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.

The iPad hasn’t been released in the Netherlands at this stage, but the first models will ship in the US in late March. Our bet is that a string of iPad-related releases, for property seekers and agents alike, will start to surface before they even hit the stores.

With so many new releases from Google over the past week, you could be forgiven for feeling a little over-saturated. As we’ve already discussed, Google’s new real-time search and personalised results raise some questions in terms of online advertising for agents. Thankfully, Google’s latest release looks positive for the world of online real estate advertising.

On Tuesday, the Google Earth and Maps team announced a new type of mapping imagery available to developers through the Google Maps API: high resolution overhead imagery that shows both the rooftops and sides of buildings at a tilted angle.

When Google made the announcement, it pointed out that both US property search engine trulia.com and US online brokerage redfin.com have already integrated this new aerial view into their websites. The two real estate websites were chosen, along with travel website orbitz.com, to be the first to try out the new imagery.

trulia.com’s example gives an idea of how the new perspective will enhance listings:



At first, the addition of a slightly new angle on Google Maps imagery might sound insignificant. But once you start moving around in the new view, it becomes obvious how much more clearly the buildings are being represented. Things like building height and where the building sits in the landscape are aspects home hunters could only guess at in the previous aerial view.

One problem with the new Maps perspective is that, so far, it’s only available in two locations: San Jose and San Diego. Of course, Google says it will be adding more cities in the coming months, but doesn’t hint at when the angled view might become available outside the US.

Do you think this new aerial perspective view would enhance your listings? As always, feel free to leave us your thoughts in our comments.

trulia.com says the increased contact options resulted in a three-fold increase in consumer enquiries during testing. Pricing is based on the number of listings a company has and the average price of their market.

The new listing package comes as trulia.com introduces changes to the way it ranks properties. The search engine says its new ranking system “ensures that the most complete listings, with quality information, rise to the top”.

trulia.com’s white paper on the new ranking system emphasises the need for complete listing information, including multiple photos, a property description, agent contact information and a full address, to get the maximum number of page views and leads.

trulia.com echoes zillow.com’s recent advice when it comes to the effect photos have on listing views and leads, stating that trulia.com users are two and a half times more likely to view listings with multiple photos than a listing with only one photo.

The white paper goes on to say that trulia.com users are also nearly three times more likely to send a lead to a listing broker or agent when multiple photos are present.

trulia.com was recently named “number one lead provider” by its partner listhub.net.

A free 90 day trial is currently being offered, but the service will cost US$15 per month after that. In an oodle.com blog post, CEO Craig Donato explained the advantages of using the tool:

“Many local advertisers have become comfortable using self-service online tools like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads for display advertising. They are also using Craigslist to promote their listings, which requires a lot of time and effort. Oodle Pro provides a simple, self-service platform for local advertisers to get more exposure for their listings across the hundreds of sites in the Oodle Network.”

Oodle Pro allows agents to track the number of impressions, clicks, leads and social actions its advertisements have generated via “up-to-the-minute” online reports. oodle.com says its audience, combined with the reach offered by Oodle Pro’s social media partners, will give agents access to over 200 million potential home buyers.

According to Wikipedia, Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality. Basically, what you see through the camera in the iPhone or Android phone is supplemented by computer imagery and information.

One of the companies taking the AR world by storm is Layar, which has just released the Layar Reality Browser 2.0 (see below). The big news is that Layar is now available worldwide from the iTunes Store, which many think will lead to an explosion of apps and innovations.

Last week Fast Company Magazine mentioned trulia.com’s Layar augmented reality application as one of the Top 5 to watch. trulia.com’s app uses Layar’s Reality Browser to overlay listings on top of a Google phone’s camera view. Users can scan a neighbourhood’s available properties and even connect to the realtors.

And trulia.com is by no means the only portal involved in AR.

The Netherlands’ market leading property portal, funda.nl, has already partnered with Dutch mobile phone company SPRXmobile to be part of their new “augmented reality” mobile application. And the number two ranked property portal, jaap.nl, has released a free app for the Android market.

Over in France, meilleursagents.com has taken things one step further by releasing a mobile android application that displays the property value of every single building in Paris in price per square meter.

In Portugal casa.sapo.pt has just introduced Layar technology as well for the Android and iPhone markets.

The proof of AR’s potential will be when people – or consumers – really start using it. iPhones are already experiencing massive surges in users. Just this week Redfin revealed some interesting statistics about their iPhone traffic: iPhone traffic is now 10% of Redfin’s site traffic on the weekends.

This week we can report that France’s meilleursagents.com has taken things one step further by releasing a mobile android application. The app displays the property value of every single building in Paris in price per square meter.

The “layar empowered augmented reality app” allows users to see at street level, through their mobile phone camera, the value or prices of real estate in Paris.

Users launch the application, place their phone in front of them and steer toward the building of their choice. GPS identifies the location and orientation of the phone and estimates of house prices from meilleursagents.com then appear in real time on the phone screen, above the camera image.

The company claim this is the first application of augmented reality real estate in France.

You can watch a video demo below:

Augmented Reality demo using Google Android + Layar from MeilleursAgents.com on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for many more android releases as the real estate industry cottons on to possibilities offered by this latest technology.

According to eRealInvestor, the eRealAnalyzer tool works by combining up to date rental, tax and appraisal information with an intuitive interface to evaluate how a property may perform relative to various financial criteria.

“It is incumbent upon sellers who wish to differentiate and attract the highest selling price to entice buyers based on their cash flow generation potential and to provide the most compelling online resources,” said Mike Genstil, eRealInvestor’s founder and CEO. “eRealAnalyzer makes property evaluation engaging and instantaneous. It easily integrates directly with the auction listing so buyers can experiment and quickly evaluate a property’s full potential.”

Last month, eRealInvestor entered into two similar partnerships, providing its financial analysis tools to Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, a global network of real estate firms, as well as to RE/MAX North Central, allowing house hunters access to information such as monthly mortgage payments and the effects of lower down payments.

eRealInvestor’s other partners include foreclosure.com, Century 21 and the Wall Street Journal’s realestatejournal.com.

Using GPS technology, the app allows users to locate nearby properties for sale, map them and directly contact the agent by phone or email from their iPhone. Users can also search using a range of search filters such as house price, property type or number of rooms. Viewing property brochures is sleek via a full colour slideshow.

myhome.ie competes with Irish market leader daft.ie, and comes 10th overall in a recent survey of traffic to all Irish websites.

Established in 2001, the website was acquired by the Irish Times in July 2006. In 2009, myhome.ie launched MyHome TV, which features a monthly property show along with videos of new housing developments.