UK Real Estate · Student housing

Housing Hand: 26x ROAS via UK student-housing Google Ads

26x return on ad spend with $2.4M in added revenue across an 8-week ramp.

Housing Hand is a UK student-housing guarantor serving international students. Their existing Google Ads account targeted a too-broad UK consumer audience with no clear conversion model. We rebuilt around international-student intent, wired offline closed-won, and let Smart Bidding learn from booked tenancies.

ServiceGoogle Ads IndustryUK Real Estate · Student housing GeographyUnited Kingdom Timeline8-week ramp

Engagement at a glance Closed

Type Paid acquisition with seasonal windows

Service Google Ads

Buyer International students · parents

Geo United Kingdom

Timeline 8-week ramp

Return on ad spend 26x weeks 1 through 8

Added revenue $2.4M from paid in the 8-week window

CTR 32.2% on 138K qualifying impressions

Qualifying impressions 138K international-student intent

Overview

Who Housing Hand is and what they came to us with.

Housing Hand provides rent-guarantor services to international students moving into the UK. The buyer is a student (often parent-influenced) searching during a tight pre-tenancy window when they realise they need a UK-based guarantor. Their Google Ads account had been running broad UK consumer queries, training Smart Bidding on the wrong signal, and conversions were defined as form fills that did not predict tenancy.

The challenge

What was hard before we started.

01 The buying window is sharp (often 4 to 8 weeks before tenancy start). Spend has to ramp into the window and pause out of it.
02 International-student intent looks similar to UK-resident rental queries on the surface. Wrong audience segmentation burns budget on the wrong searcher.
03 Conversions defined as form fills meant Smart Bidding learned from interest, not from completed tenancies. ROAS reporting was inflated and untrustworthy.

Snapshot

What changed when we took over the account.

Before

Broad UK consumer queries, no student-intent filter
Conversions = form fills, no tenancy-stage signal
Flat bidding across the full year, ignoring tenancy windows

After

International-student intent queries isolated
Conversions = completed tenancy (CRM-fed back)
Bid modifiers ramped around tenancy-start windows

Engagement cadence

Four checkpoints from audit to scaled outcome.

Week 1

Audit + conversion infra wired

Week 2

Account rebuild + creative shipped

Week 3

Launch on 30% spend ramp

Month 3

Cost-per-meeting holds; full spend

Our approach

Four moves that made the difference.

International-student intent isolation

Negative keywords removing UK-resident rental queries. In-market audience signals around ‘international students’ and ‘study abroad UK’. Bid-up modifiers for queries containing university names.

Tenancy-stage conversion model

Conversions reframed as completed-tenancy via CRM upload. Smart Bidding learned from real revenue, not interest. Cost-per-tenancy became the metric we managed to.

Window-aware spend ramp

Bid modifiers ramped into the 4-to-8 week pre-tenancy window per major UK university calendar. Spend deliberately throttled outside windows.

Landing rebuilt for the parent-influenced buyer

Landing page rewritten to address both the student (process speed) and the parent (financial credibility). Calendar booking embedded above the fold.

Tools we ran

Google Ads GA4 Enhanced Conversions HubSpot Looker Studio

26x

return on ad spend

Results

What the engagement produced.

Over an 8-week ramp, the rebuilt account delivered 26x return on ad spend with $2.4M in added tenancy revenue. CTR landed at 32.2% on 138K qualifying impressions because the audience signals filtered to real international-student intent. The shift to completed-tenancy as the conversion signal meant every weekly Smart Bidding optimization was learning from revenue.