How Ryder Homes Uses Boost to Increase Traffic and Sell More Homes

2019 marks the 60th anniversary of Ryder Homes, a family-owned and -operated company that is now the largest privately held home builder in northern Nevada. Rarely building the same plan twice, Ryder Homes has created residential communities in more than 20 counties in California and Nevada — two regions with home styles that often have to appeal to vastly different buyers.

Ryder Homes’ director of sales and marketing, Taylor Cohee, spends much of his time and budget making the homes look amazing and discoverable online by prospective buyers. He uses Builder Boost + Precision Targeting — an advertising platform that retargets interested Zillow shoppers on Facebook — and checks his Zillow performance on a weekly basis.

We spoke to Taylor to learn more about why Ryder Homes invests in Zillow advertising.

What made you choose Zillow as a partner?

You have to be where people are — that's online real estate listing platforms — and we wanted to be a sound presence in those places. Our relationship with Zillow goes back about three years now, starting with our listings, which were pretty successful.

Why did you decide to try Boost + Precision Targeting?

We have great coverage for the home market, but Zillow is obviously the biggest consumer resource out there.* The combined power of Zillow-owned sites — and using your Facebook retargeting and social media campaigns — reaches more potential home buyers than we do. It has been far more effective at driving traffic to our website than any other source.

What success can you share about using Boost + Precision Targeting?

We saw a three-year trend of approximately 1,000 monthly unique users on our websites take an almost immediate jump to 10,000 unique users per month. Some traffic came from our Boost + Precision Targeting ads on Facebook, some came directly from Zillow. We’ve leveled off to about 12,000 unique users a month. That’s a pretty intense increase in traffic.

And there’s nothing else we did differently at that time: We didn’t start a Google search campaign, the only change we made to our online marketing program was to add Boost + Precision Targeting. The results were way better than we expected — now we have the market share with ads in the Bay Area, Napa and Marin Counties, and in Washoe County in Nevada.

How do you know if your Boost + Precision Targeting campaigns are working?

We can go into the attribution report on our Zillow Builder Dashboard and see how many people came in through the door because of Zillow. In November 2018, 6 out of 7 home sales were attributed to people who say they saw us on Zillow or Trulia. We’ve been able to track that traffic.

It’s hard to describe the quality of that traffic — we’re selling homes, that’s the main indicator — but the traffic from our Boost + Precision Targeting ads on Facebook mobile is ridiculous: It’s driving about 30 percent of our traffic. We don’t spend money advertising on Facebook outside of Zillow.

Does performance data in the Builder Dashboard help you?

Yes. It’s not a small investment we’re making in Zillow, and when I meet with our board it helps to share with them what’s working. The Boost campaigns have been pretty impactful and incredibly successful. It’s something I think we’re going to do for a long time.

Why would you recommend working with Zillow to someone who might be on the fence?

I think it’s one of those things you have to do. It makes sense: It’s part of what you need to do if you want to have a relevant online presence in the markets you’re in. We try to be everywhere we know buyers are. They’re going to search, they’re going to go to Zillow, and we want to make sure all the great content we’re pushing out is being seen.

*Source: Comscore, October 2018.