webqem blog

Realestate.com.au has been making headlines and going from strength to strength this year. Whilst we’d like to ascribe this solely to our great online ad creative, we suspected there might be a few more factors at work. We fired a few questions at Kelly Millar, Marketing & Communications Manager, to get the low down…

realestate.com.au has had a great year in UV growth, what do you put that down to?

Yes we have had exceptional growth this year with our total UB’s just reaching a staggering 2.3 million in October! Furthermore, our gap over our nearest competitor Domain is now 1 million UB’s which puts us in a very strong leadership position.

We attribute our recent growth to the continuation of a strong marketing campaign this year, including SEO and paid search activity, offline brand activity, increased online display advertising and targeted micro-marketing via the realestate.com.au Property Guide. The significant marketing investment in the brand in the last 18 months is certainly paying dividends.

In the past 6 months you have redeployed some significant marketing funds towards the online medium. What is the reasoning behind the growth in online expenditure?

To date we have successfully built awareness of the realestate.com.au brand in key markets predominantly via mainstream offline advertising, with online activity focussed on SEO and paid search.

With the increasing use of the Internet amongst Australian consumers, especially the growing penetration of broadband, online is an increasingly important medium, particularly in the online classifieds category. For the real estate industry, the medium has incredible advantages over print, in that it enables consumers the ability to dynamically filter their searches for property according to their individual needs.

As an advertising medium we have seen more and more advertisers shift their spend to online, for both brand and response-based communications. Online allows us to maximise our reach nationally in an extremely cost effective manner. Moreover since online is a highly measurable and targeted medium, it has allowed us to continually evolve our marketing mix to maximise the effectiveness of brand and product specific messages over the last 6 months.

Having advertised online for 6 months now, will you continue with this strategy?

Our plan is to continue to invest in online display advertising, as well as SEO and paid search. In the coming months we are particularly interested in looking at new opportunities to promote the realestate.com.au brand, beyond traditional banner/display advertising.

Just as we constantly evolve our site, and the product offerings, so too we are aiming to maintain the cut-through and relevance of our online advertising, in an ever changing media landscape.