BANG reports its self-serve RE portal beats digital competitor at its own game

Company: Bay Area News Group (BANG)

Initiative: LeadHax self-serve real estate portal

Technology: iPublish Media Solutions

Editor´s note:  We originally covered BANG´s launch of Leadhax, a self-serve real estate portal developed by iPublish Media Solutions in 2017. Since then, the initiative has grown and improved, adding  retargeting and Facebook advertising to programmatic options, and creating an enterprise edition for brokerages. The results have been outstanding. BANG reports that each sale leads to the purchase on average of two other products; advertisers renew at the rate of 50%, and click-through rates are 3 times those of the local digital marketing competitor, Adwerx. Here is how they did it. 

Challenge: In 2017, the Bay Area News Group (BANG) started losing market share in the real estate category to AdWerx, a digital marketing firm that sold programmatic ads in addition to Zillow, Trulia and other platforms using a search-based model. Traditionally BANG sold their print ad products through the local national broker offices, but it became clear that agents themselves were buying directly on self-serve platforms.

Adding to the challenge, these agents and brokers no longer even wanted to meet with the newspaper sales representatives or discuss print advertising.

BANG decided that what they needed  was their own all-digital self-serve solution that would appeal to agents as well as brokers. They knew they could leverage traffic and search authority, but thought  a programmatic solution that maximized reach to hyperlocal targets would sell more easily. They also wanted to create a new digital-first brand that would help them secure appointments more easily.

Strategy: They turned to iPublish Media Solutions (formerly Wave2 Media Solutions), the leaders in self-serve advertising, to help develop a custom platform. iPublish had already installed AdPortal Real Estate, which automates the pagination and sales of real estate print ads worth millions in over 50 markets. This initiative had reduced time and effort to produce their Open House section from hours to minutes. 

Now iPublish  was charged with building a solution to meet BANG´s key goal—a completely self-serve programmatic advertising solution for Real Estate that was simple, powerful and affordable with attractive margins.

BANG called the new brand LeadHax to express the core benefit: tech-smart delivery of leads for both home sales and listings. Rather than merely selling the newspaper´s owned and operated website audience, the platform relied on programmatic to populate the hyper-targeted demographic and geographic audience that agents demanded.

In the beginning, four campaign packages were offered. Agents first choose whether to advertise a home or their own listing services. An automated tool populates and builds three digital display ads with information from the MLS. Finally, the agents are asked to choose between a two-week or four-week campaign, type in a click thru URL, a zip code for where they want their ads geo-targeted, and then purchase.

The design is a simple point and click process, so they are finished in minutes. 

A lot of technology, however, is going on behind the scenes. First, the MLS data includes both listings from ListHub, an aggregator of nationwide MLS, and the local MLS that BANG accesses through different partnerships and agreements. AdPortal normalizes and aggregates all these data sources into a single hub so agents can quickly find the listing they’re looking for.

The integration with a powerful DSP, where campaigns are booked and launched, takes less than a minute to target an audience within a 15-mile radius of the listing location. 

The programmatic inventory is automatically purchased via real time bidding on multiple programmatic partners, utilizing 30 real estate data segments. As results come in for the campaigns, LeadHax emails the agent with a link to view the campaign results, as well as modify an existing campaign and/or reorder.

Early results

showed that 70% of ads were served above the fold; with click-through rates approaching 1%. All of this revenue was new, most of it coming from agents and brokers who were not doing business with BANG at the time. In short, the new revenue stream created was beyond the scope of a newspaper’s mainstream products.

30 months later

As the team at BANG grew their relationships with agents and brokers, they continually worked with iPublish to evolve the LeadHax platform to meet agents’ and brokers’ growing needs. 

Key improvements included seller retargeting. BANG identified that this feature was helping competitors secure more business, so iPublish added this as an automatic feature. 

Today every LeadHax sale generates a retargeting pixel which is made available for placement on the Realtor´s website. The pixel re-targets website visitors with the ad, even when they are on their mobile phones and within a 15-mile radius of the agent’s office or listing address. 

The second major upgrade included adding Facebook targeted ad packages, a key request from real estate agents. 

Finally, BANG realized that the brokerages also wanted help differentiating themselves to attract more and better agents. So iPublish created LeadHax Pro Enterprise, a white-label version of LeadHax that brokerages can license. BANG created a strategy for the broker to pay for the first week of agent advertising for all new listings. LeadHax automatically emails the campaign results from the first week to the agent and asks if they would like to renew for four or eight weeks. The agent benefits from the first week of “free” advertising for every new listing, as well access to this turnkey marketing resource, which has become a significant differentiator in the fierce competition to recruit good agents. It also proved that agents were willing renew the existing ads so that they continue to run.

 The uptake rate by agents after the first week of free advertising is 50%. Agents  say they renew the packages for two main reasons: First, the platform is easy to use. Since the ads are already built and targeted, it only takes a few clicks to renew the ad. Second, the results are good. The average targeted ad click-through-rate on LeadHax drives 3 times more clickthroughs than AdWerx, for the same level of investment. In fact, LeadHax Pro  - the entriprise edition . is the fastest growing segment of LeadHax revenue as of October 2019.

Below is one of the promotions that shows Leadhax as a competitor to other digital options. 

One of the big surprises of the new digital only program is that print and O&O digital revenues from BANG’s other AdPortal Real Estate site went up as well. 

BANG  found that each one buy led to an average of 3 product sales.  That is, when a customer places a LeadHax order, they will likely purchase 2 additional ad products—another digital campaign, a social campaign, a print campaign. Since sales reps were able to secure appointments, they forged new and deeper relationships with their agents and brokers which drove multi-product sales.

LeadHax’s consistent ability to outperform AdWerx now gives BANG’s sales force a powerful story when initiating relationships with new agents and brokers.