You’ve done the smart thing and created a real estate ad using Canned Banners. Now what?
There are some great options to get your banner ad seen by local home buyers. Here’s a few ideas to get you started:
Zillow.com
Home buyers use Zillow to search for homes, mortgages, and real estate advice. It’s a perfect target audience. You can target your ad based on ZIP code, which will ensure that only home buyers in your area see your ads.
Go here to get started: www.zillow.com/advertising/Agent.htm
Local news websites
The local news websites that you choose all depend on your area. For instance, if you want to find home buyers in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might consider advertising on SFGate.com, a local news website that gets millions of visitors every month.
You’re not just limited to newspaper websites. You can probably advertise on local TV and radio station websites, independent newspaper sites, and local blogs.
To get started, try a simple Google search like “san francisco news.”
Retargeting networks
Retargeting shows ads to your website visitors after they’ve left your website. If someone comes to your website and browses around for a few minutes, but leaves without contacting you, you can use retargeting to make sure they keep seeing your ads.
To get started, read this blog post we wrote about retargeting for real estate agents.
Google AdWords
Google AdWords lets you advertise with banner ads, not just boring little text ads. You’ll only pay when someone clicks your ad, usually somewhere between $0.50 and $1.50 per click (or more…it really depends on your campaign settings).
To get started, go to adwords.google.com and create an account. Then when you’re building your campaign, go to your ‘Campaigns’ tab along the top. Then click the ‘Ads’ tab:
Then select ‘Image ad’ from the ‘New ad’ button:
Then you’ll be able to upload the banner ads you created with Canned Banners. Make sure to upload the banner ad SWF files—these are the animated, interactive files.
In order to make sure your ads are being targeted at the right people, choose keywords that are unique to your area. For example, in San Francisco, you could choose keywords like ‘san francisco real estate,’ ‘san francisco real estate agent,’ or ‘noe valley real estate.’ Or read our blog post on how to target specific cities.
Questions?
Got more questions about online real estate advertising? Just email us.
Top Reason Users Don’t Click Banner Ads: They Don’t Want to Be Diverted From Their Current Online Activity
It’s a well-documented fact and challenge that average banner ad clickthrough rates are very low, somewhere around 0.09 percent (that’s just 9 clicks out of every 10,000 times an ad is shown).
A recent study sponsored by AdKeeper and 24/7 Real Media surveyed consumers and asked them why they don’t click on banner ads. The number one reason given: 61 percent don’t want to be distracted: “Online banner ads take me away from my current website, or from what I am doing.”
You could look at this research and conclude that people just hate all banner ads, therefore there’s no point in running banner campaigns. But such a conclusion would ignore a few key points:
1. If people don’t want to be distracted from their current web page, then put a lot of relevant content right in your banner ad. That way the viewer doesn’t have to click the ad in order to learn about your products/services. Canned Banners has all sorts of templates that allow you to include lots of product info. Here’s a good example of a template that can feature multiple products and descriptions.
2. A lot of banner ads look downright awful, which probably explains some poor performance. But this study doesn’t seem to have examined that aspect, aside from noting that “43 percent [of consumers] say online banner ads don’t seem interesting or engaging” (the concept “interesting and engaging” could have to do with multiple factors, including targeting, which is quite independent of how an ad looks). It seems to me that the study might have provided deeper insight into consumer behavior by passively observing people in test scenarios, rather than simply asking survey questions, which tend, by their very nature, to lead people to give certain answers. Such observations might reveal how the appearance of a banner ad (regardless of the product/service being advertised) affects its clickthrough rate. However, that probably would have been a much more expensive study to conduct.
3. Some banner ads get much higher clickthrough rates than 0.09%. Canned Banners’ own ad campaigns have done better than that. First, it’s important to target your ads intelligently. Understand who your customers are and then find them online by buying inventory on specific types of websites or targeting specific keywords. Don’t just run your banner ads everywhere, because then it’s almost certain that you’ll get low clickthrough rates. Second, utilize tactics like site retargeting, search retargeting, and geo-targeting. These tactics will help you pinpoint your customers; as long as you’re showing them well-designed, relevant banner ads, you’ll probably see clickthrough rates significantly higher than a measly 0.09%.