Despite economic uncertainty this year, the real estate industry is booming.
According to Redfin, housing demand is 25% higher than it was before the pandemic. New home sales soared to a 14-year high, jumping 13.9% from June to July. Plus, the National Association of Realtors reported that home prices are up 8.5% from the year before.
Why? There are a few key reasons: urban dwellers are fleeing to less populated, more affordable areas now that they work remotely; millennials are reaching home-buying age and starting to invest in properties; and mortgage rates are dropping, allowing more people to shop for real estate or refinance their homes.
It’s no surprise, then, that we’ve seen a spike in engagement around real estate content. With increased real estate activity comes increased research about how to buy, rent, and develop properties.
For real estate advertisers, this means there are valuable opportunities to expand their reach and gain new customers. Yet, it also means competition is heating up. In order to most effectively reach their audiences, they’ll need to optimize their strategies with data-backed insights.
Specifically, they’ll need to know:
- What types of content are real estate audiences hungry for?
- How can I stay relevant and best address consumer needs in an increasingly saturated market?
To help you answer these questions, we pulled data from our network of 20,000 publishers, advertisers, and digital properties to reveal trends about how and when real estate customers consume content, which creative strategies they respond to, and how you can most effectively reach them with your campaigns.
Here’s what you need to know.
Readers Want to Know About Apartments, Development, and Rent
According to our data, three core real estate categories have seen noticeable spikes in engagement over the past 45 days:
- Apartments: 646% increase in pageviews
- Development: 323% increase in pageviews
- Rent: 197% increase in pageviews
Readership in these areas peaked in October, and those numbers could continue to grow as companies expect the current real estate boom to keep going for years. After all, younger millennials will soon enter the housing market and remote work will likely continue.
Additionally, as economic fluctuations and shutdowns cause people to save money, they’ll continue looking for better deals on rent, loan rates, and real estate investments. And they’ll need the right content and companies to help them.
Targeting Techniques to Reach Real Estate Consumers
Getting even more specific, let’s look at the biggest opportunities for real estate advertisers to target audiences across devices, content formats, days of the week, and times of the day.
These opportunities occur when there’s a low supply of content (spend %) but a high demand for that content (clickthrough rate).
Let’s take a look.
Launch Ads at the Beginning of the Week
The beginning of the week is the best time to reach real estate consumers — with the biggest opportunities happening on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. CTR spikes again on Friday, but spend is also high going into the weekend, so competition for attention is tight.
Reach Readers at 6 AM and 10 PM
Early morning and late night: that’s when readers are most engaged and the real estate ad market isn’t too saturated.
Specifically, 6 AM and 10 to 11 PM provide valuable windows of opportunities for real estate marketers to reach their target audiences. It’s probably best to avoid 11 AM and 5 PM, when CTR takes a big dip.
Distribute Campaigns Across Tablet Devices
Mobile gets all the fun, of course, but real estate advertisers are still sleeping on tablet devices, even though CTR is increasing across them. So, if there’s one thing to take away from this chart, it’s to save a bit of that mobile or desktop spend and try putting some of your budget towards tablet ads.
Invest in Video Ad Content
The gap between ad spend and CTR is most apparent when it comes to video content. Compared to text and photo ads, video ads provide the biggest opportunity for real estate marketers to enhance their engagement.
Optimize Your Bidding Process
Now that you know just how to target your real estate readers, it’s time to make sure your bidding technique is up to speed.
And don’t worry—it won’t be any headache. All it takes is a few key tweaks to start driving more value from your campaigns.
Our bidding best practices include:
- Start by casting a wide net with a high bid for the first week to gather data, and adjust from there.
- When CPAs are high, modify bids on individual sites before blocking specific publishers altogether.
- Pause ads if conversions are low on ads with 300-500 clicks.
- Increase bids by 25-50% on top-performing sites to increase competitiveness.
- Automate bids according to your goals and reader behaviors.
More on that last point. Automation can take a ton of legwork out of the bidding process—and help you find valuable opportunities you might’ve missed.
That’s where Smart Bid comes in. This tool takes the guesswork out of your bidding and enhances campaign performance by adjusting baseline bids after every impression.
This way, you know you’re only spending on ads that are most likely to drive conversions and pageviews. And you can stick to your budget and goals without manually changing bids every day.
Examples of Successful Real Estate Campaigns
Take inspiration from these real estate campaigns as you build and rework your own strategies for success.
360 Realtors Sees 100% Increase in Traffic
360 Realtors, the largest real estate consulting company in India, wanted to reach more prospective homebuyers online. So they targeted new readers based on their zip code, previous interactions, and similarities to current customers.
Ads drove users to a specific landing page where they could fill out a form and be contacted by a member of the 360 Realtors team for further information. As a result, the company saw a 100% increase in traffic and 48% increase in leads.
Square Yards Drives 50,000 Leads
Square Yards, a technology-based real estate brokerage company, wanted to generate new leads and conversions.
They used Smart Bid and retargeting techniques to engage previous site visitors and direct them to customized landing pages that addressed their localized needs.
The result? Square Yards increased their conversion rate by 15% and generated 50,000 new leads.
99Acres Increases Quality Leads Through Retargeting
Real estate portal 99Acres wasn’t driving enough quality traffic from Facebook and Google.
They launched a web ads campaign to reach engaged audiences and drive them to take action on their informative landing pages.
Compared to other traffic sources, these ads generated a 40% higher lead score, meaning they attracted and nurtured more qualified buyers.
99Acres’ campaign also accounted for 55% of all the brand’s leads and drove a 4% increase in lead volume per day.
Conclusion: Meet Real Estate Customers’ Needs with the Right Content
As the real estate market continues heating up, marketers need to be extra mindful of how they build campaigns and target their audiences.
With the right data and tactics at their fingertips, they can take advantage of valuable opportunities to reach engaged consumers and increase revenue.
The key, of course, is to understand real estate customers’ needs, interests, and behaviors, and so you can meet them with just the right messaging when it matters most.