The Channel Stack: Why TikTok and Google Both Win, and Neither Wins Alone

David Chadderton Chief Marketing Officer, Homes for Students | VervLife | Orla

The Short Version

There is a lot of noise right now about TikTok replacing Google as the primary discovery channel for student accommodation. It is not true. But dismissing TikTok entirely is also wrong. The reality is more interesting, and more useful, than either position.

Google is not going anywhere. We spent £6.5 million on Google Ads last year and it accounted for over £200 million in attributed revenue. That is a 30:1 return ratio. No serious operator abandons that.

But the funnel is no longer a single-channel journey. Students are forming opinions, building shortlists, and developing trust on platforms that have nothing to do with search ads. TikTok is one of them. Instagram is another. And the content that drives that upstream influence is not something we can manufacture.

This is a briefing on where each channel actually sits in the student acquisition journey, what we can measure, what we cannot, and what the strategic response should be.

The Google Reality

Let me be clear about what Google Ads do well. They capture intent at the moment of decision. A student searching “student accommodation Manchester September 2026” has already decided they need accommodation. They are comparing options. They are ready to act. Google puts us in front of them at that exact moment.

That is enormously valuable. It is also measurable, optimisable, and proven at scale. Our Google Ads programme is not a bet. It is a machine with a 30:1 return ratio and 2.6 million clicks behind it.

But Google is a last-click channel. It captures demand. It does not create it. The question no one is asking is: where did that demand come from? What put HFS on the student’s mental shortlist before they typed that search query?

For a long time, the answer was simple: Google was the only place students searched. That is no longer true.

What Students Are Actually Telling Us

I spend time with students. I ask them how they research accommodation. And the answer is consistent: they use TikTok for everything.

Not exclusively. Not as a replacement for Google. But as a starting point. They search TikTok for room tours, for building reviews, for “what is it actually like to live there.” They trust what they find from other students. They do not trust what they find from us.

This is not anecdotal. It is direct ethnographic evidence from the people we are trying to reach. And it is corroborated by what TikTok itself is building. TikTok now has AI-aggregated search results with sentiment breakdowns and provider rankings by view count. When a student searches for accommodation in a specific city, TikTok surfaces building-level sentiment, video reviews, and feature highlights. It is functioning as a discovery engine.

The numbers are real. PBSA providers with strong organic presence on TikTok are seeing millions of views. CODE Student Accommodation: 1.1 million views. Journal Student Living: 2.7 million. Iglu: 2.8 million. These are not paid campaigns. They are organic content from students who live there.

The Authenticity Problem

Here is where the narrative breaks down.

The content that students trust on TikTok is not content we can produce. It is not influencer content. It is not staff-produced content. It is not even “resident ambassador” content with a voucher and a content brief. It is organic, unfiltered, sometimes unflattering content from someone who actually lives in the building.

Students trust it because it comes from peers. In social psychology terms, this is in-group trust. Peers are credible because they have no commercial incentive. The moment money changes hands, that credibility evaporates. The person becomes a brand mouthpiece, and students can smell that from the first frame.

Now here is the operational reality: out of a building of 200 to 300 students, maybe one will post about their accommodation organically. Maybe none. We cannot force it. We cannot manufacture it. And the moment we try to incentivise it, we have killed the thing that made it valuable.

This is not a content strategy problem. It is an operations problem. The only way to generate authentic advocacy is to build an experience worth talking about. If the building is good, if the community is real, if the move-in experience is remarkable, a small number of students will share that. Not because we asked them to. Because it warranted sharing.

The False Dichotomy

The industry conversation has been framed as a binary: Google or TikTok. Traditional search or social discovery. Performance marketing or brand awareness.

That framing is wrong.

Google and TikTok serve different functions in the acquisition journey. They are not competing. They are sequential.

TikTok is the discovery layer. It is where students form initial impressions, build awareness, and develop sentiment about specific buildings. It operates upstream of the booking decision.

Google is the capture layer. It is where students convert their interest into action. It operates at the point of decision.

Instagram is the validation layer. It is where students (and parents) confirm that a brand is legitimate, professional, and trustworthy. It operates between discovery and conversion.

The buildings are the foundation. They generate the organic content that feeds the discovery layer. They deliver the experience that validates the brand layer. They are the product that the capture layer converts.

None of these is a standalone strategy. Together, they form a stack.

What We Can and Cannot Measure

I am a data-driven operator. I do not invest in channels I cannot measure. But I also recognise the difference between “we cannot currently measure this” and “this has no value.”

Google Ads are fully measurable. We can track every click, every conversion, every booking. That is why we spend £6.5 million on them.

TikTok’s upstream influence is not directly measurable through last-click attribution. A student who sees a room tour on TikTok in October and then searches Google in March will be attributed to Google. The TikTok touch is invisible in our current measurement framework.

But invisible is not the same as absent. We saw this pattern in digital marketing before. Brands that relied solely on last-click attribution cut their top-of-funnel spend, only to discover that the bottom-of-funnel performance collapsed. The upstream investment was feeding the downstream conversion. They just could not see it.

The answer is not to spend blindly on TikTok. The answer is to design a test that makes the invisible visible.

The Strategic Response

Here is what we are doing, and what we are not doing.

We are not moving budget from Google to TikTok. The £6.5 million Google programme is the proven revenue engine. It stays intact. There is no scenario where we break a machine delivering 30:1 returns to test a hypothesis.

We are not building a resident content programme. Every attempt I have seen in this industry to manufacture authentic student content fails in one of two ways: it dies because residents do not post enough, or it survives because you pay them, at which point it is no longer authentic. Both outcomes waste time and money.

We are investing in the conditions for organic advocacy. This means building experiences worth talking about. Move-in days that feel like events, not transactions. Community spaces that students actually want to use. Building features that are genuinely remarkable. This is an operations investment, not a marketing line item, and it is the only sustainable path to the authentic content that drives discovery on platforms like TikTok.

We are running a structured, controlled test. Incremental budget. Geo-split methodology. Matched market pairs. One market gets TikTok presence, the other does not. We measure the lift in branded Google search volume, direct site traffic, and booking enquiries. Pre-registered hypotheses. Adequate sample size. Four-month observation window. If the data shows a measurable lift, we scale. If it does not, we stop.

We are listening before we speak. Social listening across TikTok and Instagram for every building in the portfolio. What is currently being said? What is the sentiment? What are competitors doing? This is the baseline we need before we can evaluate any intervention.

We are asking our customers. Post-booking survey questions about discovery and influence. “Before you searched for us on Google, where did you first hear about us?” “Did you see content about us on TikTok or Instagram?” The answers to these questions, from actual tenants, will tell us more about the role of social media in our funnel than any platform pitch deck.

The Decision Framework

We will evaluate the TikTok question on three signals, not one:

Signal 1: The Lift Test. Does TikTok presence in test markets generate a measurable increase in branded Google search volume and booking enquiries versus control markets?

Signal 2: The Tenant Survey. Do 15% or more of our tenants cite TikTok or Instagram as a discovery or influence source in their booking journey?

Signal 3: The Google Health Check. Are Google CPCs rising while search volume remains stable or declines? If so, the funnel is contracting and upstream investment becomes necessary to feed the capture layer.

If two or more of these signals are positive, we scale TikTok investment to a defined percentage of total digital spend. If one is positive, we iterate the test. If none are positive, we conclude that TikTok is not a meaningful acquisition channel for PBSA and redirect the test budget to proven channels.

Either outcome is valuable. The only outcome that is not valuable is continued speculation without evidence.

The Bigger Picture

This is not really a TikTok conversation. It is a conversation about how acquisition channels evolve.

For the past decade, Google has been the single most important channel in student accommodation marketing. It still is. But the idea that any single channel will remain the dominant acquisition driver indefinitely is not supported by the history of digital marketing. Channels fragment. Consumer behaviour shifts. New platforms emerge.

The operators who win are not the ones who bet early on every new platform. They are the ones who build measurement infrastructure, run disciplined tests, and make evidence-based decisions about where to invest.

HFS will not be first into TikTok. We will not be loudest. But if TikTok proves its value through rigorous testing, we will be right. And if it does not, we will have spent a fraction of one month’s Google budget to find out, rather than making a speculative bet with real revenue at stake.

The future of student accommodation marketing is not Google or TikTok. It is Google and TikTok and Instagram and the buildings themselves, layered into a system where each element does what it does best.

Google is the engine. TikTok may be the runway. The buildings are the fuel.

We are protecting the engine, testing the runway, and investing in the fuel.

David Chadderton is the Chief Marketing Officer at Homes for Students, VervLife, and Orla, responsible for marketing across a portfolio of 60,000+ student accommodation beds generating revenue in excess of £650 million. He is the creator of the STAR Framework and the author of three books on behavioural science and consumer psychology.