I’ve run dual Realtor.com banners for the past two years. In my market they tell me there are only 10 slots, so when I had the opportunity to pick up two of them, the maximum allowed any one agent, I did.
The first year they cost my a little over $11,000. It was a set fee, and I paid up front rather than monthly to realize a few hundred dollars in savings. With a top banner and a skyscraper that run simultaneously, I owned 20% of the market.
Why on Earth would I pay that much for web banners? Because 80% of people shopping for homes are online, Realtor.com was the number one search site by a wide margin, and I had a strong website presence to point to. So I tried it.
At the end of the first year, they told me I had received something like 738,000 impressions, but they could not tell me how many click-throughs. This lack of data was surprising given that it was 2006. For $11,000, you’d think they could provide at least a monthly report.
In looking at my own web stats, the results were not impressive. I was getting about as many from Realtor.com as I was from my monthly report on Realty Times, which only costs me $299 per year in participation fees.
But I started getting busy with clients, a few of them said they’d seen me on Realtor.com, so when it came time to renew, I squirmed.
People sometimes get fuzzy about exactly how they find you on the web. They click, here, there, wherever, and suddenly they’re on your website. I had established a strong local blog and wanted to promote that, so with much consternation, I put another $12,000 on the credit card in the name of running a consistent image campaign online.
At the end of year two, they told me I had received something like 488,000 impressions, a 34% decline. That actually tracks with slowing conditions in my marketplace, and while dramatic, it wasn’t a total surprise. But this year they were able to give me a teensy bit of click-through data (yes, if I had more time I could go and get it off my own web server, but for $12,000, I expect a little service.)
The bottom line? They tell me I’ve been paying $9.50 per click.
Canceling both these puppies for next year was a no-brainer. When I can get quality, contextual ad click-throughs from Google for 75 cents because I know how to game the system? Why would I ever pay $10 bucks a click? I live in Reno, not New York City.
The other gotcha is that somehow my top ad banner was permitted to use the word MLS for two years. I guess that’s not allowed anymore, so I was going to have to change the ad and take that word out.
Out of curiosity, I asked which banner had been performing better, thinking that I might keep one for $6,000 (this was before I learned my true click-through cost). Given some general website design principles, I thought surely it would be the skyscraper at the right, because people tend to click on the right more than the top, and Realtor.com charges slightly more for it. Surprisingly, it was the top banner, the one with the word MLS in it. MLS access is apparently a very strong word combo in the mind of the consumer.
So I’m done with Realtor.com banners. Way overpriced for what they deliver, they did serve a purpose in my overall web strategy, and now I have more than enough traffic from Google thanks to my blogging efforts.
My suggestion to Realtor.com would be to ditch the expensive no-data static banners in favor of dynamic, changeable contextual text advertising like what Google Ads offer. One of the most valuable things about this method of advertising is that you can experiment with several ad variations, discover which work the best, set your own bids to budget, and basically get a customized set of ad campaigns for a whole lot less.
But I must say, their lack of reporting is appalling. How hard is it to send a monthly report with impressions, click-throughs and cost per click? When I renewed in 2006 I asked if they could do this, and the sales guy assured me that it was in the works. Yeah, right. Never saw that one.
Are they worth it? In most cases, I’d say probably not.
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