If you’re running real estate online ad campaigns, you’re all too familiar with the constant struggle to reach target ROI results. But because different demographics have varying perceptions of digital ads, this profoundly impacts your adverts in a way you can’t always predict. In this post, we’ll explore what customers like and dislike about real estate online ads most of all and how realtors can respond.
Agents who incorporated real estate ads into their marketing strategy are likely to face a couple of challenges. How to not suffer from ad blockers? How to craft ads that people will like and click on? What are the most annoying things about digital ads customers can’t stand?
Recent research by Choozle revealed some interesting insights into what people think about online ads and how marketers can relate. Let’s see what agents can learn from these findings.
How to create better real estate online ads
1. Addressing the ad block issue
As a digital user, you probably use ad block yourself. Let’s be honest – there are way too many ads bombarding online users every day than they can bear to watch. So a mostly negative stance towards online ads prevails which is bad for any industry, of course.
According to one of the recent reports, 53% of users installed ad blockers to minimize the time they spend viewing ads. Moreover, the demographic group aged 30-44 is the most active user of ad blockers and it so happens that this is the ideal target audience for a majority of companies across industries.
Another issue is credibility. 41% say they don’t trust ads they see online and never click on them.
With a stance like this, it’s no surprise that reaching ROI for your ad campaigns turns into a chore.
As the Choozle report suggests, one way to climb over the ad block wall is to enhance the quality of your real estate online ads. Apparently, if the ads were great, people would actually care to watch them (and not choose to install ad blockers), right? If you’re looking for some great techniques, here’s a quick guide with more info on that.
[Related post: Real Estate SEO: Specifying and Optimizing Online Ads]
2. What does age have to do with the perception of digital ads?
Another interesting finding in the report is how age correlates with ad popularity. Older people tend to dislike online ads more: 44% of users aged 60+ dislike ads as compared to 28% of users aged 18-29. Also, women are more open to view ads than men but most people (81%) would rather view ads on their desktop computers than smartphones.
All of this means that depending on the demographics you target, you should analyze your primary marketing channels in advance. For example, if you’re marketing to retirees, online ads should not be a top priority.
[Related post: Facebook Ads for Real Estate: New Benchmark Data to Watch in 2017]
3. What do customers like about online ads most of all?
Whatever the perception of online ads is, they do happen to carry some value to customers. Lots of people still think so too so that’s an inspiring thing to know.
According to the Choozle report, things customers like about digital ads are:
- Exposure to new products
- Ads are tailored and relevant to their specific interests
- Saves them money with coupons or sales
- Ads are for products they’re interested in
- Ads keep apps free
Positive feedback on real estate online ads is mostly the result of having great targeting options available to advertisers. Since it’s possible to narrow down the target audience effectively, people see fewer ads they’re not interested in or products they’ve never heard of.
[Related post: Real Estate Facebook Ads: Top 8 Features to Try Now]
4. What do customers dislike about online ads most of all?
Usual things, as you can guess:
- They slow down the web and mobile pages
- The same ad is shown multiple times, regardless of the user’s interest
- They take up too much space on the web page
- They pop up on the screen and block mobile pages
- It’s easy to accidentally click on the ad without knowing
Most of the time, you can address these issues by crafting more user-friendly ads and reducing the frequency with which your ad is shown to a particular customer. Seeing the same ad over and over again is often the reason ad blockers are installed in the first place.
What’s next?
To get better results with your ad campaigns, agents must learn to minimize the most annoying aspects of online advertising and emphasize the quality of ads. To get started, consider:
- dedicating more time to crafting better ad copies. Above all, each ad should communicate clear value and explain the next step (“Register now”, “Get a free evaluation”, etc.). This also includes creating user- and mobile-friendly ads that can be easily closed;
- narrowing down your targeting options to only reach people who are interested in your services;
- playing around with the frequency and recency of real estate online ads. It probably doesn’t make sense to display your ad multiple times a day during the whole week so you’d like to test these things to get better results.
