Toll Brothers is a luxury home builder that has specialized in building unique semi-custom homes and upscale communities since 1967. With a goal of generating qualified leads at an efficient cost-per-acquisition (CPA), Toll Brothers turned to the Google Display Network to influence consideration at scale. Using in-market audiences and targeting tools like Similar Audiences and keyword contextual targeting, Toll Brothers achieved up to 50% lower CPA and saw CTR on its remarketing ads grow by up to 3x.
Goals
Grow quantity and quality of leads
Maintain or decrease CPA
Approach
Began using in-market audiences in parallel with remarketing
Targeted segments related to real estate and homes
Used Similar Audiences to find valuable users
Used keyword contextual targeting to build out remarketing lists
Results
Lowered CPA on remarketing campaigns by up to 50%
Grew leads from remarketing
Grew CTR on remarketing ads by up to 3x
In-market audiences grew remarketing list volume
Building unique, semi-custom homes and upscale communities since 1967, Toll Brothers is America’s premier luxury home builder. Operating in 19 states, Toll Brothers has won several industry awards and prides itself on making each house a dream home with superior quality and design.
Toll Brothers’ top marketing goal is to generate qualified leads at an efficient cost per acquisition (CPA). To reach potential home buyers and convert them into leads, Toll Brothers uses a mix of traditional and digital advertising, investing more than half of its total marketing budget in the latter. Toll Brothers relies heavily on Google’s digital marketing solutions and uses audience targeting across Google Display to reach qualified potential customers. In particular, Toll Brothers grew leads using in-market audiences on the Google Display Network.
Connecting with customers when they’re looking to buy
In-market audiences let Toll Brothers drive consideration among people further down the conversion funnel—people who are actively researching with intent to buy a home. With in-market audiences, users are classified into groups based on what sites and pages they’re visiting and their demonstrated in-market behaviors across Google’s Display Network and YouTube. Toll Brothers targeted in-market buyers in real estate and home-related segments such as “residential properties for sale,” “home décor,” and “home furnishings.” These in-market audiences then drove qualified traffic to Toll Brothers’ site, resulting in high-quality leads. Once these people visited the website, Toll Brothers added them to its remarketing lists to later reconnect with them across the web.
We found that in-market audiences fuels our remarketing campaigns. It increased the number of leads from remarketing, decreased our cost-per-lead, and helped build our pool. Our remarketing lists had exponential growth, allowing us to bring more people to our site.
“One of our biggest challenges is qualification,” says Tim Bolle, online marketing manager at Toll Brothers, explaining the need to reach specific types of buyers looking to spend a larger budget on a luxury home. “When we learned about in-market audiences, it was a way to reach a more qualified audience of people actively searching for a home,” adds Jaime Goldberg, online media specialist at Toll Brothers.
Pairing in-market audiences with remarketing grows business
By combining in-market audiences with remarketing, Toll Brothers achieves up to 50% lower CPA, more leads, and a click-through rate (CTR) up to three times higher on remarketing ads. “We found that in-market audiences fuels our remarketing campaigns,” explains Goldberg. “It increased the number of leads from remarketing, decreased our cost per lead, and helped build our pool; our remarketing lists had exponential growth, allowing us to bring more people to our site.”
In addition to in-market audiences and remarketing, Toll Brothers also uses audience targeting tools such as Similar Audiences to find new users who share interests with people on their existing remarketing lists. Toll Brothers also uses keyword contextual targeting to show its ads more broadly across Google Display, generating more traffic and volume on its website.
Feeling at home with Google Display
Looking forward, Toll Brothers says in-market audiences will play an important part in next year’s display strategy. “After the success we’ve seen with in-market audiences, we plan on rolling it out into some of our regional campaigns in 2014,” says Goldberg. And from a higher perspective, Toll Brothers continues to significantly increase its investment in display advertising, which currently represents approximately 36% of its digital marketing budget. Goldberg says she especially appreciates the flexibility that Google Display affords, which makes it easy to try new tactics and features to find what works best. “Display with Google has been successful for us. Overall, Google is our top-performing vendor,” she says. “In the past few years, we’ve fine-tuned what really works for us, and we feel positive about the results.”
