Property Ad Guru » Measuring Advertising Performance

Survey: Social Media Can’t Reach Every Resident

Alice Allan — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:47:54 +0000

The results of a national US-based survey by J Turner Research suggest social media may not be the most effective marketing strategy when it comes to apartment residents.

The survey, which is based on responses from 15,964 apartment residents collected during the first 6 months of 2010, found that 24 percent of respondents do not visit any social networking websites at all.

When it came to the idea of visiting an apartment community’s page on social networks, the results showed even less enthusiasm – 93 percent of residents had never checked in on their apartment community’s social page.

Of the seven percent who had, 62 percent said they visited the page to “see what other people were saying about the community”. 57 percent were there to “conduct preliminary research about the apartments, floor plans or unit availability”, while 37 percent came to “find discounts or deals related to signing a lease”.

Only 11 percent of residents said they were visiting the page to “contact a staff member about scheduling an onsite visit,” nine percent to “refer a friend,” and eight percent to “initiate the leasing process to live at the community.”

In light of all the mind-blowing figures about the continued growth of social media, it’s easy to forget that not everyone is using platforms like Facebook and Twitter to help make decisions about real estate. Luckily, we’ve got tips on how to reach potential clients in more traditional ways – start with our tips for email newsletters, along with our advice on how to gain media attention for your company.

Facebook’s Guide to Ads

Alice Allan — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:53:48 +0000

A few weeks ago, we looked into Facebook Ads and found out exactly how to create one from the ground up. Now, Facebook has released its own guide to help people get the most out of its targeted ads.

Guide to Facebook Ads goes over every aspect of the process, from how to make your ads stand out, to budgeting, ad delivery, and best practices. Those who want to get really familiar with the process can even sign up for a webinar here.

For those still considering whether Facebook Ads are a worthwhile investment, the best practices section of the guide is a good place to start. This covers gaining more fans, acquiring leads, and driving awareness, providing a good overview of what Facebook can achieve in these three key areas.

For the record, the above ad for All Nippon Airways was featured as one of Facebook Ads’ success stories after it earned the company a 25 percent click-through rate – a marked improvement from its usual eight to 12 percent.

Facebook Ads From the Ground Up

Alice Allan — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:10:25 +0000

With Facebook now closing in on a total of 500 million users worldwide, the topic of Facebook ads is worth looking into. Here, we’ll outline how to create one of these pay-per-click/pay-per-impression ads, along with the arguments for and against using them for real estate.

To begin with, you’ll need to decide what to include in your ad. Facebook ads are based primarily on text, so strong copy is essential. Because your ads are going to be displayed down the right-hand side of the screen, a snappy, attention-grabbing headline is also important. In the body of the ad, you’re limited to 135 characters, so spend some time refining your copy to get as much information in as possible.

An enticing picture of the area you represent is also worth considering before you upload a picture of yourself. Remember: home hunters are primarily focused on where they’re going to live rather than who’s going to help them find their new home.

Now that you have a catchy headline, engaging body text, and a great picture, it’s time to choose who’s going to see your ad. Facebook lets you refine viewers by country, state, city, age, gender, keywords, education level, and even whether it’s the user’s birthday or not when they see the ad.

If those options weren’t enough, you can go on to limit viewers by the name of their workplace, relationship status, whether they’re interested in men or women, their languages, connections (pages, events, groups or applications), and friends of connections.

After all that, Facebook gives you an estimate of how many users are going to see your ad. The final step is to set your daily budget, and choose whether you want to pay for impressions or clicks. Once you’ve entered the amount you’re willing to pay per-click or per-impression, Facebook will give you an estimate of the number of clicks or impressions you can expect to receive.

The question is, do these ads actually work for real estate agents? Making the case for Facebook ads is business2.com.au contributor Charlie Gunningham, who paid just over US$3,500 over 11 months to get his ad seen 22 million times.

For the negative, we have 4realz.net, which argues that Facebook is too quick to take down non-performing ads and says the ads would only be useful if Facebook could allow agents to target people who are likely to move to a particular area.

But just because the jury is still out on whether Facebook ads are a worthwhile investment doesn’t mean you can’t give them a try. If you do decide to use them, remember to track your results, and adjust your ads according. And if you’ve had success – or lack thereof – with Facebook ads, do let us know in our comments.

Vendor Reports: Why Are They Important?

Alice Allan — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:05:41 +0000

Do you let your vendors know what’s happening with their advertising every step of the way throughout their campaign? Or do you avoid showing them statistics until the end, filtering the results so you only deliver the positive news?

Good or bad, you should be providing your vendors with weekly updates on what’s happening with their advertising campaign so you can better manage their expectations and, ultimately, the result of the campaign. An easy way to do this is by distributing a weekly vendor report.

If you are a busy agent with lots of clients, the thought of gathering statistics for all of your properties might seem daunting. You’d need to find out how many people visited each property and what number of enquiry emails you had, then look at comparable properties and combine it all to make a meaningful report.

This could take some time and may seem tedious, however each of your clients deserves the individual attention and feedback, particularly if they are paying for the advertising. But for the sake of your sanity, it’s best to look to an automated system to do the work for you.

One easy way to gather this information is through your advertising portal. Most of the large players will provide you with the raw statistics on each of the properties you have listed. Some of the more advanced portals will even package this information in a useful report that you can then forward on to your vendors.

If your portal does not provide such a service, you may need to do the grunt work yourself. No doubt you receive reports of some sort from all the different portals you advertise on as well as your own website. You should collate as much of this information as possible so you can provide your customers with a well-rounded picture of how their marketing is tracking.

Vendor reports are also a fantastic tool for you to compare properties and see which portals are producing better results than others, along with which properties are performing better and why. This knowledge is great for advising customers on how to achieve better results from their advertising.

Above all, remember to keep your vendor reports simple and only include the facts. Ultimately, vendor reports should provide a springboard for considered conversation between you and your vendor about what’s best for their listing.

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UK Study: Clicks Don’t Matter

Alice Allan — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:28:40 +0000

The findings of a UK-based study by .Fox Networks and comScore suggest the number of clicks video and display advertisements receive doesn’t actually matter.

The study evaluated results from four campaigns across four industry sectors and found that video and display advertising both successfully increased brand engagement in each.

After exposure to a display or video ad, the study found consumers were three times more likely to conduct search queries using brand or relevant generic terms during the next four weeks. Website visitation also increased by more than a factor of seven.

Comparing the two types of advertising, the study found consumers exposed to video advertising were 28 percent more likely to visit the brand website and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search than if they saw display ads. However, the response from those exposed to display ads did climb as the number of ad impressions increased.

.Fox Networks is a global online advertising network, so it has an obvious investment in the idea that online display and video advertising is effective. But the results do echo the findings of a US-based comScore study from last year.

“Today, marketers who attempt to optimise their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad,” comScore vice president of marketing solutions Linda Anderson said about the US study. “That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact.”

comScore Study Questions Value of Clicks

Marketing Habits Tough to Change

Alice Allan — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:45:20 +0000

The results of a recent survey by globaledge.co.uk reveal some interesting disparities between the marketing channels agents see as effective and the channels they actually use.

The survey looked at the marketing habits of over 200 agents and developers, asking them to rate the effectiveness of strategies like search engine optimisation, email marketing, and banner advertising, and to detail the strategies they use.

The top five most effective marketing strategies were seen to be the following:

1. Customer referral programs
2. Search engine optimisation
3. Listing properties with portals
4. Agent and IFA networks
5. Email marketing

The top five marketing strategies the respondents actually used were slightly different:

1. Listing properties with portals
2. Email marketing
3. Search engine optimisation
4. Agent and IFA networks
5. Magazine advertising

Like the recent HomeGain survey of US agents, these results suggest certain habits, like the use of print media, are difficult to break even when agents know they aren’t as effective as other marketing strategies.

If you’re trying to make the shift towards some of those top five most effective marketing strategies, make sure you check out our guest series and Top 10 Tips on SEO, our series on making the most of your portal listings, and our email marketing tips.

comScore Study Questions Value of Clicks

Alice Allan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:02:09 +0000

Digital marketing research company comScore has released updated findings that show US Internet users are much less likely to click on display ads than they were two years ago.

comScore’s 2007 research, conducted in collaboration with Starcom USA and Tacoda, showed 32 percent of Internet users clicked on at least one display ad during the month of July. By March 2009 this number had dropped to 16 percent, with just 8 percent of users accounting for 85 percent of all clicks.

But the report’s author, comScore vice president of marketing solutions Linda Anderson, argues the decreased chances of display ads being clicked does not mean display ads have no value at all:

“Today, marketers who attempt to optimise their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact.

As a result, savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions – whether clicked or not – have on consumer behaviour, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured for decades using reach and frequency metrics.”

“A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal – and it’s certainly not to generate clicks,” added Starcom USA senior vice president/director of research and analytics John Lowell. “You want people to visit your website, seek more information, purchase a product, become a lead, keep your brand top of mind, learn something new, feel differently – the list goes on. Regardless of whether the consumer clicked on an ad or not, the key is to determine how that ad unit influenced them to think, feel or do something they wouldn’t have done otherwise.”

comScore states that it has conducted over 200 studies demonstrating the effectiveness of display ads in terms of brand site visitation, trademark search, and online and offline sales.

UK Study: Clicks Don’t Matter

Real Estate Marketing Report Card

Emma Sorensen — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:38:10 +0000

Are you advertising your listings in the right places? Many agents and brokers use syndication tools like Postlets, Listhub or Point2 as a way to get their listings displayed in all the right places.

Now there’s a new tool that gives you a snapshot of your online advertising presence for a particular address.

The new marketing tool from US based International Listings aims to show whether a real estate listing is syndicated across the web on some of the popular real estate search websites.

Simply type in the address and the company’s search engine scours the web to find where it is listed, generating a “report card”.

The website searches many (though not all) of the major portals: google.com, oodle.com, zillow.com, frontdoor.com, trulia.com, and more.

It’s a great idea for consumers, and a clever marketing ploy by International Listings who have been a leader in online luxury classifieds advertisements since 2001. After the report is generated, they offer users the opportunity to put International Listings to the 30-day test and submit a luxury property listing.

As the market tightens, sellers are likely to ask more questions about where their properties are being advertised. Announcing the report card function on its blog, the company says:

“With web 2.0 real estate sites like these growing in market share each and every month, and with some 80% of homebuyers now doing research online at some point in the buying process, it’s now more important than ever that your listing appears on the major real estate search engines. Our tool searches 10 of the highest trafficked homebuying portals and gives you a “grade” (A+, B-, etc.) on how well you’re marketing your listing online.”

Find out more and trial the service at intlistings.com/realestatemarketingreport.

Agent Strategies: A Real Estate Marketing Mix

DPG Reveals Analytics Tool

Emma Sorensen — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:20:08 +0000

The Negotiator has revealed that The Digital Property Group (DPG) is in the process of unveiling a marketing analytics tool for its member agents.

Called “Insight”, the tool will allow agents to monitor their traffic, and use the data to improve consumer marketing.

It brings DPG in line with their competitor rightmove.co.uk’s “Rightmove Plus” function.

Agents will be able to monitor traffic received from DPG’s portals and compare themselves to competitors in a “benchmarking” application.

The Negotiator quoted DPG chief executive, Mark Milner, as saying:

“The point is that our customers do not have this data at their finger tips. Their media spend should be subject to the same scrutiny as every other spend.”

“We are trying to put in the hands of estate agents the same media tools that we have, so they can measure their return on investment with our sites.”

The application will be available to member agents using DPG’s four property portals: primelocation.com, findaproperty.com, homesandproperty.co.uk, and findanewhome.com.

You can find out more at insight.thedigitalpropertygroup.com and see a demo here.

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Its All About Tracking Conversions

Simon Baker — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:44:43 +0000

As agents spend more and more of their marketing budget on online advertising, it is important that they truly understand what does or does not work for them. This becomes doublely important with agencies throughout the world under financial pressure and needing to make sure that whatever they spend on marketing generates results.

The following excellent article was recently published by Mike Carter in his Zoomf Blog under the title 2009, year of tracking the conversions.

Online advertising is heavily data-centric. By this I mean that most advertisers online analyze data to the nth degree. This is both the pro and the con of internet advertising. It’s a pro that you no longer have to ask that old adage of advertising -

I know that 50% of my spend is wasted, I just do not know which half.

With internet ads, you can understand what is working and what is not just by looking at the data.

The con is that you can be buried in data.

In the property lead generation space, not a lot of thought is given to data and the power of conversion. Not yet. We here at Zoomf believe that agents will start to get familiar with ‘conversion’ over 2009.

So how can you get a step ahead in the game? It’s pretty simple. Ask yourself the following questions -

What do I consider a conversion on my website ? (hint – its a call or a registration)
Who are the top 20 websites sending me traffic ?
How many calls are generated from my site every day ?
How many registrations ?
Which sites in the top 20 have the best conversions to calls or registrations?

Once you know the questions to ask, then you get your IT or software provider to enable the tracking. Now you’re ahead of 80% of the competition and part of the movement gaining momentum today.

If your website is on Google Analytics, have a look at goals and funnels within the interface. Perfect starting point for conversion tracking.

At propertyadguru.com we couldn’t agree with the sentiments more. It is extremely important that agents and realtors around the world truly understand how effective their online advertising spend is.

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