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.
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Only 1c per page view in the Zip codes of your choice; get 'em while they're hot!
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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...
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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.
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@ 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.
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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.
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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!
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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?
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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.
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