Digital marketing is a key component of a homebuilders marketing strategy, and yet it can be extremely daunting to decide which platforms to advertise on, let alone, which types of ad products you should be taking advantage of within each platform. And once you launch your efforts, how do you even know if it’s performing well? At the end of the day, builders want people to buy their homes and that is the best gauge of marketing success. But the beauty of digital marketing, is that if done properly, you can directly correlate a digital ad to a lead.
Below we will outline what the ONeil Interactive Second Quarter Home Builder Benchmarks are for Facebook and Google and how they compare to the industry average. We will also outline how we achieve these results.
TRACKING AND OPTIMIZATION
Through the use of Google Tag Manager and the Facebook Pixel, we set up goals to track how people use our clients sites and when they reach out to contact the builder and become a lead. By tracking these goals, we cannot only show the efficacy of various digital marketing efforts, we can also use that data to influence and improve the targeting of the digital ads on Facebook and Google. This helps us achieve much higher results than the industry average as outlined below.
CTR FACEBOOK ADS 2nd QUARTER 2019
CTR stands for Click Through Rate. A Click Through Rate is the number of people who click on an ad divided by the number of people who saw the ad (impressions).
The ONeil customer average CTR for Home Builders in the second quarter of 2019 is 3.86%, down 7% from the 4.14% CTR that ONeil Clients saw in the first quarter of 2019. This number is up 6% from the second quarter of 2018.
The Real Estate average CTR on Facebook is .99%, we outperformed that number by almost 4X’s in the second quarter.
How did we achieve these results? Through the use of our proprietary Follow retargeting ads, conversion targeting with the Facebook pixel, and the implementation of specific goals on our clients websites, we are able to more accurately target likely home buyers. By guiding Facebook’s algorithm with the engagement indicators on the site, and aligning the ad copy and creative with useful information on the website, ONeil delivers an ad product that encourages the right people to see the ad, click on it and convert.
CTR GOOGLE ADS 2nd QUARTER 2019
The marketing team at ONeil has discovered that through the use of conversion tracking and by zeroing in on a strong keyword list, we have been able to stay competitive and well above the overall average CTR for both search (.46%) and display (3.17%) with modest budgets.
The ONeil customer average for search CTR is 5.51% for the second quarter. This is up .6% from first quarter results which were 5.47%. Second quarter CTRs for search are down 4.5% from the second quarter of 2018.
Google Display CTRs for ONeil clients for the second quarter of 2019 was .65% which is down 8% from first quarter’s CTR’s for display which were .59%. The second quarter display CTRs are also down from the second quarter of 2018 by 13%.
Why the decline? The Google Ads space is extremely competitive in the housing market because of players like Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin.com and top national builders who dominate search results and have extremely large advertising budgets.
BOTTOM LINE
To stay competitive, drive leads, and spend money wisely on digital marketing, it is imperative to take a holistic approach and make sure that your website is set up to not only put your best foot forward, but to also track and capture leads.
We’ll be sharing these trends quarterly so be sure and subscribe to our blog for future updates.
