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.

If you are a busy agent with lots of clients, the thought of gathering statistics for all of your properties might seem daunting. You’d need to find out how many people visited each property and what number of enquiry emails you had, then look at comparable properties and combine it all to make a meaningful report.

This could take some time and may seem tedious, however each of your clients deserves the individual attention and feedback, particularly if they are paying for the advertising. But for the sake of your sanity, it’s best to look to an automated system to do the work for you.

One easy way to gather this information is through your advertising portal. Most of the large players will provide you with the raw statistics on each of the properties you have listed. Some of the more advanced portals will even package this information in a useful report that you can then forward on to your vendors.

If your portal does not provide such a service, you may need to do the grunt work yourself. No doubt you receive reports of some sort from all the different portals you advertise on as well as your own website. You should collate as much of this information as possible so you can provide your customers with a well-rounded picture of how their marketing is tracking.

Vendor reports are also a fantastic tool for you to compare properties and see which portals are producing better results than others, along with which properties are performing better and why. This knowledge is great for advising customers on how to achieve better results from their advertising.

Above all, remember to keep your vendor reports simple and only include the facts. Ultimately, vendor reports should provide a springboard for considered conversation between you and your vendor about what’s best for their listing.

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.”

The results of a recent survey by globaledge.co.uk reveal some interesting disparities between the marketing channels agents see as effective and the channels they actually use.

The survey looked at the marketing habits of over 200 agents and developers, asking them to rate the effectiveness of strategies like search engine optimisation, email marketing, and banner advertising, and to detail the strategies they use.

The top five most effective marketing strategies were seen to be the following:

1. Customer referral programs
2. Search engine optimisation
3. Listing properties with portals
4. Agent and IFA networks
5. Email marketing

The top five marketing strategies the respondents actually used were slightly different:

1. Listing properties with portals
2. Email marketing
3. Search engine optimisation
4. Agent and IFA networks
5. Magazine advertising

Like the recent HomeGain survey of US agents, these results suggest certain habits, like the use of print media, are difficult to break even when agents know they aren’t as effective as other marketing strategies.

If you’re trying to make the shift towards some of those top five most effective marketing strategies, make sure you check out our guest series and Top 10 Tips on SEO, our series on making the most of your portal listings, and our email marketing tips.

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.

Are you advertising your listings in the right places? Many agents and brokers use syndication tools like Postlets, Listhub or Point2 as a way to get their listings displayed in all the right places.

Now there’s a new tool that gives you a snapshot of your online advertising presence for a particular address.

The new marketing tool from US based International Listings aims to show whether a real estate listing is syndicated across the web on some of the popular real estate search websites.

Simply type in the address and the company’s search engine scours the web to find where it is listed, generating a “report card”.

The website searches many (though not all) of the major portals: google.com, oodle.com, zillow.com, frontdoor.com, trulia.com, and more.

It’s a great idea for consumers, and a clever marketing ploy by International Listings who have been a leader in online luxury classifieds advertisements since 2001. After the report is generated, they offer users the opportunity to put International Listings to the 30-day test and submit a luxury property listing.

As the market tightens, sellers are likely to ask more questions about where their properties are being advertised. Announcing the report card function on its blog, the company says:

“With web 2.0 real estate sites like these growing in market share each and every month, and with some 80% of homebuyers now doing research online at some point in the buying process, it’s now more important than ever that your listing appears on the major real estate search engines. Our tool searches 10 of the highest trafficked homebuying portals and gives you a “grade” (A+, B-, etc.) on how well you’re marketing your listing online.”

Find out more and trial the service at intlistings.com/realestatemarketingreport.

The Negotiator has revealed that The Digital Property Group (DPG) is in the process of unveiling a marketing analytics tool for its member agents.

Called “Insight”, the tool will allow agents to monitor their traffic, and use the data to improve consumer marketing.

It brings DPG in line with their competitor rightmove.co.uk’s “Rightmove Plus” function.

Agents will be able to monitor traffic received from DPG’s portals and compare themselves to competitors in a “benchmarking” application.

The Negotiator quoted DPG chief executive, Mark Milner, as saying:

“The point is that our customers do not have this data at their finger tips. Their media spend should be subject to the same scrutiny as every other spend.”

“We are trying to put in the hands of estate agents the same media tools that we have, so they can measure their return on investment with our sites.”

The application will be available to member agents using DPG’s four property portals: primelocation.com, findaproperty.com, homesandproperty.co.uk, and findanewhome.com.

You can find out more at insight.thedigitalpropertygroup.com and see a demo here.

Online advertising is heavily data-centric. By this I mean that most advertisers online analyze data to the nth degree. This is both the pro and the con of internet advertising. It’s a pro that you no longer have to ask that old adage of advertising -

I know that 50% of my spend is wasted, I just do not know which half.

With internet ads, you can understand what is working and what is not just by looking at the data.

The con is that you can be buried in data.

In the property lead generation space, not a lot of thought is given to data and the power of conversion. Not yet. We here at Zoomf believe that agents will start to get familiar with ‘conversion’ over 2009.

So how can you get a step ahead in the game? It’s pretty simple. Ask yourself the following questions -

1. What do I consider a conversion on my website ? (hint – its a call or a registration)
2. Who are the top 20 websites sending me traffic ?
3. How many calls are generated from my site every day ?
4. How many registrations ?
5. Which sites in the top 20 have the best conversions to calls or registrations?

Once you know the questions to ask, then you get your IT or software provider to enable the tracking. Now you’re ahead of 80% of the competition and part of the movement gaining momentum today.

If your website is on Google Analytics, have a look at goals and funnels within the interface. Perfect starting point for conversion tracking.

At propertyadguru.com we couldn’t agree with the sentiments more. It is extremely important that agents and realtors around the world truly understand how effective their online advertising spend is.

Stats Explained

Portal sites bombard agents with a range of stats – each one bigger than the previous – and all designed to show why they are the biggest and the best site to advertise on. However, most of these stats are meaningless and dont actually tell the agent what they need to know. Here are some of the more popular stats put out by portal sites around the world.

Hits – now this has to be THE most meaningless statistic. It count how many times the server is “hit” when presenting a page to the user. Therefore two pages that look the same but are constructed differently will generate different numbers of hits. If you are quoted hits by a portal site – they probably dont have much to offer.

Page Impressions – this measures the number of page impressions or pages of information users look at – usually over the course of a month. For large sites these numbers can be massive – e.g. realestate.com.au had 528 million in August 2008. While a massive number, it doesnt mean much to the agent in one suburb.

Sessions or Visits – this measures the number of times someone visits the website – no matter what page they land on. This will also be a massive number and also not tell you, the agent, much about whether you should advertise on the site.

Frequency – this tells us the number of times, on average, a person visits a site and therefore gives you an idea of the popularity of the site. For example, a person who visits a site 3 times per month has a frequency of 3 and generates 3 visits. Sites with low frequencies (say <1.5 times per month) are usually generating traffic from SEO or SEM and that traffic is hitting the site and bouncing off. realestate.com.au, for example, has a frequency of just over 3 inicating the it has significant loyal traffic.

Unique Visitors or Unqiue Browsers – this attempts to measure the number of individuals that visit a site each month. Now this is probably not a true measure as it is calculated based on cookies and often people delete their cookies and therefore can measure the same person as being multiple people. Still, UV’s are as good a measure as you can get online.

Average Session Duration – this tells us how long a person stays on the site each time they visit. The longer the session time, the more properties they are looking at. Sites such as realestate.com.au have session times of nearly 10 minutes – this is massive and normally sites have session times of around 3 – 5 min.

Leads Generated – sites often attempt to calculate how many leads they generate. Now the reality is that they can measure how many emails are sent from the site to the agents and in some countries they can measure the number of phone calls they generate. However, they can not measure how many people visit the estate agent or just turn up at an open for inspection.

Detailed Property Views – when a user does a search on a property site, they generate search results and then click on the houses they like to see the property in detail – this is a detailed property view.

Stats the Matter

While all of the above are interesting, that is MOST important to an agent is what is happening in their suburb. Therefore all these stats about how well a portal site is performing at a global level is really useless to an agent as you want to know how well each site performs in your suburb.

Now the portals probably dont have this information or wont share it with you. However the stats you want to try to get a hold of are:

Searches Per Suburb – this is how many times a visitor to the site does a search on a particular suburb – the more that a suburb is searched, the more potential leads can be generated

Leads Per Suburb – this tells you how many emails and, if possible, how many telephone calls are generate on a suburb by suburb basis.

Leads Per Listing – this tells you how many emails (and calls) you are likely to receive for a particular listing in a particluar suburb

These are the measures that will help you work out how effective your advertising is on a particular portal site and allow you to compare how effective each portal site is in your suburb.