Portals are at a point where their real estate is cluttered with featured, branded and promoted listings, so they have to innovate and look off-site to utilise their audiences better. With users spending 3 hours daily on social media and 70% visiting it daily, bridging the gap between their audiences and the greater online audience is the way forward.
Why retargeting works
Our answer is retargeting – tracking users who have visited your portal and finding them on social media. It’s done by securely tracking their browser data or passing around first-party data and matching them. This aids portals in finding them where they are and serving them relevant, targeted ads based on their behaviour that drive them back to the portal. Though retargeting is the mechanism, the key to success is how you package the content.
Off-site ads are a must have
Off-site ads offer a powerful way for portals to retarget high-intent buyers who have already expressed interest through their platform. The ads reach potential buyers on social media feeds, creating a more organic and personalised experience. By attracting users to click on these off-site ads, portals can direct them back to their sites, with a significantly higher chance of conversion into a sale. The result is an improved user experience for buyers, a high-quality audience for sellers, and increased revenue opportunities for the portal.
Retargeting success stories
Several portals are doing this successfully. Homely is the 3rd-largest property portal in Australia, and they offer a retargeting tool called Promoter. Agents using the tool see 5x growth on listing views without touching the inventory on the site. REA in Australia has been extending its audience data for a while now, and we estimate that it’s a $10 million-a-year business for them, at the very least.
The cars.com automotive marketplace in the US showed an 8% increase in ARPD (average revenue per dealer) in a year by maximising ROI on active car shoppers, giving users access to cars.com’s exclusive audience with their Fuel product. They use their retargeted audience data to target local shoppers actively looking for vehicles via relevant off-site ads.
In South Africa, Prop Data is the dominant CRM provider. They’ve launched a product that automates the extension of sole mandate listings onto social platforms, driving traffic back to real estate agency sites.
How to generate recurring revenue from retargeting and off-site ads
The best way to commercialise these products is via a subscription business with a complete set-and-forget format. It’s sold once by the sales team plugged into the portal and continues running without further intervention. Creating packages within the product allows portals to focus on the areas where they need improved traffic – promoting listings going on sale in a particular week, sole mandates or even stale listings that have slipped off the front page.
By bundling retargeting tolls into their commercial model, portals can generate recurring revenue and access parts of agent wallets previously reserved for other aspects. It’s a novel, sticky product, and there’s plenty of demand from agencies who see the value of going off-site but don’t have the capacity or capability.
Products like those offered by Flow are about offering automation to operate at scale, running thousands of small campaigns with the set-and-forget opportunity that allows agents to focus on building relationships instead of figuring out algorithms.