retargeting

Want to get off to a great start for 2014? Each day for the next two weeks, we will be posting a marketing resolution for the New Year.

#7: I will retarget traffic to my website

We’ve consistently seen evidence that repeat traffic converts at higher rates (See Power of the Returning User blog post). By adding BeBack or a similar retargeting target product you’ll encourage consumers to come back either via clicks or other channels.  Retargeting allows you to reach thousands more home shoppers than through your website alone.

How does retargeting work? The process is simple.  A unique pixel is generated for each builder that “cookies” a consumer when they visit your site.  Your ads then follow the consumer as they visit other websites.

Retargeting keeps your brand and communities top of mind and increases conversion across the board.  Learn more about how you can target consumers at each level of their home search.

By Jamie Lintner, BDX Advertising Manager

 We’ve known for a while about the importance of running a BeBack Retargeting campaign to help convert home shoppers into home buyers. The numbers show time and time again that driving repeat traffic back to a site significantly increases both the on-site usage and the likelihood of a backend conversion. And this makes perfect sense. The more engaged a user becomes with a particular brand, the better understanding they have of the products/services being offered and the more apt they are to take action.

For example, it’s unlikely that a runner would buy the first pair of shoes he sees at Dick’s Sporting Goods. But just because he leaves the store without purchasing the shoes doesn’t mean you should abandon the prospect of a sale. He has showed strong intent to purchase shoes; he simply needs a little guidance and a little push to get him to the checkout counter. The same goes for the online space. Even if a person bounces from your site or shows little engagement, the fact that they arrived in the first place conveys intent to learn about your product.

What kind of a lift can you expect from driving return visits? On NewHomeSource, we see significant gains in both user engagement and conversion. On average, returning users showed a 25% increase in pages viewed, a 13% decrease in bounce rate, and a 60% jump in average visit duration over their “new user” counterparts.

The data shows a new shopper is exactly that, new. They come to the site wide-eyed with little idea on how to navigate the pages to find what they want. Returning visitors know what to expect from the site and have an idea on how to navigate. Because of this, they bounce less often, on average view another page and stay on the site almost twice as long. What’s most important is these users convert 30% more often, so those increased actions are actually translating into increased conversions.

Digging deeper, users who ended up on NewHomeSource.com for the first time through a display banner ad converted 2.6% of the time. Returning users who had shopped NewHomeSource previously and came back by clicking the SAME AD converted 6.5% of the time (a 150% increase). Obviously these metrics will vary from site to site due to the prevalence of the lead form, layout, number of pages to shop, etc. but the same principle applies across the board. And while display advertising is a main cog in driving repeat traffic, returning users can come from multiple sources (Pay Per Click, organic search, Google, social media, etc). Marketers should understand how all of the media channels work together to convert searches into purchases, and the best way to manage that is to consistently drive repeat visits.

Are you looking beyond cost per lead and leveraging various forms of online marketing to generate quality traffic? And secondly, are you fostering your existing traffic in ways that will lead them to return, either by creating a new customer experience or utilizing a retargeting program? Returning users generate much stronger interest and conversions on the backend, making it essential to prioritize getting as many people as possible to return to your site.

If you’d like more information about how builders are improving their web traffic through display advertising and retargeting campaigns contact us at info@thebdx.com.

By: Jamie Lintner, BDX Advertising Accounts Manager

We have all read the analysis about the low click-thru rates for Facebook advertising.  Webtrends in particular has documented a downward shift from an already low click thru rate (CTR) over a span of three years, from a .063% in 2009 to a .041% average in 2011. This is half of the comScore recognized click thru average for all online display advertising — .10%. But what would the data look like if we were to measure the CTR of display ads against a previously engaged individual who already has some level of trust with a brand?

  In Q4 of 2012, Facebook launched a new Ad exchange that allows for advertisers to bid for placement in a real-time fashion. In order to avoid the historically low performance that Facebook has shown, we at the BDX have taken the exchange one step further and are now offering builders the opportunity to retarget visitors to their website and run banners with specific messages for those visitors. Similar to our BeBack program, we will cookie a builder’s site but will then retarget them only against the Facebook platform. These resulting ads fall within the same positions as a direct buy, with the same dimensions and specs and at the same cost, but they produce click thru and conversion rates that trump those of a non-retargeting campaign.  For example, in January, we ran our own internal campaigns and discovered that the CTR is roughly nine times the average of Facebook’s overall average with an incredible lift in backend conversions.

Not only that, but the results are just as strong when compared to traditional retargeting efforts. Here at the BDX we manage our own internal retargeting campaigns across 50 unique markets as well as unique BeBack retargeting campaigns for around 100 home builders. Without fail, a retargeted user is 10-15 times more likely to convert on the backend than one with no knowledge of the brand. Facebook ramps that up to another level. A user who has been on a particular site and has actively engaged with it is roughly 30% more likely to convert through the Facebook exchange than a typical retargeted user. While we were previously content with our cost/lead for retargeting, Facebook has provided a robust channel where we receive incremental traffic at a higher conversion rate. These numbers are hard to ignore.

Moving forward, as an added perk for BeBack advertisers we are now offering an additional campaign across only the Facebook exchange in order to improve backend lead conversion and drive clicks across a previously un-utilized platform. For additional information on how to set this up, please contact info@thebdx.com for additional details.

Builder Advertising on FacebookIn 2011 Facebook became the largest Ad Network of all publishers representing almost 1/3 of display inventory.  Historically, I’ve not been too thrilled with Facebook performance. It’s had a reputation for high bot traffic, low clicks and relatively poor backend conversion.  I’m also convinced that to be successful with Facebook an advertiser needs a series of creative offerings since the high-frequency can result in ads getting stale quickly and losing their initial performance.

However, through some recent updates we can now retarget BDX new home shoppers in the Facebook marketplace ad position.  I was skeptical at first, but with the success of retargeting it was definitely worth a test and I’ve been quite pleased with initial results.

We started the initial test running a ‘generic’ ad driving people back to NHS.  We then rolled out a series of Market Specific ads leveraging our creative best practices. Since then Facebook Retargeting is one of our strongest advertising channels in terms of total conversion and bounce rate is in line with what we’ve seen with other retargeting ads.  That’s a big win.

What I think is most exciting is that our participating BeBack advertisers can also take advantage of this opportunity.  We’re extending Facebook retargeting as part of the BeBack offering at no additional cost for our builders.  Now, a builder truly can reach their users ‘everywhere’ and at the same rate as their previous campaign.

In addition to increased reach and improved conversion this is a big opportunity for builders to leverage the social aspect of Facebook.   Imagine retargeting a consumer who’s visited your website with an ad on Facebook and asking them to ‘fan’ your brand or to share ‘the home of their dreams’ or get their friends opinion on one plan vs. another.  Their truly is a whole litany of marketing strategies that can be applied to BeBack –  especially when incorporating a social component.

For more information about BDX BeBack retargeting or how to integrate Facebook Ads with your existing BeBack campaign contact your local sales rep or email info@thebdx.com.

Thane Tennison is Advertising Manager for the Builders Digital Experience and manages advertising for hundreds of homebuilding brands across a network of over a dozen real estate websites.

Banner Ad Retargeting —  it’s the hottest buzz word for online marketers and a growing trend amongst many players in the online space, but what exactly is it and how does it work?

Imagine spending your marketing dollars by only getting in front of people who have some knowledge of your brand. Banner Ad Retargeting does just that. Simply put, it allows you to concentrate and maximize all of your efforts on your current pool of consumers. This process is quick and painless, involving only one short line of code on your website. When a user visits your site, that single line of code drops a cookie onto the user’s computer which triggers an alert for the Retargeting campaign to activate. Once they begin visiting other websites, your banner ads will follow them across the internet, serving as constant reinforcement for your brand and a means for them to return to your site. For the building industry,  BDX has created the builder BeBack program solely meant to retarget YOUR traffic in order to increase lead conversion for your home-properties.

“Just how many websites will our Retargeting campaign run on?”

This is the single most common question I receive from our clients regarding BeBack. My answer to this question is remarkably simple: “How big is the Internet?” Without fail, the follow up question is, “and just how can I be sure that my banners will hit our users on relevant sites?” The answer to this question is just as simple. We will only retarget users on sites that they themselves visit, so in a way, users are ONLY shown banners on sites that are relevant to their interests and lifestyle. What’s fascinating is that by filtering through the thousands of domains where our ads have run I’ve noticed that the interest of one user is typically very similar to all of the others. By doing this it’s easy to paint a very robust picture of the online foot-print a typical home-shopper leaves across cyberspace.

For our own marketing efforts, NewHome Source.com runs several hundreds of thousands of impressions each month across a little more than 26,000 unique domains. Many of these impressions appear on major, nationally recognized websites like careerbuilder.com, toysrus.com, homes.com, facebook.com, eonline.com, petfinder.com, Zillow.com, and webMD.com. By looking at just these domain names I can almost see this person in my head. I can tell that our he/she is more than likely female, late 20’s to mid 30’s, has young children, and is very career driven. For our builders, can you imagine a more qualified home-shopper that you’d like to reach?

Filtering through these domains has given us additional insight into not only who the shopper is, but where they’re shopping and how often. For the last two months, roughly 25% of all of our view thru conversions have come as a result of banners located on other real-estate sites. This tells me two things. First, consumers in this phase of the purchasing process are shopping multiple websites; gathering data and considering all of their options. For advertisers, having a broad reach across these sites is essential to stay top of mind and drive awareness. This is one of the main reasons we launched the Builder Vertical Ad Network – to help builders maximize reach though a single point of contact with guaranteed results.

Second, advertisers should consider looking beyond just real estate websites when reaching their customers. If they didn’t, advertisers run the risk of ignoring potentially all conversion traffic from other sites (75% in our case). That’s the benefit of Be Back; it allows marketers to target the audience and not the website. This allows for a more efficient media spend while reaching your most valuable prospects especially as their online search takes them through sites ranging in scope from small builder websites to massive real estate search engines.

Below are a few interesting websites where you probably wouldn’t do a direct media buy, but have resulted in a click to lead conversion with BeBack. What’s even more interesting is that many times the ad will redirect to an area that has nothing to do with the market from which they shopped. For example the conversion off of OhioRunner.com came from a Philadelphia banner, meaning that consumer was likely looking for a home in Pennsylvania while still living in Ohio.

           

 

 

 

 

For more information about this blog post or BDX BeBack retargeting, contact Thane Tennison, Advertising Manager or contact your local  Representative.