A few weeks ago, we looked into Facebook Ads and found out exactly how to create one from the ground up. Now, Facebook has released its own guide to help people get the most out of its targeted ads.

Guide to Facebook Ads goes over every aspect of the process, from how to make your ads stand out, to budgeting, ad delivery, and best practices. Those who want to get really familiar with the process can even sign up for a webinar here.

For those still considering whether Facebook Ads are a worthwhile investment, the best practices section of the guide is a good place to start. This covers gaining more fans, acquiring leads, and driving awareness, providing a good overview of what Facebook can achieve in these three key areas.

For the record, the above ad for All Nippon Airways was featured as one of Facebook Ads’ success stories after it earned the company a 25 percent click-through rate – a marked improvement from its usual eight to 12 percent.

With Facebook now closing in on a total of 500 million users worldwide, the topic of Facebook ads is worth looking into. Here, we’ll outline how to create one of these pay-per-click/pay-per-impression ads, along with the arguments for and against using them for real estate.

To begin with, you’ll need to decide what to include in your ad. Facebook ads are based primarily on text, so strong copy is essential. Because your ads are going to be displayed down the right-hand side of the screen, a snappy, attention-grabbing headline is also important. In the body of the ad, you’re limited to 135 characters, so spend some time refining your copy to get as much information in as possible.

An enticing picture of the area you represent is also worth considering before you upload a picture of yourself. Remember: home hunters are primarily focused on where they’re going to live rather than who’s going to help them find their new home.

Now that you have a catchy headline, engaging body text, and a great picture, it’s time to choose who’s going to see your ad. Facebook lets you refine viewers by country, state, city, age, gender, keywords, education level, and even whether it’s the user’s birthday or not when they see the ad.

If those options weren’t enough, you can go on to limit viewers by the name of their workplace, relationship status, whether they’re interested in men or women, their languages, connections (pages, events, groups or applications), and friends of connections.

After all that, Facebook gives you an estimate of how many users are going to see your ad. The final step is to set your daily budget, and choose whether you want to pay for impressions or clicks. Once you’ve entered the amount you’re willing to pay per-click or per-impression, Facebook will give you an estimate of the number of clicks or impressions you can expect to receive.

The question is, do these ads actually work for real estate agents? Making the case for Facebook ads is business2.com.au contributor Charlie Gunningham, who paid just over US$3,500 over 11 months to get his ad seen 22 million times.

For the negative, we have 4realz.net, which argues that Facebook is too quick to take down non-performing ads and says the ads would only be useful if Facebook could allow agents to target people who are likely to move to a particular area.

But just because the jury is still out on whether Facebook ads are a worthwhile investment doesn’t mean you can’t give them a try. If you do decide to use them, remember to track your results, and adjust your ads according. And if you’ve had success – or lack thereof – with Facebook ads, do let us know in our comments.

The findings of a UK-based study by .Fox Networks and comScore suggest the number of clicks video and display advertisements receive doesn’t actually matter.

The study evaluated results from four campaigns across four industry sectors and found that video and display advertising both successfully increased brand engagement in each.

After exposure to a display or video ad, the study found consumers were three times more likely to conduct search queries using brand or relevant generic terms during the next four weeks. Website visitation also increased by more than a factor of seven.

Comparing the two types of advertising, the study found consumers exposed to video advertising were 28 percent more likely to visit the brand website and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search than if they saw display ads. However, the response from those exposed to display ads did climb as the number of ad impressions increased.

.Fox Networks is a global online advertising network, so it has an obvious investment in the idea that online display and video advertising is effective. But the results do echo the findings of a US-based comScore study from last year.

“Today, marketers who attempt to optimise their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad,” comScore vice president of marketing solutions Linda Anderson said about the US study. “That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact.”

Once you’ve thought about what you want to advertise and you’ve created an eye-catching banner that best represents it, where and how do you place the ad to get the best response?

Banner advertising is a really effective means of promoting estate agent’s services, especially when used on portal websites. “Advertise where the people are looking” is exactly what’s at play in this scenario. The ad becomes even more effective when placed at a granular rather than generic level such as the home page.

Placing banners on the search results pages of neighbourhoods where you operate is a key way to attract potential buyers and sellers in your market. Your message should speak directly to the people looking for property in your area and should resonate loudly with those looking to sell. So how do you get your ads up there?

There are three ways of posting banner ads on a site:

1. Work with other advertisers in an “exchange program“ where you agree to display their ad on your site if they display yours;
2. Pay a publisher site directly to display your ad; or
3. Pay an organisation, usually a banner network, to display the banner on a number of publisher’s sites.

These three arrangements take many forms and will suit particular advertisers at different times. If you don’t have a whole lot of money to launch a traditional ad campaign, you may opt for the “exchange” idea. You might choose to form your own network of sites with whom you share a particular affinity (perhaps location) and then agree to swap banner ads. This can be a very effective and cheap way of advertising to a localised market – perfect for real estate agents trying to win listings.

If you want to get your ad out there on a lot of sites and for little money you might join a formal exchange program. Typically you’ll be asked to post two ads on your site for every one ad of yours placed elsewhere in the network. This option can get you great coverage for no money but you do give up a lot of control over exactly where your ad is displayed. Most programs will say they try and match advertisers to sites intelligently but occasionally advertisers are unhappy with where their banners end up.

If you’re happy to pay to have your banner published, you can either approach the particular website you’re interested in directly, or you may employ an advertising agenct to handle it for you. If you have a very niche product you may like to go direct to a website to get a better deal. You will typically buy an advertising package on a CPM basis – paying per thousand impressions. This is how most property portals operate their banner advertising packages for member agents.

If you use an agency, they will do most of the work for you and offer many advantages over doing it yourself. From creating the banner to selecting the appropriate sites and negotiating the best price and position for your ad, they will usually get a better deal than you can by yourself because they buy impressions in bulk. One drawback though is that agencies often only deal with accounts of particular size, so if you are a small business you may need to shop around to find an appropriate agency to work with.

Paying a banner ad network is a great way to get your ad onto multiple sites quickly without having to spend time negotiating with each publisher. A banner ad network is basically a broker between the advertiser and the publisher and takes care of all the placement and tracking of your ads. They either work on an impression basis (such as Doubleclick) or on click-throughs (such as BannerSpace). As with banner exchange programs, however, the advertiser relinquishes control over where the ad is placed.

Having great banner creative with a clear message is very important, but it’s no good if noone sees it. Targeted placement is imperative to your banner advertising success. If you wish to place banner ads on a portal website you should contact the site directly and find out about their advertising packages.

Banners are small rectangular ads that appear on all different sorts of websites and contain endless messages, but all have the same basic function: to get users to click on them so they are transported to the advertiser’s website. They are a fantastic way of promoting your business, product or service to a targeted audience and are a comparatively cheap form of advertising to add to your mix. So how do you use banners effectively to promote your services?

First let’s look first at the different types of banner ads and what makes a good one.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has produced universal Ad Unit Guidelines for marketers, agencies and media companies for use in planning and creating Internet ads. The IAB has stipulated eight banner ad sizes, the most common of which is 468×60 pixels and looks like this:



There is no universal file size constraint, however most websites will ask advertisers to keep the ads quite small, say about 18k, because they add to the time it takes a user to load a page and therefore should not be too large. It is wise to ensure you stay within the designated limits when producing your ad so browsers aren’t turned off before they even see your message.

The content of banner ads varies enormously depending on what you’re advertising and where the ad is placed. You may choose to have a simple static ad with limited graphics, or you may use an animated .gif which means there’ll be some movement in your ad via the use of a succession of images or text. The fanciest banner ads of all are the rich media ads which use very creative graphics and may contain video, audio or specialist programming. These ads will have larger file sizes and may contain interaction beyond a simple click-through.

Whilst banner ads are not difficult to construct, there are some key factors that your designer should take into account. The difference between a good (and effective) ad and a bad one can be subtle and sometimes difficult to pinpoint, but here are some basic guidelines to consider:

• Use simple messages rather than long complicated ones
• Advertise one product or service – not your entire business – and have the ad link through to the relevant page on your website
• Animation and movement attract attention better than static ads
• Your graphics should be interesting and suggestive but not too obscure
• Keep file size small
• Place the ad on a page with relevant content so you are more likely to reach your target audience

Before you get too excited about having the fanciest ad on the web, you need to ensure you have a clear objective laid out for your advertising. Just as in newspaper or radio advertising, you need to be clear about the message you want to convey and the success factors you’ll use to measure the effectiveness of the ad.

Typically you’ll want your ad to achieve click-throughs and brand awareness. Publishers hope that the user will click-through to their website and ultimately buy the product/service on offer. A click-through means the banner ad has delivered the advertiser a visitor that they may otherwise not have had and is a truly measurable success factor. Brand awareness, where a visitor recalls the brand down the track and possibly makes a decision to purchase then, is harder to measure but is still considered a success factor.

Whilst there are several ways a banner ad can be successful, the typical measures advertisers will look at are:

1. Page Views (Page Impressions) – this is how many times a particular page is called from the server, which is important to advertisers who place a banner on that page because it indicates how many visitors have possibly seen their ad. This is a measure of exposure rather than brand awareness and is a typical way of selling ad space – cost-per-thousand impressions, or CPM.
2. Click-throughs – the number of people who click on the ad linking through to the advertiser’s website. Ad space is often sold on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
3. Click-through rate (CTR) – this is the ratio of page views to clicks and is expressed as the percentage of total visitors to a page who clicked on the ad. CTR is often very low, say one to two percent.
4. Cost-per-sale – how much advertising money is spent on making one sale. This calculation will vary depending on the type of service or product.

Obviously some measures are more important than others to different advertisers, but all of these elements should be considered at some point in the ad buying and measurement process. They will affect the price that you pay for the ad space and will be the process by which you can evaluate your advertising campaign and possibly tweak it for better success.

Google Street View has been added to so many real estate websites by now that it’s almost an expected part of the listing landscape. But there could be a change on the Street View horizon.

A report from cnet.com explains that Google previously floated the idea of ads appearing in Street View that are tied to the listings in its Local Business Centre and Favourite Places program (click here for a full run-down of those Google offerings).

What makes it seem like more than an idea is Google’s recent filing of a patent application titled “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising”. In other words, we could soon see something akin to virtual billboards appearing in a Street View image as users browse through an area.

Of course, this might sound like an extremely bad idea – a sure-fire way to turn people off Street View altogether. But searchengineland.com’s Greg Sterling remains optimistic. “Google will very carefully align what it perceives to be relevant ads with consumer queries and interests,” he says.

In the world of online advertising, this could open up a huge new advertising space. Much like the Augmented Reality applications developed by websites such as trulia.com, Street View could become a source of leads in itself. But exactly how this will all play out remains to be seen.

The new advertising option is pay-per-click and users can set their own budgets. They can also choose whether to advertise at a local, national or international level. Real-time maps and graphs show how well the advertisements are performing in different areas.

iPromote established a similar partnership with real estate technology provider realbird.com earlier this year.

realesatatebook.com covers home sales in the US, Canada, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos Islands and the US Virgin Islands. Its listings are published through partners such as vertical search platform vast.com and global property portal enormo.com.

Digital marketing research company comScore has released updated findings that show US Internet users are much less likely to click on display ads than they were two years ago.

comScore’s 2007 research, conducted in collaboration with Starcom USA and Tacoda, showed 32 percent of Internet users clicked on at least one display ad during the month of July. By March 2009 this number had dropped to 16 percent, with just 8 percent of users accounting for 85 percent of all clicks.

But the report’s author, comScore vice president of marketing solutions Linda Anderson, argues the decreased chances of display ads being clicked does not mean display ads have no value at all:

“Today, marketers who attempt to optimise their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact.

As a result, savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions – whether clicked or not – have on consumer behaviour, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured for decades using reach and frequency metrics.”

“A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal – and it’s certainly not to generate clicks,” added Starcom USA senior vice president/director of research and analytics John Lowell. “You want people to visit your website, seek more information, purchase a product, become a lead, keep your brand top of mind, learn something new, feel differently – the list goes on. Regardless of whether the consumer clicked on an ad or not, the key is to determine how that ad unit influenced them to think, feel or do something they wouldn’t have done otherwise.”

comScore states that it has conducted over 200 studies demonstrating the effectiveness of display ads in terms of brand site visitation, trademark search, and online and offline sales.

Real estate technology provider realbird.com has partnered with display advertising provider iPromote to allow users to convert their realbird.com websites into banner advertisements. Through the partnership, these banner advertisements will be distributed through networks such as MSN, AOL, Yahoo! and Facebook.

realbird.com explains that the automatically created banner advertisements will link back to the property’s website and says they can be set to target certain locations. The advertisements are pay-per-click, and users can set a daily budget determining the maximum amount they wish to spend as well as the price-per-click value.

“In today’s challenging economic environment, real estate agents need to leave no stone unturned to find buyers and sellers”, Zoltan Szendro, realbird.com’s vice president and chief technology officer, said in a company statement. “Creative agents can advertise where no agent has advertised before to reach a large audience and different demographics. The iPromote service allows them to do exactly that with compelling display ads, geo targeting, and budgets for as low as $5 per day.”

As well as its single property website builder, realbird.com offers a property search widget and map based MLS search that can be added to websites and blogs.

Last year US property search engine trulia.com released a product it calls “Online Billboard w/ live listing widget”, which it claims has revolutionised the “banner ad” as we previously knew it.

In a blog post updating users on the progress of the online billboard, trulia.com writes:

“Banner ads don’t generally work to drive traffic to your website. They also tend to offer little relevant content to the consumer. What does that mean? The old banner ad is on life support because advertisers failed to ask one important question: Why would a consumer interact with this ad?”

Pierre, trulia.com’s Manager of Industry Relations, says he believes a banner ad needs to meet several criteria in order for a consumer to click on it:

1) Relevant to the site they are on, and that specific site’s experience
2) Fresh, live data that won’t be overly duplicative
3) Movement or implementation that attracts the consumer’s eye
4) Deliver EXACTLY what the consumer expects when they click on it, thus making the experience positive.
5) Seamless integration into the experience

So trulia.com created its turn-key system, the Online Billboard listing widget, which the company says fulfills the criteria above and more, when coupled with Trulia’s targeting by ZIP, county, state, price points and more.

After a year of testing, trulia.com says its hypothesis was correct and every Online Billboard unit that ran its live listing widget saw a 3-5 times increase in click through rates when compared to standard banner ads. Some had so much as a 10 times increase, regardless of where the widget was targeted geographically. And an early case study with Prudential Real Estate, where they ran both ads in 30 day trials, increased Click Through Rates by 5 times.

You can see an example of the Online Billboard at work for Rand Better Homes and Garden here.