Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

Let’s say you’re an estate agent suffering in the downturn. Sound familiar ?

You’re looking to cut costs while improve lead generation and you notice that you’re spending 800 pounds a month with various property portals and websites for subscriptions. That’s 9,600 pounds a year. Should you cut that advertising spend? What will happen to all the leads they generate from the internet? I know everyone is online so I need to be attracting people. I’d like to get a lot more leads from what they generate. What do I do?

The answer is simple, search engines. You’ll get the same amount of leads (if not WAY more) and spend a lot less.  Below is how it works and how you can try it if you think I speaketh false.

1. Take your 800 pounds and buy as many clicks as you can from the leading search engines. Google, Yahoo and of course, Zoomf. In this same ‘test month’ turn off your listings with all other websites.
2. If we set your cost per click at 23 pence, this will result in 3,478 people clicking thru to your website in a month.
3. With 3,478 people (interested in property in your area) clicking to your website, how many calls and emails (the leads) did this generate for you ?

The answer ? You will find out, but I would guess a lot more leads than you generate from subscriptions.

You are probably saying to yourself, how can it be that easy and why haven’t I done this before. Let Mike tell you why….

• Subscription based websites are arbitrarily setting a price without correlating your spend to what you will get out of it. Search engines, on the other hand, send traffic directly to you and that is what you pay for. Period.
• Subscription based websites do not make it very easy for consumers to ‘click-thru’ to your website. Why? So they can keep the user inside a walled-garden experience. I’m fairly certain most agents would like their own websites to generate traffic. Search engines do exactly that, pass on the consumer to your website as much as possible.
• Emails and phone calls are the life-blood of subscription based websites. That is why they use 0845 numbers as well as making sure any emails you get have a big stamp on them saying “Sent from portal dot com.” This is how they convince you that you are getting return. If you own agency website has a phone number and an email address on it (and I’m not sure there is an agent in the UK who does not have their contact info as standard), then how many calls and emails do you think you would generate if over 3,400 people came to it during a month?
• Search is new to the property space in the UK. A lot of agents are doing exactly above while others are playing catch-up.

In this downturn, it’s of utmost importance to make sure you are getting return on your advertising spend. Subscription based websites are based on subscription but more importantly, judged by their performance. Agents should be empowered by the knowledge that for similar or less spend per month, you can generate leads for yourself. That is the power of the search engine model and why the subscription model is under threat in the long-term.

Of course I would say that, I work at a search engine.

Exactly 

It’s a topic that’s understandably close to our hearts and as a search engine we see ourselves as the eventual winners in this battle for online house-hunters hearts and minds. But people get stuck in their ways. We use the same brand of toothpaste for decades because it’s just ‘what we do’. This can be a real point of frustration for us when we’re talking to agents who don’t want to put the time into reconsidering their online marketing, they could often be getting a better return for a lot less money by turning their attention away from the portals and towards the search engines. But now that agency budgets across the country are tightening, the case of the online marketing budget has come to the foreground for many. It was certainly a point of debate in this fortnight’s edition of The Negotiator (released 21st March), the popular magazine written exclusively for agents.

Unfortunately, The Negotiator doesn’t publish articles online but anyone with a paper copy can flick to pages 17 and 18 for an in-depth look at the portals and the search engines and details of which sites can give you the most bang for your buck. There’s some pretty interesting stats, the savings that could be made by shuffling your online alliances were substantial. I work for Zoomf and even I was surprised!

The Negotiator found that an agency with ten offices who currently subscribe to the two main portals, Rightmove and Primelocation, could save just under £100,000 per year by switching over to Zoomf and buying 30 keywords, and that’s not a saving to laugh at! It wasn’t just the big agencies that stood to save a fortune either, a five office agency was estimated to be able to save £45,000 per year and a single office agency with 10 keywords could drastically reduce their online marketing budget by 85%! Gosh. If you’d like more details about our clever targeted advertising then you can contact greg@zoomf.com for an overview.

And whilst we’re on the topic of online advertising, we’re currently getting very excited about our next seminar for agents. We’ve got a new venue, Interbrand on The Strand, and it will be taking place on the 24th of April at 6.30pm. Along with the usual Zoomf experts there will be presentations from Oodle and Yell, and of course the opportunity for you to have all your questions answered. We’ll be discussing Google AdWords, targeted advertising and all sorts of lovely things to do with online marketing on a tight budget. It’s free to attend, but places have been snapped up impressively quickly, so make sure you email marianna@zoomf.com if you want to guarantee yourself a place!

Technorati Tags: Real estate, Property, Online Advertising, Portals

As Flavor Flav from one on my all-time favorite rap groups Public Enemy would say, “Don’t believe the hype.” Portals do have a big audience, fair enough. It’s a valuable audience one should constantly monitor to see what return it gives on your ad spend.

However, do not take the page impressions marketing at face value. Page impressions is increasingly a false economy online. As quoted by respected online veteran Om Malik in regards to Facebook being a page impression ‘honey-pot’, the same is true of most property portals. Page impressions are less of a measure of value than ever before.

So why are property portals mis-leading you when speaking about it’s page impression levels?

It’s all fairly simple… portal users are forced to rack up time-spent-on-site and page impressions due to the poor nature of their search facility. Everyone would agree that ’search’ is the main reason to visit a portal, so why is it so poor? A typically user of a portal has to read and read and read to discover properties that match requirements.

For example, take a requirement like “mews flat in NW6 with a garden and parking.” A user would be forced to read description after description to find the properties that match four requirements; mews flat, geo location, has a garden and has parking. If you execute a search for “NW6″ in a leading portal, it can list up to 100 plus results. At 10 properties per page, a user would have to read all the descriptions and compile a little excel chart to see if they can find the matching results. Sounds like a lot of reading and a lot of page impressions to me.

Take that example and amplify it across any criteria across all geographies and you can see the obvious flaws in their product. Page impressions would have to be sky high as a direct result of how they limit the consumers search. Time-poor consumers should be able to find their content in a couple clicks. In the property portal world it seems like the reverse is true.

With technologies like AJAX beginning to also devalue the page impression metrics, it’s even more important to make sure to cut thru the marketing noise to the real value of what a website delivers for spend.