Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Yellow Pages Dead?

Borrell Assoc. just announced that they believe that the Yellow Pages are all but dead.

Over the next five years, we are expecting 39% of the ad spending on print yellow pages to vanish.  After 12 years as an advertising medium, the Internet has finally reached small-business owners with viable marketing opportunities in the form of keyword advertising, interactive directories and low-priced online video commercials.  The recession appears to be triggering the shift.  Click here to download an executive summary or the full report.

Interestingly, they say that by 2012 streaming video advertising will surpass all other formats, including banners and paid search.  The report includes local online spending estimates for search advertising and streaming video for 210 markets.

Google Adwords for Real Estate

The mystery around Google stems from it behaving like an evolving,  living breathing organism.

And this organism spins baby.

For years they have spun their positioning algo into a multitude of layers of complexity. Making it impossible for mere humans to get into a top search engine position.

Along comes AdWords (their money Enterprise) and the mystery has continued. They constantly keep their methods shrouded with their eye on profit:

"Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign's reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists," Google's email reads. "For example, if you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as 'shoes,' 'adidas,' 'athletic,' etc., and less obvious ones such as 'slippers' that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion your site."

In other words, Google will automatically take the money an advertiser isn't spending and spend it on searches the advertiser hasn't explicitly approved. For the average advertiser, this is not a good idea....."They're offering you the exciting opportunity to bleed every penny of your budget every day, advertising against keywords that you didn't want to bid on," says Dan Thies an Adwords expert.

It makes sense for Google to keep the animal complex as the profiteers would easily game the system. As an example click arbitrage is a real problem as marketers buy ads on one engine for pennies and send the visitors over to a page with Google Adsense that pays several pennies or dollars more.

This tension between market and Engine,will no doubt stay with us a long time.

Real Estate Advertising

Total real estate ad spending has dropped 3 % so far this year, while spending on the online segment has grown 25.8%, hitting $2.6 billion. Borrell projects online real estate advertising to grow at 12.4% next year while total real estate advertising continues to compress. The report forcasts that agents and brokers will be spending more ad dollars with online media than with the newspaper within as little as three years.

Meanwhile....

Younger Online News Consumers are Not Newspaper Readers

A new comScore, study of the differences in online behavior among heavy, medium, light and non-newspaper readers showed that non-newspaper readers are likely to be younger, but are actually heavier than average online news consumers. Meanwhile, heavy newspaper readers are more likely than average to engage with traditional print news brands online.

Those age 65 and older are nearly 3 times more likely than average to read the print edition of newspapers 6 times per week, while those age 18-24 are 38 percent more likely than average to not read a print newspaper at all during a typical week.

1 home sold every 2.5 days

Iowas #1 Real Estate Agent

Find out more killer real estate marketing tricks. Or turn to the next page for his video sales tips and notes...

Newspaper Advertising

What is Saving Offline Advertising? Online....

Newspaper Association of America show that advertising expenditures for newspaper Web sites increased by 21.1 % to $773 million in the 3rd quarter versus the same period a year ago. This is the 14th straight quarter of double digit growth for online newspaper advertising since 2004.

Although,total print ads spends in newspapers are down 9% year over year.

Last quarter classified ads fell 17% and Real estate advertising fell 24.4% to $1 billion   

NAA President and CEO, John F. Sturm, blames the economy for the declines:

"Newspaper Web sites continue to generate substantial revenue by offering advertisers access to the nation's most desirable group of consumers... (while) broader economic issues are (negatively) impacting... real estate, recruitment and retail advertising..."

Umm Real Estate was not always slowing and in case you have not noticed unemployment is at record levels and retail sales keep breaking records. Listen closely and you might just hear the last gasp before the door slams shut on the old media. Can you recall this kind of lame spin coming from this space.... ever?

Advertising

This fits very much with my last post.

Borrell Associates expect newspaper advertising revenue to drop more than 6%. This they say will decline by 16% in 2009 and 13% in 2010 as consumers go online for their CONTENT. The real estate advertising market is expected to show strong growth online through 2012. Online real estate ads will grow from $2.6 billion in 2007 to $3.5 billion in 2012. The online real estate ads will surpass newspapers by 2012.

Additionally, it seems old habits are hard to break as Classified Intelligence LLC and media company Realty Times revealed recently that real estate professionals still devote more advertising dollars to newspaper print ads vs. online ads at newspaper Web sites.

More Reasons To Tear Down Those Walls

Recently I posted an article declaring everyone a liar. The premise was that people are becoming so distrustful of everyone because of the deluge of ads we get and the fact that we are by our nature not trustworthy. It is best to let your website or blog be transparent.

Since writing the post where I reported that roughly 25% of us are willingly and openly petty thieves, I found another article at FastCompany that says we are regularly dishonest.

In a recent survey of 40,000 Americans, 93% admitted to lying "regularly and habitually in the workplace." ."

Death of a Salesman

If you have not noticed, traditional advertising is dying.

We get hit with thousands of messages a day, so it is easy to understand why we just zone out. We kind of TIVO all the ads away.

Our trust of Authority is at an all time low. Not only do we not trust advertisers, we do not trust our leaders. Just when you can feel bad for President Bush's ratings which are 24% for his handling of Iraq while Congress hit an all time low of 3%.(Zogby)

Wow! So who can we trust if not our elected leaders (dim your laughter please)? Certainly a priest. Nope. They get just a trustworthiness of 6.9.  (scale 1 to 10 by Univ Mass study). It gets worse. Teachers are only 7.3%. It was only ten years ago that they were at 9.0 and 9.2 respectively.

So who do we trust?

Ad Dollars from Blogging

The Contextual Advertising firm, Chitika just released a study whereby they have estimated that that $500 million was generated within the top 50,000 blogs in 2006.

Google Basing the MLS II

Well it seems that as soon as I posted my mls.google.com story about Google Base, I started seeing similar takes in the real estate industry and elsewhere.

Blogs are that way aren't they? Topics often firing off simutaneously.

I saw references in Inman News as well as off-real estate blog marketing sites.

GoodRoI actually pointed out how the results seem to be showing up in the regular SERPS ( Search Engine Ranking Position). Perhaps a beta test of some kind.

GoogdROI references a poster over at Webmasterworld as having said that this is going to be a mess as every Realtor massively uploads their MLS listings and the rest of the MLS. This will cause a massive duplicate content problem. Not to mention all the vendors will get into the game of uploading your listings as a service.

Why would they do that? So they can get the traffic back to their site thats why. One poster actually brought out a brilliant point.

Drumat5280 said:

Google Base scares me.

I can handle competition from other sites, but competition from Google itself scares me in the classified ad market.

I am sure Craigslist and Monster are also starting to get scared.

This actually could be interpreted as a shot across the bow of agents trying to get Natural search results. If the bulk of the results are Google Base for real estate, then agents will have no choice but to pay for clicks.

This shows that results in natural search can come from, not only natural SERPS, but Local Search and perhaps Google Base. Oy Vey!