Online home valuation and real estate marketing site Zillow is digging deeper into targeted advertising with the launch of new ad products that enable larger advertisers to reach a narrower and more specific set of consumers.
The company today released Zillow Home Direct Ads, which it says are patent-pending and aim to connect advertisers with homeowners who are on the verge of making major home-related purchases such as moving or updating the home they currently own.
Zillow compiles data on some 70 million homes in the United States and enables homeowners to claim their properties and make updates to the data that appears at the Web site. Homeowners and real estate agents can also flag homes that are for sale, and the company last week said that it would begin enabling bulk uploads of for-sale listings from brokerage companies. (See Inman News story.)
With the new advertising products, companies trying to reach homeowners will be able to target their ads by individual address or by home values. They can also target ads by certain characteristics such as families with children or families planning to move.
“What we’re offering advertisers is pinpoint accuracy on the purchasing intentions of homeowners, including the ability to forecast that they are highly likely to move or remodel well before they start the process,” said Greg Schwartz, Zillow’s vice president of ad sales.
“Our advertisers can target ads down to the specific address or home value, or learn other facts about the neighborhood and locality that will allow them to tailor ads directly to this audience,” he added. “As a result, advertisers are more successful, and the ads that Zillow users see on the site are immensely more meaningful and interesting to them.”
The company will continue to offer the self-service EZ Ads product, which is aimed at individual advertisers such as real estate agents who want to display ads in specific ZIP codes.
Zillow says that almost 90 percent of its site visitors own homes, and 71 percent plan to buy or sell real estate within the next two years.
The Seattle-based company launched in early 2006 and has raised $87 million in funding.
