Founded in 1856, Marsh & Parsons is London’s longest established estate agent providing services that include property valuations, sales, rental, and property management. With viral marketing campaigns and 33 offices across London under their belt, Marsh & Parsons had built trust by becoming a familiar face on Londoners’ commute and became an estate agent Londoners liked (very rare!) through a flow of entertaining, witty ads. But over the last 5 years Marsh & Parsons have seen the market become more competitive as a result of a rise in new only-online competitor types as well as rising marketing budgets from nationwide competitors. This meant M&P needed a way to be smarter with their marketing budgets to increase valuation volumes in an ever crowded market, and to do this as cost efficiently as possible in order to reinvest into other areas of the business such as brand and innovation to maintain market share.

The Challenge

Addmustard were challenged with discovering and implementing core improvements across marketing and technology in order to increase property valuation and instructions as cost efficiently as possible. 

We translated this into 3 main challenges…

  1. How do we Increase site conversion rate to improve valuations across all digital channels, including Direct
  2. How do we grow our unpaid channels to increase valuations at minimal cost
  3. How to improve cost-per-lead (CPL), specifically on PPC, to generate valuations at a lower cost

The Solution

Increasing site conversion

Addmustard’s technology, CRO and UX teams came together to create, manage and execute a new development pipeline that focused on core, actionable conversion issues that had been highlighted by the team through comprehensive onsite, comparator, and market analysis.

This included:

  • Website functionality enhancements and development of new features which put Marsh & Parson’s online experience best in class in their industry, incorporating new search filters, advanced property feeds, and new communication features with the office managers. 
  • Improvements to core CTA pages with a mobile first approach across UX, UI, and page speed, improving Core Web Vitals impacting organic performance. 
  • Optimisation of the platform infrastructure and CMS to allow for quicker scalability of changes across the site, improving efficiency across internal and client teams.
  • Development of successful channel, and campaign, specific CRO tests including updated valuation forms, new office page structures and a homepage redesign.

Growing organic traffic

A gap analysis of core terms and persona building was used to identify new opportunities for content and execute a production plan. This not only helped to increase keyword rankings and coverage, it also contributed to improving the customer experience by providing content for users at all parts of their journey, from step-by-step guidance for property valuation all the way to comprehensive explanations of the expert M&P service. A new area of the site for local area guides was also built to showcase Marsh & Parsons’ in-depth local knowledge and extensive coverage across the city.

Alongside this, our development team addressed all SEO Core Web Vitals and mobile issues to improve unpaid traffic as well as redesigning the homepage and new navigation with SEO in mind.  

Improve CPL on PPC

A new PPC campaign structure was implemented to enable more tailored targeting and messaging across M&P’s focus areas in London and improve quality score and CPCs. This was teamed with additional match types and campaigns such as DSAs which allowed us to target newer, cheaper search terms which we had seen appear since the pandemic. Tests were also run to pull-back PPC spend on terms where we ranked highly organically, which not only led to an increase in overall valuations, but also a reduction in CPL. 

New landing pages were created via our CRO programme to keep the journey and messaging consistent for those customers engaging with us through paid media, reducing content and making call to actions much more prominent on the page to improve conversion rate and CPL. 

The Results

In 2021, valuations driven by digital were up,+39% up on 2020, and +114% on 2019. 

Site conversion rate improved by 22% YOY, with mobile nearly double the conversion rate it was in 2019.

Some CRO successful tests within this period:

  • Introduction of different valuation formats delivering +30.3% increase in vals
  • New homepage redesign drove 23% increase in organic traffic due to improved optimisation for high value terms such as “london estate agents”
  • New marketing landing pages drove +355% conversion rate and +16% improvement to quality score 

Organic valuations increased YOY by 42% as a result of 502% increase in visibility, 65% increase in traffic and 2,545 new keywords ranking for the domain.

PPC CPL improved YOY by 8% and through increases of unpaid channels, the percentage of traffic that is paid for has reduced by -9.7%.

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Increase in digital valuations YoY
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Improvement in site conversionrate YoY
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Increase in organic visibility
Michael Baulk - Marsh & Parsons Chairman

“We engaged Addmustard to support our strategy of differentiating our brand, increasing our digital presence and innovating our technology. Addmustard have worked with us across all channels and platforms to deliver highly  successful digital performance, improved customer experience and increased efficiency of our digital marketing. They have integrated with our team and have completely aligned themselves with our strategy.”

Categories: Performance, PPC