Less than a week until Thanksgiving, 2020 just keeps steamrolling right on through. Covid is surging, my kids are learning virtually again, and we’re back to not going inside anyone’s home or letting anyone in ours. The good news is that I started putting up my Christmas decorations on November 1st and I’m pretty sure I can cajole my husband into buying our tree next weekend. Christmas is my favorite. Below I bring you some Christmas Thanksgiving cheer in the form of continued good housing news as well as a couple of exciting updates in the land of Google and Instagram.
HOUSING
The housing market keeps beating estimates and thriving amid the pandemic. It’s one consistently bright spot amid a sea of not-so-good news. This week delivered news that new home construction is surging in large part to single-family starts. And with this came a rise in home builder confidence for the 4th month in a row. In fact, life is so good in the building business that there are a couple of things that might hamper growth like limited skilled labor pools and land on which to build. However, I’m confident that those are hurdles that any builder will gladly work to overcome. All of this news is parallel with what we see in terms of website activity as compared to 2019.
Last week I discussed Spotify’s growth in the podcast ad space and this week, I’m sharing the news that Google has begun Beta testing audio ads in Youtube to take advantage of the people who are using youtube to stream music and to use in those home audio devices like the Google Home Max. Both venues are a great place to run top of funnel ad campaigns to drive brand awareness. Audio ads provide opportunities to diversify your ad platforms and audiences at relatively low costs, especially when compared to traditional audio media like radio.
This is news that I personally find extremely exciting as it’s a feature whose absence as always chafed me…keyword search ability. Until now, you could search people, locations, and hashtags but not key words. So if I wanted to find examples of new homes, I’d have to search for the ttag #newhomes. Not everyone uses hashtags, and certainly not everyone uses the hashtag you think they should when you run a search. But now, keyword searches have arrived and hopefully surfacing the content you want will be easier. This is helpful for builders too because now more of that content you work so hard to generate will be searchable and thus likely to surface more often for users. #wootwoot
Those are the highlights from this week’s reads. Our offices are closed next Friday and as such I will be taking the week off of the edit. If anything super compelling comes through, I’ll be sure and share it on Insta, Facebook and/or LinkedIn so make sure you’re following us across those channels. Have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Also tune in Monday, November 30th to Facebook Live for our latest installment of Homefiniti and Beyond.
