Online Advertising - Set Goals

Over the past 3 years, we (me and 30-plus members of Zillow’s sales team), have learned a tremendous amount about what successful and unsuccessful ad campaigns look like.  We routinely share this information with Zillow advertising partners, but feel there are many more professionals who could benefit from these results.  One of our goals at Zillow is to empower consumers and professionals.  So with this blog post - and, hopefully, many others - I would like to create a conversation among real estate marketing professionals on how to best utilize various online marketing tools on Zillow.

What are your goals?

For example, we found that many potential advertisers can’t answer the question, “what are your goals for this campaign?”  Many will respond with generic answers like, “sell homes”, “find buyers” or in the case of new construction, “get buyers to my sales center.”  What’s nice about the online advertising world is that you can measure every step of the process from a click, to a lead, to a transaction — if you have the tools in place to make those measurements.

Also, for each dollar you spend, you need to know what kind of return you want.  For instance, if you have $1,000 to spend, what does the publisher, like Zillow, have to deliver in order to be successful for you?  If a publisher drove 1,000 clicks to your Web site, does that help drive sales?  Or, for $1,000, do you need to see 10 leads?  For some businesses, these are great results; for others, these are not great results.  Figure out your goals.

Step 1…

So,  here we are at Step 1: You, as the potential advertiser, need to come up with a budget and what that budget needs to accomplish for you.  Then, work with each publisher to find a program that can reach those goals.  If you don’t have set goals and share them with your publishing partner, you may end up with the wrong program and, most likely, disappointing results.  Share your goals with your publishing partner and most likely, your needs can be met.