Trulia Goes Pro
Trulia continues on its quest for revenue by adding Trulia Pro today – a new ad platform for agents looking to create a quick and easy ad for themselves on Trulia’s search pages.
The package (which runs $39 a month) gives you unlimited “Feature Listings” (meaning participants get their listings floated to the top of the search results) and unlimited Local Spotlight Ads – Trulia’s new take on self-service ad concept.
Trulia CEO Pete Flint gave me a demo of the system recently and it looked pretty straightforward. Ads are easy enough to create (in fact, if you have a profile on Trulia already it’ll prepopulate the ad with your photo). You can add a tagline and a URL to your web site or blog (no-follow’d, natch).
When buying your ads you can pick to have them run in zip codes, neighborhood or cities. You can choose up to 20 locations when checking out (and change them later on if you want to tweak the campaign). Ads show up on Trulia’s search results pages, mid way down the right column.
Nothing terribly new here; Zillow already has its EZ Ads pay-as-you-go platform and Realtor.com has long offered up geographic regions to own. Trulia’s twist is they are offering unlimited impressions – so you’re not paying for a set amount of views. They’re throwing all the pageviews into a bucket and divvying them up according to how many people are wanting to be there.
(It is proportional however, meaning those who have fewer locations overall get more impressions in the areas they have chosen to mark.)
Flint made a good point when I spoke with him that fortune will favor the early adopters – the more people piling into the mix later on means the fewer impressions go around. If you get in early, right now you can own a city – for a while at least. Portland Real Estate is up for grabs, for example.
And Trulia is definitely trying to goose this out of the gates and poach some ad dollars from from their competitors by offering a Trulia Pro promo for the first three months free for current EZ Ad or Realtor.com advertisers.
My biggest concern with the ads however, is the placement on the page is poor so I doubt it draw many eyeballs beyond the initial curiosity phase. Past that, I’m also not sure how many home buyers will actually click through on any of the ads, making the ROI questionable in the long run even with the low monthly costs.
It’ll be interesting to see and hear what people’s experiences are running Local Spotlight ads. And, for that matter, any of the other self-service ad platforms that exist out there already.
14 Comment(s)
2 Trackback(s)
- From Advertise on Trulia with Trulia Pro | Jun 18, 2008
- From Trulia adds a Spotlight ads and lowers… « 4realz.net | Jun 19, 2008
Erik | Jun 18, 2008 | Reply
Seems like this is the perfect opportunity for a bidding engine (once there are enough ad buyers in a region). Have it transparent too, where you can see the “going rate” for a zip code, county or city and decide to bid it up or down for the next month.
What I think every ad buyer wants though is a one-stop-shop for their real estate ads. Who is going to be the nexus that allows you to buy across the networks? It's a real drag on agents/brokers already stretched time to have to manage 3-5 different site's ads. All with different requirements…
Agent21 | Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
For $40 a month, do they turn off the no follow? Otherwise an agent is paying to create relevance for Trulia, not their own branding.
Nozmo | Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
Agents just don't think! For years Realtor.com has been ripping them off with services that are overpriced and under performing. Who really didn't think that eventually Trulia would be charging for similar services. Agents should devote their money and resources to their own sites rather than lining the pockets of online interlopers.
Andrew Hillman | Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
Placement of ads is poor and I also feel the click through rate will be low The Trulia Result pages have too much going on. They need to remove the map widgets. Personally, I like a clean interface.
David G | Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
It seems Joel forgot to link to EZ Ads on Zillow. Here it is: http://www.zillow.com/ezads/GetStarted.htm
Only 1c per page view in the Zip codes of your choice; get 'em while they're hot!
jimlee | Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
Sounds good but how do you quantify the results (if any)?
Joel Burslem | Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
Noted! I'll update the post David – thanks.
Adam | Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
We've been utilizing Trulia Pro for several weeks now, and I must say that the results have been solid, although not stellar. Every week, Trulia provides the number of views that each listing received. They used to provide the number of clicks each ad received, but that's disappeared for some reason.
For $40/month, this is a tough package to beat. Trulia impressions are much more targeted than Google/Yahoo ads, so we feel its money well spent for the moment.
trulia | Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
@ Joel – As with everything we do, we will monitor the new release and learn from it's effectiveness. Ad placement one of the things we're monitoring.
@ Erik – Interesting thoughts. On some level, larger advertisers can already reach across multiple networks w/ our Trulia Ad Network. Trulia Pro is about simplicity and relevancy. We'll tweak where appropriate to give our advertisers the most value.
@ agent 21 – The link on the Trulia Spotlight Ad is meant to drive traffic to the website or blog of your choice, not juice. If an agent wants that, they can get that from our profile page where they can point up to 5 naked links to the site of their choosing. Additionally, if they have listings, all their listings on their profile page have no follows.
The Trulia Profile page is a great place for agents to give consumers a glimpse of who they are and what they're all about.
@ nozmo – we believe we are providing a tremendous amount of value with our new offering. See Maureen's post as she has some fantastic perspective on Trulia Pro – http://agentgenius.com/?p=2206
@ Andrew – Good feedback. We will analyze everything we do. So as we get more feedback, we'll tweak if as necessary.
@ jimlee – You will be able to see the views in your dashboard which will help you monitor which ad copy and geography is working best for you. Early adopters will see a tremendous benefit as they will see the most impressions, which are unlimited – no pay per impression.
josephbr | Jun 20, 2008 | Reply
Doesn't anyone think it is frustrating to have to pay to advertise on listings that you have already acquired? Not sure that Trulia's ads will generate a substantial ROI for real estate professionals. This is targeting interuption marketing that the user of Trulia (who is searching for listings) will want information from a particular agent base on a picture.
While the others (Zillow & Realtor) also have engines in our testing we didn't show them to be as profitable as good old fashioned Adwords.
Hawaii_Real_Estate | Jun 25, 2008 | Reply
@ josephbr – Are you saying that once you secure the listings you don't think it's your job, as an agent, to advertise that listing?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You got it all backwards, brah! You have the listing and it's your responsibility to advertise it. Sure, you can post your listing on Zillow and Trulia for free, but if you want the extra exposure, you have to pay for it.
Haven't you paid to advertise your listing in a magazine before? Well guess what, people don't look at home magazines and books anymore. The latest NAR study done in November 2007 shows that 1% of home buyers found their property through a real estate magazine or book while 29% found it on the Internet. So it's the home buyer who is dictating this shift in our industry, and now, if you want to be a successful agent, you have to advertise your listings on the web.
I'm gonna see what I can grab in Hawaii right now!
MissSuperFiscal | Jun 26, 2008 | Reply
If I were an agent my question would be “Why do consumers go to Trulia.com?”
I would agree that a real-estate specific website with geographic targeting would have better results than Google or Yahoo keywords; but are the consumers interested?
As far as I understand Trulia is selling itself as a search engine on infinity for home buyers and sellers. Yet for real estate agents it has another meaning, a way to advertise their services.
As said on their Advertise page 70% of their users don't yet have agents (how that number was founded I'm not sure), which sounds like a pretty sweet deal. But do any of those home-buying customers use Trulia to find agents, or are the agent ads just an interruption on the sidelines to finding your dream home?
Buying Florida Property | Jul 5, 2008 | Reply
Our experience is 100% in line with that of Hawaii Real Estate above – “people don't look at home magazines” – at least, in our part of the world. Like many local real estate people, we have given up on print advertising entirely, because the return over the last couple of years has declined to almost zero.
On the other hand, Joel's comment “Nothing terribly new here” sums it up for me: Trulia's new offering looks perfectly ok, but is it sufficiently differentiated from other offerings to make it worthwhile? Time will tell, I guess, but it doesn't look like a “must have” to us right now.
romana | Jul 14, 2008 | Reply
i agree with you, early adopters will gain more from this service. i have a question though – all these popular RE websites offer services only in US, but there are many real estate professionals, for example in Mexico, who'd like to target US market with their vacation homes or second homes, but the system doesn't enable uploading properties from US; even their search engines enable only search in US cities and by US zipcodes… are you familiar with any website which enables realtors from other countries to join in? thanks!