performance

By BDX Guest Blogger, Carol Morgan, mRELEVANCE

Tweet, tweet, tweet! Many home builders, real estate agents and industry suppliers have finally started tweeting their content and creating buzz with their interaction. However, Twitter users and skeptics alike still want to prove that their time and energy is worth it. Luckily, help proving the return on investment on Twitter is finally here! Recently, Twitter released a new analytics platform which provides users with a wealth of useful and insightful account information.

Among the information available when a company or user logs into the analytics portal is a timeline glimpse of your follows, unfollows and mentions over the last 60 days. Below the timeline is a chart displaying recent tweets along with retweets, favorites and replies each specific tweet received. To see which content is among your most actionable, users can sort this data to show your “best” or “good” tweets, including highlighted statistics on which tweets or actions fall within your top 15 percent for the past 30 days. Businesses can make the most of the data from this chart by noting what types of content or tweets are most successful, and applying this information to future tweets.

Switching to the followers view, users can see the growth of their followers since the account was created. A further breakdown of  followers’ location by country, state and city; gender; interests and who else they are following provides interesting insight that can help companies strategically plan tweets to appeal to their audience demographics.

Ready to start tweeting more relevant content for your Twitter followers? Be sure to bookmark this URL, which takes you directly to the Twitter analytics login page: https://analytics.twitter.com/accounts/1edxhg/timeline_activity.

By Thane Tennison, Advertising Manager, BDX

Last month the BDX network served over 2.8 million clicks. However, not all of those clicks were sent to an advertiser’s website. Many of those clicks were identified as Bots and filtered out of our reporting. The Bot Filter is just one of the services BDX provides to help optimize performance for our builder advertisers. 

Bots are a piece of software that scan websites and follow web links to create an index for major search engines. They’re not something a consumer would notice in their regular online activity but can have a profound affect for a webmaster looking at traffic and click trends.

In our BDX Ad reporting we typically see Bot Traffic as spikes in click thru activity for a builder.  For example, a builder may average a .20 Click-Thru Rate (CTR) but occasionally performance will spike to five percent over a short period of time.  By cross referencing the domain and IP we can typically identify and block the bot. However, other Bot Traffic is not as obvious and may appear as regular click activity.  This is especially true if an advertiser is running GIF/JPEG files that will record all click activity (the Javascript in a SWF File or Ad Tag will typically filter the bot click).

In our review of Bot Traffic BDX has identified a series of browsers and IPs that represent three percent of all traffic but as much as twenty percent of the clicks for our builder advertisers. These clicks are recorded in our ad server but may not appear in a builder’s Google Analytics (After all, Google runs several bots of their own and automatically filters that traffic).  The result is a natural discrepancy between publishers’ reports and what a builder sees in their analytics. Meaning publishers could report a high number of clicks & high CTR but the advertiser sees relatively little value.

By implementing the Bot Filter BDX is able to provide more accurate reporting that closely aligns to a builder’s backend reporting across all of the BDX advertising products from BeBack to Realtor.com. With more accurate reporting, we can better work with our advertisers to optimize their campaigns and improve our product offerings.

Many publishers and ad severs do have a bot filter included in their service and will only capture known bots identified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. They don’t actively manage new bots regularly introduced into the market nor do I think most publishers apply the same level of scrutiny as BDX to identify these occasional spikes in click traffic.

If you’re working with a publisher and running online campaigns I’d recommend auditing performance to ensure numbers closely align to what’s reported.  Setting up UTM tracking codes and developing campaign goals in Google Analytics are some easy ways to help track performance across different channels and optimize your media flight. As many of our advertisers work with limited resources it’s important that they have accurate data to make the right decisions regarding their marketing efforts.  At BDX we work with several of our advertisers to help set up campaign goals allowing them to truly understand the value of their online advertising. 

If you’d like additional information on some of the unique services BDX provides to optimize builder campaigns or assistance in setting up tracking in Google Analytics please contact me at traffic@thebdx.com.

Thane Tennison is the Advertising Manager for the BDX and manages hundreds of home builder brands across a network of over a dozen real estate websites.

Taking advantage of new rich media and data features on NewHomeSource and Move New Homes websites leads to double-digit increases in performance for builders.

Austin, TX – October 12, 2011 – Builders Digital Experience (BDX), a leading provider of digital marketing solutions for new home builders, today released the latest performance details for the company’s flagship websites, NewHomeSource and Move New Homes showing significant increases in leads and click-throughs for builders.

BDX recently launched new versions of NewHomeSource and Move New Homes, the #1 and #2 new home websites[i]. The new sites create a more useful and useable home shopping experience and feature a host of rich media upgrades including larger images and video galleries. The BDX sites also allow builders to highlight hot homes, promotions and spec homes for consumers. The company analyzed builder data across the two new sites and found that the builders who were taking advantage of the sites’ rich media and data features saw dramatic improvements in performance over those who didn’t utilize the enhancements.[ii]

[i] comScore 2011

[ii] Study based upon Newhomesource.com website and all communities published during the study look-back period of June and July 2011 . Performance statistics, by community, were correlated to counts (“completeness”) of certain data, such as descriptions, pictures, videos, promotional text and other data assets.  The findings represent the percentage gains in lead and click-through performance of those communities having the desired data or with the data present in larger quantities, versus those with lesser amounts or absent data.   BDX considers these results to be significant and representative of the average performance gains that could be achieved by those builders who currently have none or little of the data now, if such data was provided in the future.  As with any correlative study, there may be other unknown factors that account for the results seen; and BDX does not guarantee specific results for any builder.

 

Everyday we have discussions with builders about online marketing performance. From setting benchmarks to ongoing measurement, our experts can provide unique insight into a builder’s online marketing iniatives. One of the most common questions we receive is — What can I do to improve my performance? We always start the discussion with builder data — what elements are you including with your listings and what can you add to make them even better. We recently performed some analysis on builder data across the BDX network and below are some of our findings. Here are our top five ways to see a lift in your leads and click-thrus.

Download: Improving Performance Whitepaper