ATTRACTING ADVERTISERS WITH ACQUIA SITE STUDIO

Across an expansive network of websites, Apartments.com's CoStar Grow campaign aims to help advertisers fill vacancies fast. But a bloated back-end bogged down with old assets wasn't helping to make content changes quickly enough. CoStar's designers came up with amazing UI wireframes to optimize the experience, but needed assistance bringing those ideas to life. By collaborating with our Drupal developers, the team was able to make their website more manageable and enhance the opportunity to drive conversions.

The real estate market is in a volatile place, with more advertisers vying for customer attention than ever before — and the CoStar team was looking to spend less time managing unwieldy website content and more time actually marketing. To ensure that Apartments.com stood out, we made sure the target audience had as many ways to interact with each listing as possible; including written content, videos, interactive photos which included a 360 degree view, and a scale of ratings and reviews. But managing so many interactive assets and delivering a consistent performance across devices is no simple task! Thanks to Acquia Site Studio, users from multiple divisions were able to compose new content quickly and at scale.

When managing a Drupal site, we try to avoid siloing design or developer teams at all costs. By having the right conversations early in the process, we can ensure admins are armed with the knowledge of what they can (or can't!) change and build a plan for any possible permutations developers need to take responsibility over. With a campaign targeting property owners across several sites, we needed clarity on how moveable, editable or removable each piece of content needed to be.

Our collaboration helped maintain a balance of site speed without compromising the quality of engaging design: combining a Drupal-centric UX team with imaginative, informed designers with big goals. With a refreshed content strategy that understands and represents the needs of the audience, metrics have shown that bookings have grown by 34% from the website alone.