A Dubai luxury property brokerage that needed paid advertising to produce traceable buyer enquiries rather than impressions. I ran the paid campaigns, built listing-focused landing pages for them to point at, and reported on where each enquiry actually came from.
Advertising that produced conversations with plausible buyers, and a way to see which listing each conversation belonged to.
Dubai luxury property is one of the most heavily advertised categories in the region. Every brokerage is bidding on the same developments, the same neighbourhoods and the same handful of phrases, which makes clicks expensive and makes it very easy to buy a large volume of enquiries that go nowhere. The brief was not to generate more leads in the abstract. It was to generate enquiries the sales side could actually work with, and to be able to say which campaign and which property produced each one.
There was a second, quieter problem underneath that. Paid traffic was landing on general pages rather than on the property being advertised, so a buyer who clicked an ad about a specific residence arrived somewhere that did not mention it. That gap between the promise in the ad and the page behind it is where most of the budget in this category is lost — long before anything reaches a salesperson.
So the engagement had four jobs, and the rest of this page is a description of how each one was handled. It is a description of scope, not of outcomes: the numbers in this client's account belong to the client, and none of them are published here.
Luxury property attracts an enormous amount of casual interest. The campaigns had to be aimed at people with a genuine reason to enquire about a specific listing.
Sending paid traffic to a general homepage wastes it. Every campaign needed a destination that showed the property being advertised and made enquiring obvious.
Buyers in this market expect to open a conversation rather than fill in a long form, so the routes into contact had to suit how people actually behave here.
The brokerage needed to see which campaigns and which listings produced enquiries, rather than a total that could not be traced back to anything.
Campaigns, the pages they point at, and the tracking that connects the two — treated as one system rather than three separate jobs.
I rebuilt the paid account around intent rather than around channels. Someone searching for a named development is a different person from someone browsing a feed and being shown a residence for the first time, and collapsing them into one campaign makes both harder to judge. Separating them meant each campaign could be held to its own standard, and budget could move between them on evidence instead of on preference.
Landing pages were built listing by listing. A buyer clicking an ad about a specific property should land on that property, see its location, layout and position, and find the enquiry in front of them rather than after several screens of brand language. Where a listing did not justify its own page, the campaign pointed at the closest genuine match instead of a generic destination — a smaller set of pages that actually earn their traffic is worth more than a large set that nobody finishes reading.
Search and social campaigns separated by what the audience was doing — looking for a named development, researching an area, or being reminded of a listing they had already seen.
Pages built around individual properties and developments, with the details a buyer asks first — location, configuration, position in the building — above the enquiry.
Direct messaging alongside the standard form, so an interested buyer could open a conversation with the brokerage in the app they were already using.
Ongoing exclusion of rentals, job seekers, agents and off-market noise, so budget stayed on the searches that could plausibly end in a viewing.
Ad creative produced from the actual property material rather than generic skyline imagery, so the ad and the landing page told one continuous story.
Every campaign, ad set and listing page tagged consistently, so an enquiry could be traced back to the specific ad and property that produced it.
The definitions were agreed before launch, so success was not something anyone could redefine afterwards.
An enquiry counted when a real person made contact about a real property — not when a page loaded, not when a video played, and not when someone clicked. Every campaign, ad set and landing page carried consistent UTM tagging, so any enquiry could be traced back to the ad and the listing that produced it. That tagging is unglamorous work, and it is the difference between a report that explains what happened and a report that simply asserts it.
Client results are commercially sensitive and, in a market this competitive, routinely exaggerated. I would rather show you the reasoning and the method — and walk you through live accounts in a conversation — than publish a percentage you have no way to verify. How I approach measurement generally is set out on performance marketing.
Four phases. The first two are finite; the last two are the shape of the work month after month.
I started with the inventory rather than the advertising: which developments and price bands the brokerage was actually trying to move, who tends to buy them, and what existing campaigns had been set up to do. Alongside that, a look at how enquiries were arriving, who handled them, and how quickly — because paid media cannot fix a response time. That review decided what was worth advertising first and what should be left alone.
Campaigns were rebuilt so each one had a single job and a matching destination. Listing-focused landing pages were produced for the properties carrying budget, with the specifics a serious buyer looks for placed above the enquiry rather than below three screens of brand copy. Tracking went in at the same time, so nothing launched before it could be measured.
Once live, the work was steady rather than dramatic: watching which listings and search terms produced conversations, excluding the ones producing noise, rotating creative as it aged, and shifting budget toward whatever was earning enquiries that the brokerage considered worth following up. Where the honest read was that a listing simply would not advertise well, I said so rather than keep spending on it.
Reporting was written to be read by the people selling the properties, not by another marketer. It showed where enquiries came from, what they cost, and what I intended to change next — with the underlying accounts open to the client throughout, because reporting that cannot be checked against the source is just a story with charts.
The same three services, described in full — and the rest of the client work is on work.
The search side of this engagement — intent-led campaign structure, negative keyword work and conversion tracking that survives contact with reality.
Explore Google AdsPaid social built around ad set architecture and conversation-based enquiry routes rather than reach for its own sake.
Explore Meta AdsThe measurement layer underneath both channels: agreed definitions, consistent tagging and reporting you can audit.
Explore performance marketing