One of the most remarkable things about the growth of online real estate websites is that the majority of the visitors represent an ideal demographic. They earn more money with average median income of $60,000+, and they have homes with a value of at least $200,000.  This represents a fantastic opportunity for real estate websites and capturing these visitors has become a major source of ad spending.

Online real estate ad spending will reach 1.8 billion this year alone, which equals approximately 15% of the projected 11.7 billion in total real estate ad spending. More interestingly however, is the speculation that these figures should more than double by 2010. As more attention is paid to online demographics, much of the money that will flow into real estate advertising will be shifted away from traditional outlets such as newspaper classified advertising and into online avenues. . Real estate classified ads are down about 8% this year. By 2010, newspapers will count for only 30% of the real estate ad spend (2.9 billion), which will equal less than the online advertising spend. 

Online ads offer much more investment opportunity then traditional formats.  A single online ad can be tracked through to the single click of a single user, thus making tracking both effective and efficient.  The end result is the ability to tailor an advertising campaign to a market that can be authored based on substantial real world information.  The online ad medium offers real estate websites an opportunity to effectively track their ROI by pricing their traffic and by actual leads and not only distribution. This is a very efficient way to monitor how successful a particular ad campaign is.

Search Engines:
Search engine use is quickly becoming a powerful source of traffic.  22% percent of visits to real estate websites were referred through search engines. Further, about 5.5 percent of individuals who leave a real estate website go to a search engine as their next online destinations. This makes having a search engine friendly site; one that is capable of climbing the rankings vitally important. There was a time when search could be ignored but today, search must be taken very seriously. 

Being indexed by a search engine; simply showing up in their rankings is not enough. To have a performance real estate website, it must be configured properly to allow it to rise quickly through the ranks.  Effective search engine optimization or SEO is now a critical component of real estate websites.  Traffic drops off substantially after the first result of the main page search listing.  In other words, the first page of search listings garner more attention then any or all subsequent pages combined.  Even on the first page of search results, the traffic distribution is uneven.  It is estimated that the second paid listing receives 40% less traffic than the main listing however, after that point the decrease gets less dramatic losing online 5%-10% of traffic all the way down to the 10th listing.

It follows logically: if traffic consists of a specific and sought after demographic, and if more and more website leads are converting sales, then having a site which brings in traffic through high search listings makes sense. Search engine optimization is, without a doubt, going to be the fasted growing segment of real estate website expenditure. To learn more about search engine optimization visit the following link:

http://www.paperclipcms.com/content/realestatepromotions.aspx

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