Paid Media
Scaling Paid Media Performance Across Markets for a Home Builder
A leading North American home builder runs paid media across more than 13 markets in the U.S. and Canada. When one market began outperforming the rest, the team looked at what was working and turned those insights into a repeatable strategy. Paired with improved conversion tracking, the approach was scaled across markets and into a national sales promotion that delivered stronger results across the account.
The Challenge
Coming out of Q4, conversion rates were well below, and the team identified a few key areas holding performance back:
Messaging wasn't matching search intent.
Ads focused on general brand and feature messaging instead of the details homebuyers were actively searching for, like price, availability, and location.
Non-brand campaigns struggled most.
Non-brand traffic had the lowest conversion rate of any campaign type.
Conversion data was incomplete.
Standard analytics tracking was missing conversions due to cookie restrictions and user opt-outs, leaving Smart Bidding and Performance Max with less data to optimize against.
The Solution
Identifying What Worked
Location 1 stood out as a top performer. The team dug into why and found three key differences: stronger Performance Max audience signals built from the client's customer list, more direct rate-focused messaging, and tighter alignment between ads and landing pages.
Scaling the Strategy
Those learnings became a documented blueprint that was rolled out to other locations and eventually across the national Spring sales promotion.
Improving Conversion Tracking
The team also replaced GA4-based conversion tracking with Google's platform-native pixel tracking. This gave Google's bidding algorithms better visibility into conversions that had previously been missed and more complete data to optimize against.
The Results
The results showed that a strategy built in one market could be successfully scaled across locations, driving significant gains in conversions, efficiency, and overall performance.
The Spring promotion generated 345% more conversions than the prior quarter's promotion while reducing cost per lead by 37%
Conversion rate increased 264% compared to the previous promotion
Location 1 saw a 558% month-over-month increase in conversions, with cost per lead down 66%
Location 2 saw conversions increase 191% MoM after adopting Location 1's audience strategy
Location 3, a different country and price point entirely, saw conversions increase 146% MoM after implementing the new pixel tracking
What started as a successful strategy in one market became a repeatable approach across the account. By identifying what was working, applying those learnings to other locations, and improving conversion tracking, the team was able to drive stronger performance across markets.
