Sign in with Google Andrew Kimberley is head of digital at Zoopla, one of the U.K.’s leading property platforms helping people buy, rent or value homes. He oversees the company’s brand and performance marketing strategy
After nearly 20 years in digital, I’ve seen that true performance comes when brand and performance work hand in hand, which is the most powerful formula for delivering Zoopla’s sustained growth objectives.
Zoopla is one of the most recognised names in the U.K. property market, used by millions of home movers every year. With the market shifting and competition rising, we chose to focus on what sets Zoopla apart: empowering people with the knowledge of what their home is worth, and turning that moment of curiosity into the start of their next move. By building on the success of our “Win at Moving” brand campaign, we focused on ensuring growth in our key audience of home movers through our website’s instant home valuation tool.
We set out to make our brand investment work smarter, reaching home movers at the exact moment they start imagining their next move. By harnessing the power of AI, we turned those early sparks of intent into meaningful engagement and measurable action.
Bringing brand and performance under one roof
In the property sector, the most valuable audience are people selling their homes. If you can keep a steady stream of them coming into the funnel, everything else follows. That’s why our home valuation tool is so important to us. It’s where most seller journeys begin.
Our “Win at Moving” campaign helped evolve Zoopla’s position from a crucial moving tool to a trusted moving partner, broadening the brand’s relevance. Digital channels like Google played a key role in the campaign to drive both awareness and action, supporting growth across the full consumer journey.
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Opening new doors with Demand Gen
People don’t just wake up one day and decide to move. There’s a long period where they’re browsing, dreaming, and planning, and that’s where we wanted to show up. But this time, we wanted to bring AI into the mix.
That thinking led us to test Demand Gen campaigns as a new approach to attracting new consumers. These campaigns allow us to reach people before they’re ready to buy or sell, by running highly visual, multi-format ads across YouTube, Shorts, Discovery, and Gmail. While these ads ran, we simultaneously implemented Google’s AI to find the right signals and optimise towards the outcomes that matter most to us.
The creative was built around short, ten-second video cut-downs from our main brand campaign, alongside a suite of static images. The scenes captured the euphoric highs (and occasional lows) of moving, from first viewings and packing boxes to finally getting the keys. Each tied the “Win at Moving” message back to clear actions like valuing your home or starting your moving journey.
Our Demand Gen approach focused on reaching audiences showing early intent, allowing us to find the right people at the right time. We used:
- Life-event segments, like people planning weddings, often a strong indicator of upcoming moves.
- Lookalikes based on Zoopla’s five million registered homeowners who track their property value on the platform.
Midway through the campaign, we realised that including existing users was dampening incremental lift, since they were already likely to convert. So in order to hit our audience growth targets, we moved beyond our core users. We continuously optimised the campaign using AI-driven targeting and assets that were both educational and entertaining. This approach ensured we were constantly engaging and acquiring new customer segments.
We used a full funnel lift study to measure incremental impact across brand metrics such as ad recall, search activity, and conversions, to give us a clearer picture of how brand activity was driving performance. While this is a challenge for other brand channels, Google’s strategy and measurement offerings equipped us with a performance mindset and allowed us to understand the impact throughout the customer journey.
Turning movement into momentum
Our results proved that brand activity can drive measurable performance and generate new demand.
The campaign delivered a 14% increase in valuation searches, one of the clearest signals of new seller intent. It also drove a 4.2% lift in ad recall and a 1.1% lift in brand awareness — a significant shift for an already well-known brand such as ours. Demand Gen played a supporting role across the customer journey, ultimately increasing leads by 28%.
We were using brand budget to deliver performance goals, and it worked. These results show that reconnecting brand and performance is essential for growth in a changing market. For Zoopla, that means continuing to test, using data to employ consistent storytelling and AI to keep every brand impression working harder.
