Cavanna Homes

Paid Search 

Competing for buyer attention against national portals like Rightmove and Zoopla – and against major housebuilders with far deeper pockets – Cavanna Homes needed its paid search budget to work harder, not bigger. 

With a Cost per Lead of £176 and a website converting at just 0.5%, the regional housebuilder was losing qualified enquiries to friction long before they ever reached a form. 

Bluesoup rebuilt the strategy around hyper-local geo-targeting and dedicated, conversion-focused landing pages – cutting Cost per Lead by 51% and lifting landing page conversion rate by 98%. Proof that smart targeting can outperform a brute-force budget, in even the most competitive markets. 

The challenge

Cavanna Homes faced a highly competitive landscape, dominated by major national property portals (such as Rightmove and Zoopla) and aggressive national housebuilders. 

At the same time, regional organic search demand was softening, making it essential for them to maximise the efficiency of their paid digital budget, to secure qualified buyer enquiries.  

Specific challenges that our work needed to address included:

• High lead acquisition costs – the existing paid digital baseline produced a Cost per Lead of £176 using the main website.  
• Low conversion efficiency – the main website was underperforming with a low 0.5% conversion rate, indicating significant friction in the user journey and drop-off before visitors submitted an enquiry.  
• Intense search competition – national portals and major builders were outbidding and diluting Cavanna's online visibility, requiring a smarter campaign structure to capture local, high-intent traffic without overspending.  

Geographic targeting gaps – the need to balance hyper-local site interest ("near me" searches close to developments in places like Exeter or Bude) with broader regional/UK-wide search intent for buyers looking to relocate to the South West of England. 

The solution

Before starting on any tactical work, we looked at what the overall strategic direction needed to be with paid search activity, to address the high lead acquisition costs and intense market competition.

We proposed a shift from generic destination traffic to a high-intent, friction-free digital strategy. This centred on capturing local homebuyer demand through precise geo-targeting, delivering tailored landing page experiences, and operating with agile, performance-led collaboration between our team and Cavanna Homes.  

With this as our guiding principle, we then devised a tactical implementation plan that focused on three areas:

• Dual-layered geo-targeting structure – we built hyper-local radius campaigns, in the form of targeted search campaigns around active development sites to capture immediate "near me" local intent in areas, like Exeter and Bude. We also ran broader location intent campaigns, which were UK-wide campaigns that captured relocation buyers searching specifically for new builds across Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset.  
• Dedicated, low-friction landing pages – we replaced standard site destination pages with streamlined, campaign-specific landing pages designed specifically for conversion. Also, we positioned enquiry forms prominently above the fold and highlighted key site benefits (e.g. location perks, local amenities, and development specs) to reduce drop-off.  
• Continuous campaign and conversion rate optimisation – we ran ongoing A/B testing on landing page elements and ad copy to continuously refine user journey efficiency. We also implemented active bid management and search query filtering to suppress non-converting, low-intent traffic and stretch budget further.