Business
Rent City Apartments is a family business that was established in Barcelona in 2003. It is devoted to leasing luxury apartments for short stays and places major emphasis on quality of service and customer care. Rent City Apartments offers a wide range of apartments mainly in Barcelona, though the company is expanding its offer to encompass other cities. The services are offered online via a website that is promoted internationally: www.rent-city-apartments.com
Challenge
Founder of Rent City Apartments
Rent City Apartments decided to try out Google AdWords, Google's advertising program, in 2005 on a very low budget. The aim was to ensure that traffic to its website would be of a good quality, not just from Spain but also from all over the world. The company also wanted to better understand its website visitors and adapt marketing campaigns to customer needs.
To this end, Rent City Apartments used Google Analytics, a tool which helped the company to pinpoint the target client that would net the company a greater turnover, thereby achieving a higher number of conversions from visits to the web page. The company's founder, Eva M Marzal, told us: "We've been using Google Analytics for two years. We use it on a weekly basis without fail and I must say that over the course of these two years, the tool has become even better. It is increasingly user-friendly and practical, providing the user with better results."
Results
Thanks to the use of Google AdWords in conjunction with Google Analytics, Rent City Apartments saw significant growth in both the number of visits received and the number of new customers. Specifically, the company witnessed a 1000 per cent increase in traffic which has brought about a large increase in sales.
More owners became interested in listing their properties on Rent City Apartments. As a result, the number of luxury apartments on offer rose by 1400 percent. In all, 60 percent of bookings made with Rent City Apartments result from searches on Google.
According to Eva Marzal: "Google Analytics is an ideal tool for analysis. It allows you to optimize promotion campaigns, for AdWords and for any other campaign. We consider it to be a key tool to success since it allows us to monitor our return on investment over time. As a result, we can see the effects immediately as we optimize campaigns."
Google Analytics allowed the company to identify the keywords with the lowest cost-per-conversion. Rent City Apartments was able to invest more money in the most profitable words while minimizing investment in words that resulted in fewer conversions. As a result, the company received a better return on investment.
Using Google Analytics also allowed the company to target the most suitable markets and indirectly helped them to optimize the content of their website. Knowing the highest-ROI terms enabled them to edit the language used in their website so that their customers could find exactly what they wanted, directly and easily.
Consequently, Rent City Apartments now sets itself well-targeted and well-defined goals with the aim of gradually entering new markets.