In part one of this article about how agents can maximise leads from portal sites we looked at the importance of the quality of the advertisement. In part two, we’re going to look at how you can maximise the placement of your listing and the benefit of tracking your listings.

Placement of the Listing Advertisement

The placement of the listing advertisement is also very important in maximising the number of leads from a particular listing. Anyone who has searched on Google knows that if you do not appear on the first or second page, then you are very unlikely to be clicked upon.

Property portals are a little different in that people will search through a number of pages to find what they are interested in. However, the closer to the top a listing is, the more click throughs that listings will receive to the property details page.

To get towards the top of the search, and therefore stand out from the crowd, it is important to look at the options offered by the portal site being advertised on. Here are some examples that should be adopted if available:

• Many portal sites offer the ability to go to the top of the search (guaranteed top spot). This means that a listing is guaranteed to be displayed before anyone else.
• Featured or premium listings are also often offered by portal sites. These often have slightly bigger pictures and are displayed before the standard listings.
• Keeping a listing up to date can often push the listing up the search results list – sometimes to the top. It is important that an agent understands how the site handles the presentation of the listings and uses this to their advantage.
• Complete all the fielded information (e.g. beds, baths). This is important as not all people search by suburb only. Some people will search for 3 bedrooms in a particular area and if this information has not been entered, the listing may not be displayed in the search results page.

Tracking Performance

For those who take their online advertising very seriously, it is important to put in place performance tracking of the advertisements. It is important to understand just how well each advertisement is performing and if the changes you are making to quality or placement are having an impact on the number of leads generated.

The information that should be tracked is:

• Number of searches conducted in each suburb that an agent has listings.
• Number of times the listing is displayed on the search results page.
• Number of times the property details page is displayed.
• Number of leads generated for each listing.

While all this may not be available, having access to this will help an agent understand how well their advertisements are performing and if the changes they are making are improving the number of leads they are generating.

There are no silver bullets to online advertising. It is all about a series of small, incremental steps that agents around the world should be taking to maximise the number of leads they generate from their online advertising.

[flower image: flickr/Clearly Ambigous]