THEIR CHALLENGE
Nido Living is a premier provider of student accommodation across Europe. To stabilise occupancy and maximise revenue per room across their highly competitive Spanish and Portuguese portfolios, the brand set an ambitious target: to secure 80% occupancy for the upcoming academic year while launching new sites.
However, a critical technical deficit threatened the entire strategy. Their third-party booking platform was stripping referral data and incorrectly attributing over 1,200 high-value search leads to generic "direct" traffic. Operating completely blind, the internal team was unable to accurately calculate ROI, leaving them vulnerable to aggressive competitors in a highly volatile market.
OUR SOLUTION
We broke down the traditional silos between organic and paid channels, deploying a unified, behaviour-led search strategy engineered to de-risk their international spend and capture distinct student mindsets.
Our integrated team executed a sophisticated multi-layered recovery and growth framework:
- Algorithmic Attribution Rescue: Built a bespoke HubSpot dashboard utilising the client’s raw CRM data. By manually validating lead IDs against original search queries, we successfully rescued the attribution data for over 1,200 leads, providing the high-fidelity data required to pivot their strategy with absolute confidence.
- Cannibalisation Shielding & Efficiency: Implemented a shared keyword intelligence framework at a city-by-city level. We used Paid Search as a tactical short-term shield to buy traffic for high-converting terms where a Page 1 presence was lacking, while the SEO team simultaneously built long-term organic authority to eventually own those terms naturally.
- Alleviating Lifecycle Anxiety: Deployed hyper-targeted organic content around 'Student Visa' and 'Erasmus Life' requirements. This captured international students during a high-anxiety research phase, building foundational brand trust that exponentially increased the conversion rate of subsequent paid retargeting ads.
- The Certainty Nudge: Tackled student cost anxieties by embedding 'Cost of Living' and 'all-inclusive' transparency guides directly into Paid Search sitelinks, satisfying the user's psychological need for financial certainty before they even arrived on the landing page.
THE IMPACT
By treating SEO and Paid Media as a single, fluid ecosystem backed by ironclad data accuracy, the campaign completely transformed Nido Living's international performance, earning the title of Winners of the Best Use of Search (Real Estate & Property) at the European Search Awards 2026:
- The €1M Revenue Engine: Eradicated duplicative channel spend and cannibalisation, generating an additional €80k in revenue above initial projections and transforming a fragmented campaign into a €1M revenue generator.
- Occupancy Targets Smashed: Propelled the pan-European portfolio to an exceptional 86% occupancy rate in just three months, comfortably outperforming the client’s original annual benchmark.
- Explosive Scalability & ROI: Achieved a monumental 2,143% Return on Investment (ROI) alongside an extraordinary 7.7 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
- Algorithmic Dominance: Fuelled a 113% year-on-year increase in organic sessions and triggered a 362% surge in inbound phone calls directly from targeted ad placements.
2,143%
Return on Investment (ROI)
7.7
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
+113%
YoY increase in organic sessions
363%
Increase in phone calls from ads
