Realtor.com unlocks website intent data to offer high performing marketing programs on Facebook and Google for their customers

Using Evocalize’s expertise and developer tools, Realtor.com® unlocked real-time behavioral insights from site searches and activity to extend the experience of connecting buyers and sellers with local agents to Facebook and Google.

The Challenge

Each month Realtor.com attracts millions of home buyers and sellers with the web’s largest inventory of homes for sale and a rich suite of search features. As site visitors search, sort, organize, and favorite listings to find their dream home, Realtor.com collects millions of insights that show real-time buyer and seller intent.

Realtor.com already used these intent signals to allow their users to reach in-market buyers and sellers on their website. However, recognizing that home buyers and sellers spent the majority of their time online on Facebook, Instagram, and Google, they began looking for ways to unlock their valuable intent signals in these and other non-endemic channels as well.

Realtor.com’s Product team had four main challenges to overcome to bring their innovative new solution to market.

• First, Realtor.com’s team needed to unlock the behavioral insights generated from site searches and other activities performed by users on their site, and build an infrastructure to scalably extend to more than 40,000 local markets across Facebook, Instagram, Google channels.
• Second, the data that powers the program changes often, so Realtor.com needed to keep programs constantly updated within Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Furthermore, marketing best practices are constantly changing so they wanted a way to test and iterate at a massive scale.
• Third, Realtor.com set out to give home shoppers a world-class experience with dynamic ad creative using video, 3D animation, images, and messaging that resonated with them.
• Finally, Realtor.com needed to ensure consistency in operation and delivery, so they needed advanced monitoring, error reporting, and retries at a large scale.

The Solution

Working closely with both Facebook and Realtor.com, Evocalize assembled the technical requirements needed to build and launch the product on top of the Evocalize Platform. With the timeline and roadmap in place, Evocalize and Realtor.com worked together to instrument and structure Realtor.com®’s behavioral insights into structured data for ingestion into the Evocalize platform. Then, Evocalize used their proprietary developer tools to link the activation of customized ad programs to Realtor.com®’s order and fulfillment processes.

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“Our new Market Reach product provides a powerful new way for the Real Estate Industry to use our high-intent, search-based behavioral insights to target active home shoppers on Facebook and Google. It also opened a new revenue stream for us. The Client Success team at Evocalize guided us through every step of the design processes of this program, and their technology allowed us to quickly and easily scale to tens of thousands of users.” - Deepak Thakral, SVP, Product

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Highlights

Exclusive Audiences

To help agents and brokers compete in their local markets, Realtor.com®’s behavioral data is used to target home buyers in real-time. Additionally, look-a-like audiences are used to extend the program’s reach to people similar to high-intent site searchers, helping local agents, teams, and brokerages find the right buyers and sellers earlier in the process.

Program Monitoring

To ensure every program runs successfully, Evocalize’s customer success team actively monitors the activation and fulfillment of thousands of programs. This service includes monitoring programs to ensure budget spending is pacing, any Facebook transient errors are automatically handled, ads are approved, and any technical issues are dealt with in a timely manner.

Best Practice Ad Creative

With over 20 years of industry knowledge, Realtor.com® has a keen understanding of what industry professionals need to grow their businesses. Evocalize translated their industry knowledge into multiple unique best practice programs (Blueprints). Two of these programs are highlighted below:

• Listing walk through video ad
  With the objective of promoting a single home listing, an ad is dynamically generated in real time using a video that automatically pulls in data from the listing description. It uses listing photos, animated 3D graphics, branding for the listing agent along with the brokerage data that agent represents to ensure legal compliance.
• Auto-rotation of ads
  ‍For agents and brokers with multiple listings this Blueprint demonstrates expertise, success, and credibility in the local market. It automatically showcases for-sale and sold properties in a carousel ad unit.

The Results

Local agents, brokers, and teams now have a way to market themselves and their listings to high-intent home shoppers in minutes.