With some much noise going on in the digital space, brands need compelling and innovative ads that offer consumers and potential customers value, whilst generating high levels of engagement and ROI.

Creative campaigns can help elevate brands in the public eye, and this was particularly true for ‘build-to-rent’ brand Quintain Living (formerly Tipi) who utilised dynamic creative ads to meet their business goals in a fully virtual world.

Bringing Interactive Tours to Digital

Among the many businesses impacted by the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rental market was among those particularly hard hit. With the government’s introduction of social restrictions, combined with the general advice that people should stay in their current homes and only move if absolutely necessary, it rendered physical property viewings near impossible.

As a leading brand in the ‘building-to-rent’ sector, this posed a significant problem for Quintain Living, who offer high end apartments in Wembley Park, with additional perks such as no fees, 24 hour support and stylish furniture and fittings.  If people were no longer able to view the properties, Quintain Living were concerned about the logistics of driving site enquiries and generating leases.

The Solution

Quintain Living’s roster consists of seven buildings, each designed to meet the needs of a specific demographic. Each building has a dedicated page on the website, which includes an image gallery and a 360 virtual tour of an apartment.

Anticipating that prospects would be unlikely to convert without having a full view of where they were going to live, we prioritised the virtual apartment tours as a key area to draw attention too within our digital campaign. Designing interactive dynamic banners to showcase the tour feature.

Because Quintain Living already had the virtual tours available on site, we had access to a bank of 3D panorama style images for each room. This meant that the display build would be relatively simple and therefore highly cost-effective. The banners we designed used these 3D images, placing them front and centre to ensure that in every case they took up the full space available. Interaction with the 3D functionality was provided by arrow navigation to highlight the interactive nature of the ad. To emphasise the ad capability, a subtle animation of the banners was included when the banner first came into view.

The banners were designed to be almost entirely dynamic to allow them to be updated as new imagery/buildings become available, this ensured that we could build audience-based targeting into content selection and allow us to test and optimise. The back-end feeds were set up so that we could test different images for each room in each building.  We could change which four rooms were displayed within the ad, the order in which they were presented and which room should be highlighted first.

Recognising that each building would appeal to different audiences, the creatives were built to allow us to target different customers with different content in a flexible manner. Our targeting strategy was built in two parts: those who had previously visited one of the building-specific pages on site, and those who had not.

In order to maximise traffic and engagement, it was important we avoided the risk of creative fatigue, exposing prospects to a broader range of imagery. To achieve this, we set up a sequential rotation strategy. When the creative is first served to a potential tenant, it will show the ‘default’ room, selected based on data taken from our paid social campaigns. This is recorded using an integrated floodlight tag, so the next time the user is served the banner, a different room is used as the starting image. If someone engages with the ad – by using the room selector to view a different room – then that room is recorded in the same manner via a floodlight tag. When the creative is next served to them, it shows a different set of creatives promoting a different room to maximise their exposure.

The Results

Before going live, we set a benchmark of 5% as an excellent engagement rate, based on clients who went live with similar assets. We exceeded this target, with 7% of users served with the ad actively engaging with it – of the 7% that engaged, 1.6% of these users clicked through to the website with session durations above 1 minute, a 2x increase on the previous creative.

When analysing display activity, we saw a 91% rise in CR, thereby highlighting the value of creative ad formats in driving conversions. Quintain Living’s use of dynamic creatives drove exceptional engagement rates, high quality traffic and enquiries

Click here to view the full case study; Driving Site Enquiries for Quintain Living.