Vendor Reports - Why Are They Important?

Do you let your vendors know what’s happening with their advertising every step of the way throughout the campaign? Or are you frightened to show them the statistics until the end, filtering the results, only delivering the positive news? The beauty - and fear - of online advertising is that it is measurable and transparent. But 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 laboriously pulling together statistics for all of your properties might seem daunting. You would need to find out how many people visited each property on the websites and what number of enquiry emails you had, then have a 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. To save your sanity you’re best to look to an automated system to do the work for you.

One easy way of gaining and disseminating 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 on their site; facts such as visits and enquiry emails generated through that site. Some of the more advanced portals will then package this information in a useful report that you can then forward on to your vendors.

An example of a Vendor Report from realestate.com.au can be seen below. There is a summary underneath the property photo that shows total page views and email enquiries since listing the property on the website. There is a graph that shows the visits over the last seven days and also some comparable listings by you for your vendor to look at. In the interest of doing more to promote the property, particularly if visits and enquiry is waning, there is the option to contact you about additional products to make the property stand out better on the website. These products are usually good for your brand as well as your vendor’s listing.

This sort of report is a great way to stay in contact with your vendor throughout the marketing campaign, providing completely transparent results. It gives you an opportunity to discuss the marketing and whether it might need altering to achieve better results. It’s also a good way to let your vendor know you are thinking about them and their property. And best of all, on sites such as realestate.com.au, this report can be emailed automatically each week without you having to lift a finger.

If your portal does not provide such a service, you will have to do some more grunt work yourself, but it’s definitely worth investing the time.

You should set up a template that you can re-use which displays the pertinent information and then talk with your technical people about obtaining the stats to populate it. 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 in your Vendor Report so you can provide your customers with a very well-rounded picture of how their marketing is tracking. It’s also a fantastic tool for you as an agent to compare properties - what portals are producing better results than others, what properties are performing better and why (perhaps they are in a premium position on the website). This knowledge is great for advising customers on how to achieve better results from their advertising.

A Vendor Report should be a useful piece of information, provided regularly to your customers, so that they can see in a snapshot how their property is performing. Remember to keep it simple and un-complicated and only include the facts. It should provide a springboard for speculation and then considered conversation between you and your vendor. Don’t be frightened of the statistics, rather use them to upsell new advertising options and manage your vendor’s expectations.

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