Last night, after reading Zadvertising on Zillow.com at the Bloodhound Blog earlier in the day, we started a little experiment. We went ahead and created a Zillow account and signed up for EZ Ads.
I have to tell you, the Zillow EZ Ad interface is great – it is elegant and extremely simple to use. The only problem I found was that you cannot edit your zip codes once you place the ad (and if I am wrong, and you actually can edit zip codes, they need to make it easier and more intuitive). And I guess one other minor gripe would be the image upload – Zillow crunches your image and severely degrades the quality.
Anyway, we chose to trigger our advertisement in the 5 zip codes surrounding Lake Minnetonka here in the Twin Cities. If you are not familiar with Lake Minnetonka – it is a very large lake, just minutes from downtown Minneapolis. It is the most exclusive “neighborhood” in Minnesota and is home to industry barrons, CEO’s, and professional athletes.
We started our account off with a balance of $100. Zillow uses a very clever sales strategy with their EZ Ads – by advertising the cost as one (1) penny per impression, they make you feel like you are getting a great value and an awesome deal. In reality, one (1) penny per impression is actually a CPM of $10 ($10 per 1,000 impressions). A $10 CPM is a pretty steep rate when it comes to advertising on the Internet. LakePlace.com does not charge its advertisers close to $10 CPM, and our traffic is much more targeted…but, this is neither here nor there.
Our little experiment is going to track the success of this advertisement throughout the $100 spend and we will post our daily results here on the Pine Needle Lawn.
As we provide the numbers on our 1st day of Zadvertising – please keep in mind that we have not yet completed a 24 hour cycle and our EZ Ad is only showing in 5 zip codes.
Zillow EZ Ad Results – Day 1
91 impressions (of which at least 6 were me)
0 clicks
So that is it for day one. So far not much, but again, we did not expect to see much this early in the game. We will probably be tweaking this “campaign” as we get a little further into it. We plan to expand our zip code base in the next couple of days to see if has an impact on our results. Check back tomorrow to see how we are doing and how our Zillow EZ Ad is performing.
Now that you know what size your image is going to run, pre-scale to that size before you upload. They’ll probably still put the JPEG hammer down, but starting at the right pixel dimensions will give you better results.
When Zillow tells me its desired image sizes, I’ll make them public.
Hey Greg, thanks for stopping by.
I believe they want the image upload to be at 140×70. But like you said, they are going to “Crunch the K’s” no matter what you upload.
Thanks for trying EZAds, Dave. I’ll look forward to how the campaign does for you.
Thanks for stopping by Drew, we look forward to seeing the results too.
Hey Dave, Jason from Zillow here. I’m an engineer working on the image quality problem — it should be improved next week, and we’re looking for better long-term solutions. Thanks for trying EZAds out!
Thanks for the reply Jason – I must say, you guys are on top of your stuff.
[...] I have to mention that the folks at Zillow are also monitoring the results closely. Zillow, without a doubt, has the best evangelist and outreach team in the business. I am not sure what their final revenue model will be (I am a born skeptic), but they definitely stay on top of their stuff. As I stated yesterday, we are currently showing our ads in only five (5) zip codes and the campaign is barely a day and a half old. [...]
[...] We are now three days into our little Zillow EZ Ads experiment. Our total spend thus far has been $1.85 – out of our $100 pre-purchase.Here are the Zillow EZ Ads results – Day 3: [...]