If you work in this industry you hear it constantly – like a chant – “Real Estate is local. Real Estate is local.” No two housing markets are alike; trends in home values are local and demand for housing is localized. Even expertise is local; you do not want to hire a Seattle Realtor to sell your Manhattan loft and so it’s logical that advertising in the Real Estate game is most effective when it is – you guessed it – local.
Go Local with Showcase Ads
Zillow just launched Showcase Ads – local advertisements targeted at the ZIP code level. If you have a local business or service to promote this is the ad product for you. Showcase advertisers can purchase 25, 50, 75, or 100 % of ad placements in a given ZIP code. If you’re a Realtor whose farm spans a few ZIP codes your Showcase Ad can be targeted to buyers and sellers searching for homes in multiple ZIPs (and at a fraction of the cost of sending postcards.)
Pricing
Showcase Ads run for 30 days and are paid for per ZIP code targeted. Pricing varies from ZIP to ZIP depending on both the popularity of the ZIP code (number of visits on Zillow.com) and the value of the real estate there. For example, 25% of page views in my Seattle ZIP code (98103) gets me 13,000 impressions in 30 days and is priced at $136 whereas the 98244 ZIP (in a remote part of Washington state where I own some land) gets me <500 impressions and is priced at only $10. It’s simple to figure out what your ZIP code is going for; just create an ad and click through to “Step 2. Pick ZIPs.”
Get Creative
Showcase Ads offer advertisers the chance to get creative with the imagery and the content of their ad. An ad can include an image, a headline, two lines of text and a link. Unlike many ad products online, advertisers are allowed to include their phone number and e-mail address in their Showcase Ad.
An ad’s creative design plays a huge role in the attention it gets – so it’s important to experiment! Advertisers can change the design of their Showcase Ads at any point during the 30-day window and we show you the number of clicks your ad’s getting so you can work out which design has the biggest impact.
Easier than EZ.
Showcase Ads is Zillow’s second generation local ad product. It’s a re-branding and re-tooling of the successful EZ Ads product and so I’ll wrap up by explaining the transition from EZ to Showcase Ads. “Showcase” is more descriptive branding of the ads and it’s more logical branding for Zillow’s newspaper partners who are selling the ads through the phone to the papers’ classified ad customers. But more importantly, Showcase Ads are even easier to use than EZ Ads were. Customers gave us great feedback about EZ Ads and the most common thing we heard was “just make my ad show up on every page!” In response to that request, we devised the simpler 30-day pricing model of Showcase Ads.
To get started with Showcase Ads click this link.