds of previous visitors to their website. In this instance, when someone visits The Domain website they are served banner ads on other websites that they visit. This helps keep the brand in front of those visitors, encouraging repeat visits to The Domain.
Since launching the campaign in June, digital traffic to the website has increased from 2,644 unique visitors in June to 3,162 unique visitors in July, with 91 visitors being directly referred from the remarketing banner ads in a short period of time. With conversion tracking in place, we can see that 44% of the total traffic from paid search resulted in clicks to the lease application page. Remarketing combined with other digital efforts have led to 1,313 clicks on the leasing application page.
This addition of digital advertising helped the property achieve a higher pre-leased occupancy rate than they experienced last year.
The remarketing campaign is still in full effect and showing strong results, which should continue to support leasing efforts for the property.