As Director of Growth Marketing for Property Finder across the Middle East and North Africa, Ahmed Osman is passionate about harnessing the potential of the digital economy to drive strong growth and create a meaningful, tangible social and environmental impact.
Since Property Finder started as a print magazine back in 2005, we’ve watched the real estate market in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) continue to reach new heights. Dubai's real estate market alone achieved the highest-ever quarterly transaction volume in the third quarter of 2025, with 59,228 property sales valued at $46.5 billion USD.
Our brand has grown since then too, becoming one of the go-to digital platforms for people looking to buy, sell, or rent a home in the region. In a competitive landscape, connecting property seekers with agents is the foundation of our business.
Our app is central to this. It’s where we offer the best experience for people, and we’ve seen that it has double the conversion rate compared to our mobile website. So, naturally, our goal has been to get more people to use it.
Laying the foundation: Our initial focus on app installs
To grow our app user base, we initially focused on app install campaigns. The logic seemed simple: more downloads should lead to more business. We measured our success using a Cost Per Install (CPI) model, where we paid a set amount for each time someone downloaded our app from an ad.
Our CPI campaigns were bringing in a high volume of app users, but not always the right ones. We were building a house with a weak foundation, not focusing on the strength of the structure.
This approach helped us acquire a large volume of people installing the app. On the surface, the numbers looked good. But we started to notice a disconnect. We were hitting our install targets, but it wasn't translating into the business growth we expected. We knew that our real business goal wasn’t just getting people to download our app. It was about generating high-quality leads, meaning when a property seeker connects with an agent, either through a WhatsApp message or a phone call.
Looking closer, we realised our CPI campaigns were bringing in a high volume of app users, but not always the right ones. The measurement was flawed because we were optimising for an action, the install, that wasn't directly tied to our ultimate objective. We were building a house with a weak foundation, focusing on the number of bricks instead of the strength of the structure. And a deep dive with the Google team confirmed this.
A new blueprint: Redefining success to drive high-quality leads
This insight led to a change in our approach. Instead of measuring success by the download, we would measure it by the lead. After all, it’s not about how many people download our app. It’s about the value that they bring to our business over time.
This meant we needed a bidding strategy that understood our true goal. We decided to test a new approach in the UAE. We switched our app campaigns to a Target Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA) bidding strategy. This is an AI-powered tool that helps get as many conversions as possible at a set target cost.
Instead of telling the algorithm to find us cheap installs, we told it to find us valuable leads. We set a target price for each lead, and Google’s AI went to work, optimising our bids based on the likelihood of a person actually contacting an agent. It was a simple switch, but it fundamentally changed who our ads were reaching.
The effect on app user quality was immediate. We saw less drop-off from new app users, and the people we were acquiring were much more engaged. They weren't just downloading the app, they were actively using it to search for properties and connect with agents.
Unlocking success with historical lifetime-value data and focused creatives
We took two big learnings from this experience. The first is that past data is key to setting the right price for a lead. For example, we studied the lifetime value (LTV) contribution of our app users across different devices, and our data showed that iOS app users generate an impressive average of 8.6 leads per user, compared to 3.8 on Android.
This knowledge was a game-changer. It made us rethink our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for iOS and helped us set tCPA targets that truly reflect the potential of each operating system. Simply put, we stopped viewing all app installs equally. We now focus our spend where the real downstream value is, allowing us to grow both our efficiency and our scale much faster than before.
The second lesson is that smart bidding alone isn’t enough for a successful campaign. To truly connect with high-value users, ads need to be as focused as the bids. We moved from broad, catch-all messaging in CPI campaigns to a more structured creative strategy in our tCPA campaigns. The latter clustered assets into two themes, brand-led and product-led, with stronger designs and calls to action. This evolution enabled us to grow relevance, momentum, and performance across audiences.
The results: A stronger structure for sustainable growth
We achieved a major win with our new tCPA campaign strategy, which is delivering better leads at a lower cost. Under our old CPI campaigns, efforts to scale up resulted in lead quality dropping off, meaning higher spend rarely translated into meaningful search or lead actions.
Thanks to tCPA, that problem is history. We actually managed to boost our high-quality installs by an amazing 47X year-over-year. And here’s the best part. We achieved that massive growth while simultaneously seeing impressive quality gains, notably an 8.2 percentage point jump in people searching for properties and a 1.6 percentage point increase in people converting to leads. This proves that we can grow bigger and better all at once, which is exactly why we made this strategic move.
Based on this strong performance, we were confident in rolling out the strategy across the rest of our markets in the Middle East. This success fundamentally shifted our priorities. We now treat app acquisition campaigns with the same importance as our branded search campaigns, recognising they are vital for building our audience and protecting our brand equity.
However, moving from a successful test to a full-scale rollout presented a new challenge. That is, scaling without losing performance. While it is always tempting to increase the budget dramatically when a campaign is working well, we learned that sustained, high-quality results require a progressive approach. Our strategy is now to increase budgets slowly, by no more than 15% per day. This disciplined, gradual pace is crucial as it gives the campaign’s governing AI sufficient time to adapt to the new spend, which helps us maintain stable, high-quality performance over the long term.
