Retargeting has been a buzzword for the past year or so, and for good reason. Retargeting is an effective tool to increase website conversions. Depending on your setup, it can often be an inexpensive marketing channel. So how would you use retargeting for real estate?

1. Listings

This idea has multiple benefits. First, you can use retargeting to promote your listings. This is an opportunity to really impress your clients! Showing them the impressions alone is enough to get them excited. Your data will likely show thousands of people who saw the ad for their home.

Don’t just stop at showing impressions, show the sites their home has been featured on as well. Powerful stuff!

An ancillary benefit is other potential sellers can see your ads on sites like NY Times, Realtor, USA Today, Forbes, CNN, Zillow, Trulia and more. Trust me, they’ll take note! It’s doubtful the agents they know or use are getting their client listings featured on high profile sites like that! Proof that you can attain exposure like this is something you can and should add to your listing presentations and marketing collateral.

2. Buyer Leads

I’m guessing one of the main reasons people visit your website is to search the MLS. A large percentage of those visits probably bail before you get their information.

Create banner ads that promote searching homes in your area. When they’re ready to resume their home search, chances are they’ll go back to your site and pony-up their information.

3. Seller Leads

If you really want to get smart, segment your visitors. For example, the visitors that view your Sell pages and do not initially convert can be retargeted separately.

Build ads with headlines such as What’s my Home Worth, Guaranteed Sell Programs, Free Market Analysis or downloadable white paper content and send them to landing pages specific to the ad.

4. Increase Visit-to-Lead Conversion Rate

The idea behind retargeting is to bring visitors back to your site in hopes of converting them. Show your retargeting ads to visitors that did not initially convert. Be sure to remove them from your retargeting list once they have become a lead. You don’t want angry customers do you?

Create specific landing pages for your ads. Keep the pages clean and include a form. Remember, these are visitors who already came to your site previously. If they returned because of your retargeting, they are more likely to convert. Make it easy for them to become a lead and restrict their navigation options. Fill out the form or bail!

5. Branding

One of the benefits that gets trickier to measure success is branding. Make sure your ads highlight your brand as well. Include your logo and even your website url written out. Seeing your advert over and over will beat them over the head with your brand. Retargeting is great for branding and makes it hard to forget you.

Do it Right

Use common sense with retargeting, it’s a great marketing tool but retargeting longer than 90 days can get flat out annoying. The more you test and the smarter your segmentation is, the better your results will be. Keep in mind that it takes time to build-up a large enough visitor pool before you start seeing traction. Use View-through Conversions as a key metric to gauge performance.

The value of retargeting is building brand awareness, segmenting visitors/leads for smarter marketing and converting more of your website traffic. Solid retargeting campaigns can deliver an impressive ROI.

How have you used retargeting for your real estate business?