Thoughts on Listing Advertising and Real Estate Marketing

You may have noticed some of the formatting in the headlines not displaying properly in your craigslist ads recently. We tracked the root to a change in the way craiglist handles formatting and quickly released a fix. Thanks to Michael for the heads up.

Admittedly, this is something we should have included when the craigslist Ad Builder was fist launched, but hey, better late than never.

Figure 1. Start: Click "Build an Ad".

The Ad Builder now saves your ad contents, so if your listing doesn’t sell in the first 7 days, you can easily re-visit your ad and re-post it to craigslist.

For those who haven’t tried the craigslist ad builder yet, it’s pretty simple to get started. Create a campaign with the word "craigslist" somewhere in the label. It can be any part of the label (i.e. "craigslist 9/10" or "craigslist" and "Sept 10th craigslist" all work).

Once you’ve created the new marketing campaign, you’ll auto-magically see the "Build an Ad" link (see Figure 1.). Click that and follow the instructions on the screen. All your settings will be saved so if you need to re-post the ad (or make edits), just revisit that same link.

One of the ideas I got really excited about when we launched listingnumber was that, given broad enough usage, we’d be able to draw some interesting insights, if not conclusions regarding the comparative effectiveness of differing advertising mediums. With better data, you can make more informed decisions regarding where to spend your advertising dollar (and in the case of the “free” services, your time).

The idea for the service was pretty simple. Given most folks:

• don’t find enough information in a print ad (or post card or classified sites like craigslist) to satisfy their curiosity, and
• don’t want to call a salesperson for basic facts and photos

…they will take the path of least resistance (visit the property web site) for more information on the listing.

If you provide that sites address in the ad, you can track it and compare which mediums work best. Since most web addresses are too unwieldy to work in offline advertising and web analytics programs can’t track the source when an address it typed directly into the web browser, listingnumber, was born.

With enough agents using the service to track their ads (craigslist, newspaper, post cards, flyers, email campaigns, etc.), we should be able to do a bit of data mining, to extract out averages across agents and their listings and provide some meaningful data back to the community. So that said, here are some preliminary results.

Average Visits Per Campaign

We need to dig much much deeper into the data to draw any real conclusions here. For example, I’m not sure if agents are creating a new, unique tracking code per craigslist ad. Ads expire each week, so they need to be recreated. While this is true for the newspaper as well, we need to dig deeper to understand the usage patterns of the service so we are doing a fair comparison.

The more meaningful numbers of course are not the raw visits, but the cost-per-visit. For example, if the cost to place a craigslist ad (given it’s free to post) is simply the time spent, we can use an agents hourly rate of say, $100/hr @ 30 minutes and estimate the ad cost at $50. At that rate, craigslist traffic averages $0.50 per visit. Potentially much less expensive than keyword advertising and assuming less than half a visit per newspaper ad run (regardless of the cost per ad), insanely less than the newspaper.

We’ll share more raw numbers and analysis as they become available.

Thanks,

In response to frequent requests for “marketing collateral” (a handout), here is a simple flyer that breaks down how the ListingNumber service works in one page. Great for sales meetings or training sessions.

Figure 1. Screenshot of the the flyer. Click on the image to download a PDF file

Thanks!

ListingNumber was created with two key goals in mind:

1. Make it easier to track the effectiveness of listing advertising.
2. Make it easier for an agent to demonstrate value to clients.

The second is the primary goal, however I think that it’s a lot easier to demonstrate value if you first measure key areas in your business (as Deming was believed to say “you can’t manage what you don’t measure). One of the challenges I noticed when studying this problem is dearth of tools for agents to measure their value. That in turn makes it tougher to prove value.

David Garfinkel mentions in his copywriting blog the two kinds of proof necessary for people to believe you (in real estate, this means ‘be willing to pay your fees’).

The first kind of proof is proof that you can deliver the results you are promising.

The second kind of proof is proof that you understand how you deliver your results well enough to explain it to ordinary people — non-experts.

The advertising and marketing of a property is of course only one of the many value propositions agents make to their clients and thus only one of many to measure.

It’s a start.

Given a primary goal of listingnumber is to allow agents to easily track traffic generated by their ads, it was a natural for us to focus on cutting steps out of the process.

In that vein, we created this simple tool to allow you to create an ad for use on craigslist. The tracking URL is automatically embedded in the ad.

We took special care in creating the template to respect the craigslist community. Key features are:

• Community-friendly: Many templates are too rich in design and not only distract from the property, but fail to respect the spirit that drives a community site like craigslist. Respect the community by focusing on the property, not personal marketing (do that on your site).
• Photos: Buyers want photos. Including a crystal clear call to action gives them easy access to what they want and increases the number of visits to your listing.
• Crisp Typography and Clean Layout: A well-crafted ad with crisp typography and a clean layout is not only easy on the eyes, it’s more likely to generate visitors.
• Visitor Tracking: And of course, automatic visitor tracking tied to your listingnumber property profile with reports that let you share results with your clients.

To give it a spin, login to listingnumber and click the classified ad button in the main menu.

Enjoy!

Hi! We’ll shortly be posting a few quick guides on how to use some of the features in listingnumber. Thanks!