Zillow EZ-Ads-are a great way to drive targeted traffic to your listings or directly to your website. EZ-Ads are Zillow’s pay per view platform and I’m a big fan of these ads. They are simple, flexible and affordable, Thank You Zillow.
These ads can be quickly assembled online, all you really need is an account with Zillow and a credit card. The platform will allow you upload a small photo, A headline, two lines of text and an outbound link.
We personally like to use them to drive targeted traffic to our single property websites. The nice thing about this platform is that you purchase ads by a particular zip codes. So, for example, if we list a house in a zip code that is not quiet as hot as a neighboring zip code, we will run the ad in both zip codes. Our hope is that searchers in one zip code will become aware of opportunities in other comparable areas.
Below is an example of one of our exiisting EZ-Ads. This ad leads the viewer to this particular properties single property website. Since we do video for each of our listings, we make the call to action “View Property Video.” Additionally, we track the click thru’s to views ratio to give us feedback on our pictures, headlines and calls to action.
EZ-Ads are a great addition to our listing marketing toolbox!
We are constantly looking for new and improved tools to help us raise the bar on our marketing efforts We feel like the more clicks and looks we can get for our listings online, translate to more showings and greater interest in the real world.
We have started using a great new tool for our listings. Icovia Room Planner is a vector based floor plan program that allows the potential buyer to actually see how their stuff will fit into the home. We hire an appraiser to measure our listings, the appraiser creates a floorplan of the home and sends us a jpeg with the measurements. Icovia has a tracing tool, this allows us to simply upload the jpeg to the web and then trace over it, much like the tracing function found in programs like Adobe Illustrator. We simply add doors, windows, closets etc…Once we are finished the floorplans go live.
Here’s a sample Click Here floor plan, as you’ll see the product is branded and even shows a picture of the property along side the floor plan.
Potential homebuyers can answer those important questions like, will our refrigerator fit? from the comfort of their own home.
In my last post I talked about tracking marketing numbers by using a single property website in conjunction with Google Analytics. The ultimate goal behind any tracking program like this should be to improve the user experience.
Today I would like to talk about using online video to enhance the user experience as well and some of the tools we now have to judge its effectivenes on the user experience.
We use wellcomemat.com, a Boulder, Colorado based company to host our online videos. Wellcomemat allows us to monitor the number of views we see on a particular video. Here is a sample of one of our property videos. As you can see from the counter statistics, I can verify a much larger number of views then I could from a magazine or newspaper advertisement.
We still use high quality photography to build the initial interest in the property but video allows us to create a more realistic impression of the property then still photos or virtual tours.
Although the cost of implementation is expensive, we have found that video is a valuable tool for exposing homebuyers to potential properties. Homebuyers often request a copy of our videos at the closing and often admit to watching it several times before actually seeing the property.
Knowing your numbers in Real Estate is absolutley essential, most people focus their attention on the obvious and important ones like List Price, Days on Market, Price Per Square Foot, etc…However, when you are marketing a home for sale the most important numbers are really quiet different. Numbers like ”how many people have seen my house and know it’s for sale?” are essential but hard to find.
Magazines and Newspapers can give you good distribution and circulation numbers, the problem is that you just don’t know how many of those readers actually see your ad and more importantly where they go or what they do next, unless the reader calls. Yard Signs, like ads provide little feedback other than a call to let us know what kind on interest there is in the home. Brochure boxes help as they allow us to keep a count of how many fliers have been taken but since they are so easy to take, it’s difficult to know how many were serious, curious or just mischevious.
On the other hand, we have used our website SpringsHomes.com to get a handle on our online marketing numbers. The Internet actually allows us to track how effecitvley we are marketing a particular property. We use a technique called a single property page. This is a website and domain dedicated to a single property, the agent purchases a domain name related to to the actual property they are listing. For example if the property address were 14280 Corrico Court, the URL would be closley related to the property address, here’s an example of one of our single property sites: http://www.corricocourt.com/ this is a memorable address and easy enough for an agent or home seller to pass along to a prospective buyer.
By setting up a single property website we are able to monitor how many people actually look at the listing on line, how long they stay and what they look at most. We use Google Analytics, a web analytics program, in conjunction with the single property site to monitor the most important metrics. This is relativley simple to setup and at the end of the month we are able to print a copy of the report and send it to our seller. Google Analytics allows us to track the following:
Number Of Visitors
Where they came from (Google, Yahoo, Direct, Link, etc…)
Where they are (Country, City, State, etc…)
How Long They Stayed
What they looked at while they were there
And probably more importantly…
Where they left the site
Where they went next
The last two might seem negative but these go a long way at helping us understand where and why they left. This gives us a great opportunity to fine tune our pages, keeping viewers engaged in our listings. At the end of the day that is the Real Estate marketers job, to keep your listings in front of the home buying public!
To view a sample Google Analytics Report, Click Here.
The June numbers are out and the month actually looked good. This is normally a busy month so we’re going to chalk a lot of this up to a normal seasonal activity spike.
Still, this is great news and we’ll keep our fingers crossed.
Here are the important overall numbers. We’ll drill down into some of the area in the coming days:
Single Family/Patio Home Sales: 867 Listings Sold (that’s up 27 sales from May)
Median Sales Price: $223,000 (that’s up $13,000 from May)
Average Sales Price: $256,829 (that’s up $5,286 from May)
Average Days on Market: 91 (This one is up from May by 3 days)
May was a good month but June was even better. Especially for realistic Sellers and qualified buyers.
