Halstead Property

Diane M. Ramirez
President
dramirez@halstead.com
(212) 381-3203

Matthew J. Leone
Director of Web Marketing & Social Media
mleone@halstead.com
(212) 381-3338

Putting More Muscle Into Internet Marketing

Large firms spend big to dominate searches, but jury's out on best way to measure who has most traffic 

By Marc Ferris

When Halstead wanted to promote its new online luxury listing initiative, dubbed "S3," the company put digital signs atop New York City taxis — an unusual, if old-school, way of driving traffic to its Web site.

The product and the promotion are emblematic of how many brokerages are making a significant push to attract certain demographic groups to their Web sites — and trying to ensure that users "stick" online. S3, for example, allows a Halstead client who has listed a property with the brokerage to track how many Internet users have viewed the listing each day.

In general, brokerages are putting more muscle behind their Internet marketing efforts, using the savvy of new-media professionals who try to minimize "bounce" (jargon for when visitors leave a site) and increase "conversion rates" (selling listings tied to online ads).

"A recent study by the National Association of Realtors showed that 84 percent of buyers are going on the Web, and that's across almost every demographic," said Matthew Leone, marketing manager at Halstead Property. "We understand the need to commit larger sums of money to Web-based products and our approach is cumulative, where we focus on small, effective enhancements that drive traffic over the long-term, rather than one big bang."

It's no surprise that larger firms dominate the rankings of New York City-based brokerages on public Web metrics sites, because they spend vast resources engaging in search engine optimization, or SEO, which attempts to ensure that sites place high in Web search results by embedding them with key terms that are likely to be typed in by buyers, like "New York City condo" or "Manhattan apartment."

By contrast, search engine marketing, or SEM, consists of paying handsomely for an ad tied to those coveted search words. However, there are differing opinions on how effective SEM is in terms of drumming up Web clicks.

"We found that only half the visitors noticed [SEM] ads," said Katherine Cartwright, principal at Criterion Global, which specializes in Internet marketing for real estate firms. "Yet the big New York City brokerages engage in bidding wars to get generic terms like 'New York condos' . . . paying $5 a click in some cases."

Tracking traffic and rankings

To measure effectiveness, firms use many different approaches. One of Google's auxiliary services, Google Analytics, offers accurate data for owners of URLs, but it provides only limited comparative data.

Major Manhattan brokerages use this application, along with internal data generated by their sites and other metrics bought from comparative Web metric firms, including Nielsen Online, Compete.com and Quantcast.com, to build a critical mass of data to sift. Measurements aren't cheap; subscriptions to Compete.com run between $199 and $499 a month. Nielsen Online's NetView service, which tracks the online usage of about 30,000 people a month, costs $50,000 a year.

The Corcoran Group subscribes to Google Analytics, Hitwise.com, Quantcast.com and internal log file analysis, said Matthew Shadbolt, director of Internet marketing for the brokerage, who noted that the firm also follows other ranking sites, like Alexa, which some experts argue has a selection bias.

No matter how many numbers get crunched, comparing Web sites is certainly a tricky game from a statistical standpoint. "The Web generates way too much data and you can only take a snapshot of portions of it," said Mark Gibbs, a Web metrics expert, Network World magazine columnist and author of four books about computer technology. "Even if Alexa gives 90 percent confirmation of your thesis, you should look for other evidence."

To that end, Gibbs noted that he helped develop the randomized Nielsen Online method, which employs political polling techniques to recruit over 30,000 random testers to install a toolbar and have their Web usage tracked.

Regarding its rankings, the top New York City real estate firms have such limited traffic that they fall below the public reporting cutoff, said a Nielsen Online spokeswoman.

Quality, not quantity

Although brokerages use techniques like SEM to get as many people to their sites as possible, many also say they are focusing much of their IT know-how on better targeting the types of people who eventually click on their sites.

"In the past, our primary focus was on how many visitors came to our site," according to a published Google Analytics testimonial from Kristi Graning, senior vice president of IT and e-Business at RE/MAX. But now, "we want to know more about their behavior in order to serve them better. For instance: Why are people coming to our site? Where they are coming from? And what do they do once they get there?"

With that data, according to RE/MAX Web analyst Jeanna Bush, the company can track leads once handed off to Realtor.com. "Now, in addition to allowing consumers to search on all listings, we will be able to capture leads, pass them directly to our agents, and track and measure our lead-to-sale conversion rate," she said.

However, "the catch-22 is that all this data is useless unless you can get advice to help you understand it, mainly by analyzing the path people take through the site," said Gibbs.

Many sites initiate A/B projects to test the best design, he said. In that type of a test, visitors coming to the site in odd minutes might land on the standard Web site, while others entering on even minutes would get a completely different beta test site.

Halstead's S3 program, the one promoted atop the city's taxi fleet, is named for a decade-old tagline, "service, service, service" — and it offers two main components, noted Leone: In addition to providing sellers with a checklist of agreed-upon tasks that the agent has completed, it also gives a slate of Web statistics to sellers.

"It provides full transparency and accountability by giving the seller a log-in password to see everything an agent is doing," he said. "The goal is to offer more analytics in the future."

For now, statistics delivered to S3 clients include the top ten sites where visitors found the listing, total visits to the listing site and a breakdown of the links visitors clicked on when they got there.

For Halstead and other brokerages, the trick is not just to get visitors to their sites, but also to keep things engaging so they don't bounce out. This is where the science of attracting traffic turns into an art.

"It's not about volume; we're trying to get beyond the random person to get rid of barriers and engage visitors more deeply," said Cartwright. "If you're pushing amenities on a particular project, for example, and visitors to the site are clicking on floorplans and bypassing the amenities package, then you should make floorplans the selling point."

Customization is key

For Cartwright's clients, a major goal is to collect registrations from visitors. "That's the gold standard for figuring out what they like and don't like, and determining what is getting them to spend money."

Registrants are requested to provide varying degrees of personal information. For example, at a Shvo Group open house in the Financial District held in August for the W Downtown, visitors were encouraged to register at a couple of computer kiosks, where prompts asked them for the type of apartment they were looking for, their occupation and their income.

Firms use this data to send targeted ads, among other strategies, said Cartwright. "Say someone looks at an online ad for an Upper East Side two-bedroom," she said. "A week later, if you log on to a specific display ad, we would send an e-mail to you based on the criteria you've established. It's logical and doesn't waste anyone's time."

The key to this kind of campaign is cookies, computer tracking devices that Web sites embed on the personal computers of site visitors that allow companies to monitor individual behavior. To some consumers, the practice smacks of Big Brother, so some online registration applications require a double opt-in process.

"The merger of analytics and advertising is exciting because for the first time you can actually get a lot of information about the people coming to your site, and there's much more qualified traffic than ever before," said Cartwright. "But data mining is a wild card because if you dig up too much information about your prospects, there's a chance you can turn them off."

Monday, December 01, 2008