# From Treading Water to Sold in 12 Months, Google Ads in Three Languages for a Self-Storage Facility

> A Brussels self-storage facility went from 52% to 91% occupancy in 12 months with Google Ads in French, English and Dutch, and the business sold.

Source: https://go.cosmocalifornie.com/gads-multilingual-1-en
Author: Sonny Hughey, Cosmo Californie Media
Published: 2026-11-10 · Updated: 2026-11-10
Type: Case Study · Topic: Google Ads

**In short:** A 182-unit self-storage facility in Brussels went from 52% to 91% occupancy in the 12 months after Cosmo Californie Media took over its Google Ads in October 2025, and the owner sold the business. The ads ran in French, English and Dutch on about €1,100 a month. We matched every lead to a lease by hand and found that English speakers leased at about twice the rate of French speakers while their clicks cost about two and a half times as much, so both languages ended up at about €200 per lease. Cost per Google Ads lease fell from €330 to €116, against a target of about €128.

- **Client:** Self-storage facility in Brussels, 182 units (not named)
- **Industry:** Self storage
- **Services:** Google Ads management in French, English and Dutch, lead-to-lease matching, conversion tracking
- **Period:** October 2025 to September 2026
- **Tools:** Google Ads, Performance Max, Nimbata call tracking, the owner's lead sheet
- **Reported in:** EUR; occupancy and bookings from the owner's records, leads and leases matched to campaigns by hand

**52% → 91% Occupancy Across French, English and Dutch**

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## Challenges / Opportunities

This client was a small self-storage facility in Brussels, with 182 units. It opened in May 2024 and serves customers in French, Dutch and English. The owner started running Google Ads a month after opening and worked with an agency on the ads and SEO.

By September 2025, about 17 months after opening, the facility was only 52% full. The facility was treading water and needed help. To control overhead, the owner then cut SEO completely and moved Google Ads to us on the same monthly spend (we did provide SEO consulting over the course of our time working together).

That spend was also small next to the competition. The facility was up against huge chains with a lot more ad spend to work with, so the account had to be very efficient.

The owner is a native Dutch speaker, so strong French was a large requirement when they were looking for someone to run the ads. We work with multilingual clients, and since we're based in France, we have clients in France, Quebec and other French-speaking countries. Our team speaks French, English, Spanish and German, so we can run accounts in those languages on our own. We're also open to a review process when a client wants one, which is how we've worked in languages nobody on our team spoke. The campaigns ran in all three languages, but the ad account couldn't show which language was turning into signed leases.

We saw two opportunities. The first was to connect with customers in a way the chains can't. Big chains come with a lot of process, so most people would rather deal with a local owner, as long as the local business has everything they'd expect from a chain, such as security, easy access and a safe area. If the ads showed that to the right local audience, with better videos and images and tighter location targeting, stronger click-through would bring down our cost per click and then our cost per lead. The second was to improve the booking rate. The three languages were effectively three different types of customer, so we wanted to trace every lead through to a lease, compare them and let the budget follow the customers most likely to lease.

## Client Results

- **The business sold** after 12 months of working together
- **52% → 91% occupancy:** September 2025 to September 2026, about 70 more occupied units out of 182
- **Cost per Google Ads lead:** about €120 (before us) → about €55 (March–September 2026)
- **Cost per Google Ads lease:** €330 (October 2025–February 2026) → €116 (March–September 2026), against a target of about €128
- **30% more bookings on the same ad spend:** 105 → 137 (January–September 2025 vs 2026), as the lead-to-booking rate went from 38.5% to 44.8%
- **About €200 per lease in both main languages:** €196 in French and €210 in English

## The Work We Did / Lessons Learned

**A target built from the customer.** We took over the account in October 2025 and started with an audit alongside the owner, to set expectations and work out how we would make this a profitable venture. Together we looked at what a lead was costing, how long customers stayed and how many leads became leases. With a 2x return on ad spend as our margin of safety, a lease could cost about €128 and a lead about €48. The account had been paying about €120 a lead, well over double that. So we had two jobs, which were to bring the cost per lead down and to get more of those leads booking.

We also told the owner after the audit that we wanted customers to stay longer, because every extra month raises what we can afford to pay for a lease. The first-month-free offer was bringing in too many people who only stayed for the free month, so we talked it through and in March it moved to 50% off the first three months. Against the same months a year earlier, customers leaving in their first month fell from about 8% to about 3%, and across our 12 months the share leaving within three months went from 37% to 30%.

We wrote the ad text in a shared sheet, so the owner could review our French and add the Dutch, which helped build trust from the start.

![Ad text written for each language](https://files.leadconnectorhq.com/file/6af33512fbdd54a8279534c3/gads-multilingual-1-en-ad-languages-chart.png)

**Better images, tighter location targeting.** Cheaper leads had to start with cheaper clicks, and on this budget the way to get those was strong click-through against the chains. The client was already running a French Performance Max campaign, which shows ads across Search, YouTube, Maps and other Google placements from one set of images, videos and text. We kept it and added English and Dutch versions, because its clicks cost about a tenth of French Search.

What needed work was how the business looked in those ads and who saw them. Google had filled the campaign with automatically generated videos, and the photos made the area look very busy. We wanted to position the business as local, clean, easy to access and in a safe area. All of that was true, but it wasn't coming across in the assets the client had. We asked the owner to film the building inside and out, including in the evening when there was less traffic, and we edited the footage into tour videos and new images. They went live in mid-October, and it was a big change in how the business looked. In the month that followed, French click-through was up significantly across YouTube, Google's Discover feed, Search and Maps.

![French click-through rose everywhere after the new assets](https://files.leadconnectorhq.com/file/6af33512fbdd54a8279534b4/gads-multilingual-1-en-ctr-chart.png)

We also tightened the location targeting, the same kind of work we did for [a local medical practice](https://go.cosmocalifornie.com/gads-overhaul-2-en), and that combined with the better assets and positioning did well. By the summer French YouTube click-through was about double the year before, and a French Performance Max click cost €0.20 against €0.65 a year earlier, which is what brought our cost per lead down.

**Counting more than the lease.** Together with the owner we also closed the biggest tracking gaps, adding call tracking and getting most visitors to accept cookies. The bidding still had a problem, because about ten leases a month gives Google very little to learn from. So we also counted the steps before a lease as conversions, such as each stage of the checkout, forms and longer phone calls, and gave each one its own value. The signed leases stayed our record of what was real, while the conversions gave the bidding something to learn from. This value ladder goes against the standard rules, which say to count only the real sale. However, because we understand how strongly the bidding algorithm affects performance, contrarian strategies can play out, as they did when we [counted form fills as well as calendar bookings for a B2B payment software company](https://go.cosmocalifornie.com/blog-1-en#b2b-saas-payment-system) in 2025.

![The bidding saw 734 conversions against 85 signed leases](https://files.leadconnectorhq.com/file/6af33512421749dec79f974e/gads-multilingual-1-en-conversions-chart.png)

**Three days a week.** We went against the standard rules on the schedule as well. In late August we cut the ads to three days a week on about the same weekly spend, so each day the ads ran had about €90 behind it instead of about €50, which made us more competitive in the bidding against the chains.

![Clicks doubled and cost per click halved on three days a week](https://files.leadconnectorhq.com/file/6af335122962a23219dbac54/gads-multilingual-1-en-schedule-chart.png)

**Every lead matched by hand.** To work on the booking rate we needed to see who was actually leasing. The owner logged every enquiry on a lead sheet, and each week we matched the new leads to our campaigns by hand and followed them through to a lease. We've run [campaigns across several countries and languages for an eyewear brand](https://go.cosmocalifornie.com/gads-ecom-intl-1-en), and there each language had its own market. Here all three shared one building and one budget.

**The language that closed.** French brought the most leads and looked like the obvious place for more budget. However, by February the sheet was showing English speakers leasing at about twice the rate of French speakers, and the gap held for the whole engagement:

![French and English cost about the same per lease](https://files.leadconnectorhq.com/file/6af33512fbdd54a8279534b3/gads-multilingual-1-en-language-chart.png)

French speakers mostly picked up the phone, and far more of them were looking for a competitor or already renting from one. English speakers most often went straight to the website to book, which is how the owner wanted people to buy.

**Adding the cost of the click.** English looked like the easy answer until we added the cost of the click. In Performance Max an English click cost about two and a half times a French one, so the higher close rate and the higher click price cancelled out, at about €200 per lease in each language. French stayed the largest budget.

**Pausing the owner's own language.** Dutch was the hard call, because the owner had written the campaign themselves and Dutch speakers did lease at a high rate. Only one of those leases traced back to the Dutch campaign, though, and several Dutch speakers were booking on the English version of the site. So we cut the spend first and then paused the Dutch Performance Max campaign in August.

The main lesson is that on a small budget, lead counts would have sent the money to the wrong place. Neither the language with the most leads nor the one with the best close rate told us where to spend. It took lease rate and click cost by language together, and an owner who logged every lead so that we could see them.

## Results & Lasting Benefits

It started slowly, because our first five months were the quiet season, when customers move out much faster than in spring and summer. About as many customers moved in as moved out, so occupancy stayed in the low to mid 50s. However, against the same months a year earlier, on the same spend, bookings were up about 20%. From March occupancy climbed every month through September, on about €1,100 a month of ad spend.

![Occupancy went from 52% to 91% in 12 months](https://files.leadconnectorhq.com/file/6af33512fbdd54a8279534b5/gads-multilingual-1-en-occupancy-chart.png)

Occupancy was still about 90% in October 2026, when the ads stopped.

![Cost per lease hit our €128 target in April and stayed near it](https://files.leadconnectorhq.com/file/6af3351530caaf80f63c564c/gads-multilingual-1-en-cost-per-lease-chart.png)

By October, 12 months after we started working together, the facility had passed all three of the owner's targets for 2026, and the owner ended up selling the business due to the strong numbers we were able to build together.

One last thing we looked at was how our year compared with the agency before us. They had a new building with every size available, few customers to lose and SEO running alongside the ads, so they should have had the better numbers. We had nearly twice as many move-outs to replace, mostly small units left to sell and SEO cut. We still beat the 17 months before us on every measure here, in 5 fewer months:

| | 17 months before us | Our 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Leads | 371 | 418 |
| Bookings | 140 | 163 |
| Cost per booking | €110 | €81 |
| Occupancy points gained per month | 3.1 | 3.2 |

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**If you advertise in more than one language and every lead counts the same in your account, shoot me a message and we can map out which language is paying for itself.**

*Reference note: occupancy and bookings come from the owner's records and cover every channel, which in 2025 included the previous agency's SEO. Ad spend includes a small Microsoft Ads test. Language figures and Google Ads leads and leases come from the owner's lead sheet, where we matched leads to campaigns by hand, so they are close estimates. Part of the fall in cost per lead and per lease comes from call and consent tracking improving in March. The first-month comparison covers customers who started 11 March–31 July in 2025 and 2026, which is 4 of 53 customers against 2 of 70, and by month three the two groups were level at 23%. The three-month comparison covers customers who started May 2024–September 2025 against October 2025–October 2026. The comparison table covers May 2024–September 2025 against October 2025–September 2026.*

## Questions

### How did you run Google Ads in three languages on one budget?

We ran French, English and Dutch Performance Max campaigns alongside Search, and wrote the ad text for each language in a shared sheet so the owner could review our French and add the Dutch. Each week we matched the new leads on the owner's lead sheet to our campaigns by hand and followed them through to a lease, so we could compare the languages by signed leases. Our team speaks French, English, Spanish and German, so we can run accounts in those languages on our own.

### Why did French and English end up costing about the same per lease?

English speakers leased at 57% and French speakers at 26%, but an English Performance Max click cost €0.73 against €0.29 for French. The higher close rate and the higher click price cancelled out, at €196 per lease in French and €210 in English, so French kept the largest budget.

### Why was the Dutch campaign paused?

Dutch speakers did lease at a high rate, but only one lease traced back to the Dutch campaign, and several Dutch speakers booked on the English version of the site. The Dutch campaign cost €1,573 per lease, so we cut its spend first and then paused the Dutch Performance Max campaign in August 2026.

### Why run the ads only three days a week?

On a small budget against large chains, spreading the money over every day left about €50 behind each day the ads ran. In late August 2026 we cut the ads to three days a week on about the same weekly spend, so each day had about €90 behind it and the account was more competitive in the bidding. Compared with the eight weeks before, clicks doubled, cost per click halved to €0.41 and leads on the owner's sheet went from about 8 a week to about 11.

### Why count more than signed leases as conversions?

About ten leases a month gives Google very little to learn from, so we also counted the steps before a lease as conversions, such as each stage of the checkout, forms and longer phone calls, and gave each one its own value. The account recorded 734 conversions against 85 signed leases from October 2025 to September 2026, while the leases we matched by hand stayed our record of what was real.