Unlocking the Door to Marketing Efficiency: Entrata's Winning Combination with NinjaCat and Shape

Entrata is a property management platform designed to help property owners and managers streamline business operations. More than 26,000 apartment communities utilize Entrata’s all-in-one “operating system” to control property operations, prospect and resident relations, accounting, financial reporting, and marketing and leasing strategies.  

To help its customers attract tenants, maximize rental income, and maintain high occupancy rates, Entrata provides digital marketing services, including paid advertising, search engine optimization, and reputation management.

Before onboarding NinjaCat and Shape in 2016, Entrata’s teams manually assembled marketing reports and tracked paid media spend for their customers, a truly herculean effort. Learn how Entrata scaled its operating efficiency by automating reporting and budget management.

The Challenge

Entrata’s customers often manage multiple apartment communities and need to be able to analyze performance at both an asset and portfolio level. They need a way to evaluate insights quickly and make marketing decisions that may impact their communities.

Before partnering with NinjaCat and Shape, the team at Entrata was manually aggregating marketing data, generating reports, and emailing them to customers. Reporting was incredibly cumbersome for Google Analytics since there was no easy way to aggregate data for multiple properties. Thus, a customer with ten properties would receive at least ten PDF reports to review each month.

While each multifamily property is its own business, Entrata’s customers typically manage multiple properties at the region or portfolio level. The digital marketing team found that generating property-level reports was extremely time-consuming and resource intensive, and that the majority of their customers found region or portfolio-level reports significantly more useful.

Paid media spend was also monitored manually by the Entrata team before they onboarded Shape. For a while, Google Ads’ in-platform budgeting features sufficed for Entrata’s customers who wanted to focus their ad dollars on one search engine. But, as marketing strategies expanded to include Facebook and Microsoft Ads, it became increasingly difficult for the team to manage paid media budgets. 

The Solution 

To solve the most pressing issue of marketing report automation, Entrata and NinjaCat built a custom reporting dashboard to bring all their customers’ marketing data into one place.

Together, they built a template that unifies their customers’ marketing, advertising, and analytics data; provides region and portfolio-level rollups; and enables apartment owners and managers to make strategic marketing decisions faster.

Entrata’s customers now have access to a dashboard via a link in the platform where they can view business-critical KPIs whenever they need. Instead of pulling reports, Entrata’s digital marketing team spends more time optimizing ad campaigns which in turn improves customer satisfaction even more.

Around the same time, Entrata partnered with Shape to help ease managing paid media budgets. Entrata was able to aggregate all its customers’ digital advertising spend into one platform. Shape’s collaborative dashboard enabled the team to monitor ad spend across multiple ad networks, eliminating hours spent aggregating and managing ad spend by hand.

Likewise, Shape’s automation features helped reduce errors and stress associated with manually reconciling ad spend and pacing ad campaigns. Entrata’s digital marketing team especially loves AutoPilot Daily, which helps prevent overspending by pacing spend across a budget cycle, and Rollover, which automatically adjusts budgets utilizing rolling budgets. 

The Results

By adopting NinjaCat, Entrata’s digital marketing team now saves hundreds of hours each year that otherwise would be dedicated to aggregating, formatting, and sending reports to customers.

The template that Entrata and NinjaCat generated powers 818 unique client dashboards and has given the Entrata team nearly 30% of their time back to work on improving digital marketing performance for their customers. Not only is generating monthly reports much quicker, but the team is able to analyze those reports and identify optimization opportunities faster as well.

Similarly, by utilizing Shape, Entrata’s digital marketing team now manages over 1,700 ad campaigns across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads each month. What’s the biggest win for the team? The complexity of managing budgets for thousands of properties across several platforms is significantly lower.

With NinjaCat’s acquisition of Shape in 2022, Entrata’s reporting and paid media spend management have been further centralized. Entrata’s team notes that they are able to accomplish their workstreams faster because they spend less time on reports and that having that time has enabled them to act on more strategic opportunities for their customers.

To find out if NinjaCat and Shape can help you streamline your digital marketing performance and spend management, get in touch.