Bayut Egypt
The Challenge
Bayut, a leading real estate classifieds platform in the GCC, expanded to Egypt in September 2023. Since launch, Bayut Egypt focused on driving lead volume while optimising budgets, initially relying on local Search ads as the primary acquisition channel.
With Search campaigns performing well but showing signs of scale limitations, the team needed to explore complementary channels that could grow unique lead volume without inflating cost per lead, a critical metric in Egypt's competitive real estate market.
Our Approach
We incorporated Performance Max into the campaign mix alongside existing Search campaigns, using a Maximize Conversions bidding strategy to let Google's AI optimise across all available inventory, Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and Discover.
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AI-Generated Asset Strategy, Deployed AI-generated creatives across text, image, and video formats to accelerate creative production and enable rapid iteration without manual overhead.
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Conversion Tracking Validation, Dedicated a two-week period to campaign setup, optimisation, and rigorous conversion-tracking validation to ensure data integrity before drawing conclusions.
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Incremental Lift Measurement, Used Caliper causal analysis to isolate Performance Max's true incremental contribution to branded search queries, separate from organic and direct traffic.
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Statistical Significance Threshold, Only declared results after Performance Max showed statistically significant uplift across lead volume and efficiency metrics, avoiding early false positives.
Results & Impact
Following the validation period, Performance Max delivered statistically significant results across every core metric, proving its value as a scalable complement to Search campaigns in the Egyptian real estate market.
The 31% relative lift in brand search queries, measured with a 90% confidence interval via Caliper causal analysis, demonstrates that Performance Max drove meaningful upper-funnel awareness in addition to direct lead acquisition.
Client Voices
"Using AI-driven creatives and new data signals in Performance Max helped our lead-acquisition strategy, optimising our targeting and efficiency."
— Samar Samuel, Senior Performance Marketing Specialist, Bayut"This test delivered tangible results, with an increase in leads and a marked reduction in cost per lead."
— M. Haris Ansari, Manager Performance Marketing, BayutFrequently Asked
Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that runs across all of Google's channels, Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and Discover, from a single campaign. Unlike standard Search, which targets specific keywords on Google.com, Performance Max uses AI to find the right audience across the entire Google ecosystem, optimising bids, placements, and creative combinations in real time. This makes it particularly powerful for reaching users at multiple stages of the buying journey.
Performance Max requires a broad asset library, headlines, descriptions, images, and videos, because Google's AI assembles thousands of creative combinations and learns which perform best for each audience segment. AI-generated assets dramatically reduced the time and cost of producing this volume of creative, allowing the campaign to launch with a rich asset set from day one. This gave Google's algorithm more material to test, accelerating the optimisation cycle and improving results faster than a manually produced creative set would allow.
Absolutely. While Performance Max was initially associated with ecommerce through Shopping campaigns, it is equally effective for lead generation when conversion tracking is set up correctly. The key is defining a high-quality conversion action, such as a form submission, phone call, or account registration, and ensuring tracking is validated before the campaign optimises toward it. Bayut Egypt's results demonstrate exactly this: a 30% increase in unique leads with a 49% reduction in cost per lead, driven entirely by Performance Max in a lead-gen context.
Branded search lift measures the incremental increase in users searching for your brand name that is directly attributable to a campaign, not just correlation. For Bayut Egypt, we used Caliper causal analysis, a statistical method that constructs a counterfactual control group to isolate the campaign's effect from organic trends and seasonal fluctuations. The result was a 31% relative lift in brand search queries at a 90% confidence interval, meaning we can be highly confident that Performance Max, not other factors, drove the increase in branded searches.