by threshold | Jun 1, 2021 | Creative, Design, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Written by Chelsea Friel, Graphic Designer
Designing with accessibility at the forefront has never been more important, but it can be daunting to determine whether or not your website is in compliance with regulations. In 2020 alone, over 3500 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed, including federal and state ADA lawsuits, and an estimated 56 million people in the U.S. are currently living with a disability. As we look to expand our services in the real estate and housing market, it’s paramount that we keep accessibility top of mind in our work. The goal is to improve our practices to make our designs as accessible as possible for the widest audience, and to make usability as high a priority as visual appeal.
What Does Web Accessibility Look Like?
To be frank, the word “compliance” doesn’t exactly bring to mind a font of creative flights of fancy. It usually summons images of black Arial text neatly organized on a white background, which is fine for doing your taxes but less than ideal for promoting your sparkling new multifamily property. In truth, adhering to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG, from here on out) is pretty easy to incorporate alongside our existing design practices. WCAG ratings are ranked from A to AAA, in a sort of “good, better, best” system. If A is the rank for a solidly usable website, then AAA is the gold standard of accessibility.
Similarly to how we build successful brands that thrive in the wild, the process of establishing an accessible web presence requires some collaboration between designers, copywriters, and developers. By keeping a few helpful guidelines in mind, each team’s work contributes to a fully accessible real estate website that anyone can (and will want to) use, regardless of their level of ability.
A Helpful Guide for Accessible Design
Contrast
When establishing a color palette, high contrast is critical for usability. When considering moderate to severe visual impairment, the ideal contrast ratio is between 1 to 3 and 1 to 4.5, depending on the size and the boldness of the text. The larger and thicker the characters, the lower the ratio can be while maintaining legibility to the eye, or to a screen reader. Any important copy should be designed with the highest contrast possible to ensure greater visibility for users.
Chrome extensions such as Spectrum can help you determine how user-friendly your website is by showing you alternate versions of your website based on various visual abilities.
Alternate Indicators
On the topic of visual acuity, consider using alternate methods of establishing a hierarchy of content apart from color changes. If a piece of text changes color when a user hovers, the addition of a line under the text serves as an additional cue that the copy can be clicked or is interactive in some way. Other visual indicators can be icons, boxes, or typeface changes (such as semibold to bold or black) to indicate to the user that they’re on the right track.
Charts and graphs can also present a challenge. Apart from using distinct colors to designate a data set, one solution is to incorporate texture or patterns into the design to further differentiate the information presented to the user. Trello has a plugin that can convert graphs using color blindness–friendly patterns to help aid legibility for all users, while maintaining the overall look and feel of the design.
Alt Text & ARIA Labels
Used to describe an image when it is unavailable to the user, alt text and ARIA labels should provide as much detail as possible. Describe what’s happening in the image instead of opting for the file name or a bland categorization of the subject like “man” or “house.” For folks who use screen readers to navigate websites, this attention to image descriptions provides a much clearer idea of what is in the design and what the website is trying to convey. This can be a key factor in whether or not they pursue your property further, depending on how well you describe the photo of the premises or the neighborhood using these tags and labels.
Content and Type Hierarchy
When writing copy for a website, simpler is better. Important messages should be short and to the point, while conveying all of the essential information a user needs to know right off the bat. WCAG recommends limiting a line of text to 80 characters or fewer, and to avoid writing overly complicated or lengthy sentences. Designers and copywriters should work in tandem to draft copy that looks beautiful in the design, excites the user with its content, and can be read by as many people as possible, regardless of the tools they use to view the website.
UI and Navigation
Users of varying abilities frequently use keyboard navigation to explore websites, and care should be taken to establish a logical flow of information. Good design is obvious, and a user shouldn’t have to spend time deciphering how to move through a website to find what they need. Clean focus states, clear and easy-to-remedy error states, and concise links makes a site more accessible to all, and provides a better user experience across the board.
Designing for Everyone
Accessibility should always be as high a priority as creating a beautiful design. A visually stunning website that can only be accessed by half of our users is ultimately a design failure, and our goal should be to be as inclusive as possible in our work. As we continue to go above and beyond for our clients and our audience, normalizing accessibility practices deepens our understanding of who we serve, and provides a more inclusive space where all are welcome.
by threshold | May 20, 2021 | Digital Marketing, General, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Written by David Belachew, Digital Marketing Strategist
Ever since Apple’s announcement of their all new App Tracking Transparency feature (ATT) last summer, anxiety has been rampant for digital real estate marketers in the multi-family housing industry. ATT will require app developers and partners such as Facebook and Google, to ask users permission “to track their actions across other third party apps, websites, or offline properties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes.” Within the first week of the launch of ATT on April 28th, over 96% of iOS 14 users have chosen to opt out of app tracking.
Initially, digital real estate marketers were all fearful of the impact of losing valuable tracking data from these users. Without this information, digital real estate marketers will have a more difficult time assessing the performance of their digital campaigns and will likely have less data to rely on when making budget allocation decisions.
However, in response to the feedback shared by advertisers from some of Apple’s largest partners, Apple rolled out a tool called SKAdNetwork, which will allow advertisers to “measure the success of their ad campaigns while maintaining the privacy of their users.”
In conjunction with SKAdnetwork, both Facebook and Google have rolled out new features and policy updates that will also balance both the privacy concerns of users and ad attribution concerns of their digital advertising partners.
We recommend that digital real estate marketers who actively use Facebook and Google advertising platforms follow these platforms’ new guidelines to offset the negative impact of the ATT on their campaigns. With that in mind, this blog will provide you with some valuable tips on how you can improve the performance of your digital campaigns and confidently report on online behavior of iOS 14 users on your real estate website.
Use Diverse Sources Of Remarketing
As more users choose to opt out of tracking on their iOS 14 devices, both Google and Facebook expect to have a smaller pool of users from their website remarketing audiences. This means that getting the desired results from campaigns whose objective is to remarket users based on their online activity on your property’s website will become more difficult.
With that being said, we recommend that digital real estate marketers diversify their retargeting audience sources to improve the reach and performance of their remarketing campaigns. These sources may include, but are not limited to users that:
- Viewed a specific percentage of a real estate marketing video asset, including from YouTube and Facebook videos, or videos embedded on your property’s website
- Engaged or commented on an organic post from your property’s Facebook or Instagram page
- Clicked on the call to action button from your property’s Facebook or Instagram ad
By expanding your retargeting sources beyond just your website visitors, you will lessen the likelihood of losing the opportunity to promote your property to iOS14 users.
CRM Tool Integration
Even as Google and Facebook implement new attribution modeling techniques that will estimate the volume of conversion actions generated from iOS14 users, both companies have been vague about how large of a negative impact ATT will have on reported conversion attribution from campaigns on their advertising platforms.
With that being said, there are several tools from popular CRM platforms in the housing industry that have the ability to fire native events directly to leading tag management and analytics platforms such as Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.
These leading CRMs and tools include, but are not limited to:
- Setmore – A popular scheduling tool used by property managers to schedule in-person and virtual tours with prospects
- RentCafe – A popular CRM used by property managers to help develop their property’s website, provide an applicant and resident portal for the property, and help improve resident retention
- Knock Doorway Bot – Similar to the G5 bot, this bot, developed by Knock, helps pre-qualify users by providing them pricing and floor plan availability and also encourages users to schedule virtual or in-person tours and complete a contact form submission.
Integrate Your Google Analytics and Google Ads Accounts
As mentioned above, integrating your CRM with a compatible analytics platform can go a long way to understanding user behavior on your property’s website. However, if you use Google Analytics (GA) to track and report on traffic activity on your property’s website, there are several actions you can take now to better understand the performance of your campaign across most platforms, which will allow you to make smarter optimization decisions.
From contact form submissions to completed applications, you can create Goals from your Google Analytics account to measure valuable actions taken by users on your property website. Once these goals are created, you can measure the volume of goal completions across multiple channels, such as organic, paid search, paid social, display, etc.
You can also transfer your GA goals as conversion actions into your Google Ads account. Once you complete your conversion configuration on Google Ads, these conversion actions can be reported and optimized from your paid search and display campaigns and may lead to a higher volume of qualified leads generated on your website.
Another added benefit of linking your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account is that you can better fine-tune your website remarketing audiences. You can configure your remarketing audience by focusing on users who visited a minimum threshold of pages on your website, spent a specific amount of time on-site, and so much more. These remarketing audiences will ensure that your display campaigns will only target users who are more likely to convert on your website while filtering out users who have shown little interest in your property.
by threshold | May 11, 2021 | Digital Marketing, General, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
In spite of evidence to the contrary, some marketers still operate under the incorrect assumption that today’s seniors don’t spend time online or rely on technology to make purchase decisions. In reality, seniors are more tech-savvy than ever, with 88% of adults aged 50-64 and 73% of adults over 65 identifying themselves as internet users. In fact, today’s target audience for senior living communities will rely on online searches, online reviews, digital ads, and your property website to help make their final housing decision much the same way younger generations do. Still, that doesn’t mean you should use all the same digital marketing strategies for senior housing as you would for student or multifamily communities. There are some crucial nuances to be aware of.
When it comes to Active Adult housing, digital marketing strategies should focus on the platforms where these active adult prospects spend most of their time. For Independent Living, Assisted Living, and Memory Care, your strategy should also appeal to the adult children of senior prospects who are often assisting or directing the housing search. Your digital marketing should also take into account the prolonged digital renter’s journey that can be common for senior prospects, who often have more flexibility regarding when they choose to move out of their current home. Finally, a digital marketing strategy for senior housing should be tailored to address common priorities for senior prospects, including sense of safety, reliability, and community.
There are many strategies you can employ to meet these unique demands of the senior housing market, from unique ad types to website design. Here are some of the top digital marketing strategies for senior housing.
Addressable Marketing Campaigns
Addressable Marketing is emerging as the direct mailer for the digital age, making it a particularly excellent choice when marking housing to seniors. It allows ads and other media to be served to individual households across a number of personal devices—TVs, smartphones, personal computers, etc. These ads can target prospects based on household location, age, income level, home equity information, number of household members, and a variety of interests, resulting in highly qualified online and offline traffic from prospects who are more likely to convert.
Because it targets your audience household-by-household, this tactic shares many of the benefits of the direct mailer while also saving on design and printing costs and allowing you the flexibility to target your audience with data aggregation tools rather than requiring you to have a list of addresses ready at hand. These data aggregation tools and fine-tuned targeting factors can help you hone in on senior prospects who may be ready to move, like empty nesters who may be looking to downsize, for example.
When creating an Addressable Marketing Campaign, you start by defining the audience you’re hoping to reach across factors like household location, interests, and other demographic information such as age, income level, etc. Then, though data aggregation tools, micro-geofences are drawn around each physical address that meets those data requirements. Next, a conversion zone is drawn around a specific location where you want to measure foot traffic (e.g. your leasing office).
When a prospect enters your micro-geofenced locations (e.g. physical home address), they will be targeted with your ads on their mobile and desktop devices for a set amount of time (30 days is typical). When the customer enters the conversion zone (e.g. leasing office) with their mobile device after being served your ad, the conversion zone recognizes the prospect and attributes their visit as an offline conversion. OR, if a prospect converts online by filling out a contact form, that action is measured as an online conversion.
Facebook Campaigns
By now, it’s well-understood that most seniors and active adults have adopted social media. In particular, older generations tend to use Facebook. Many seniors use Twitter and Instagram as well—some even use TikTok—but Facebook reigns supreme for its focus on fostering connections with family, friends, and acquaintances both current and past. To get specific, 72% of American adults between the ages of 50 and 64 were on Facebook in 2016, as were 62% over 65 and those figures are even higher in 2021. Naturally, this also means that seniors between the ages of 50 and 70 respond well to Facebook advertising. After all, 15% of users in this age range spend 11+ hours per week on the site.
Facebook offers a wide variety of ad types, be we particularly recommend Traffic and Lead Generation Campaigns for senior and active adult prospects. Traffic Campaigns are especially useful as an awareness tactic, targeting users within a geographic area and proactively serving ads to users with relevant interests and demographics. This ensures seniors nearby are aware of your community when they are ready to start their housing search. And because seniors tend to take longer to finalize their housing choice than younger generations, building that awareness over time is particularly rewarding when it comes to these prospects.
Lead Generation campaigns allow users to submit their name, email, and phone number directly on the Facebook platform, sending this information directly to property staff for quick and easy follow-up. This tactic is excellent for senior housing marketing because it gets prospects on the fast track to a real conversation with your staff, which many seniors still find preferable to the experience of browsing a website and hunting for information online.
Facebook can also do retargeting campaigns, which target users that have already interacted with your ads or Facebook posts before, making it useful as a way to keep top-of-mind with prospects. But bear in mind that older generations tend to be more wary of data tracking than younger generations who tend to see these tactics as the norm. That means aggressive retargeting campaigns may strike them as eerie and invasive rather than convenient and friendly. However, retargeting them sparingly and with the right message can result in increased conversion rates.
Email Marketing
When it comes to lead nurturing, Email Marketing is hard to beat. That’s especially true for seniors and active adults who tend to value personalized interactions directly from leasing staff when making their decision. So when developing your email marketing strategy, be sure to incorporate personalization as often as possible.
For more tips to enhance your Email Marketing strategy, Check out our article below.
Email Marketing for Apartments: Best Practices That Actually Earn Leases
Reputation Management
Before signing a lease with you, your prospects are going to research your community’s online reputation on sites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Apartments.com, and ApartmentRatings.com. And that’s not just true for younger generations. Seniors (and their adult children who sometimes assist in or steer the housing search) also pay attention to reputation and use online reviews as well as word of mouth to determine whether they can trust a housing community.
When your prospects conduct this research, it’s important that what they find inspires their confidence. A poor online reputation means fewer prospects make it to your website, choose to schedule a tour, or take the plunge and sign a lease with you. In fact, a study by Harvard Business School showed that a one-star increase in your ratings can result in up to a 9% increase in your overall revenue.
There are many things you can do to improve your online reputation, including encouraging reviews from loyal residents and responding to the reviews you get, both positive and negative. For more tips on how to improve your online reputation, we have another article you should check out.
How To Make Online Property Reviews Work for You
Website UX Upgrades
A poor website experience is frustrating for everyone. Those who are especially tech-savvy may find their way around a poorly designed and developed website, but often prospects will just give up and look elsewhere. Poor website UX results in high bounce rates, low SEO rankings, less website traffic, and ultimately fewer digital conversions.
When it comes to improving UX for seniors, consider all the factors you normally would (page load times, easy scannability, a clear hierarchy of information, prominent calls to action, etc.). Also consider avoiding smaller font or icon sizes or images with poor contrast. This makes your website more legible to everyone, not just to seniors.
How To Improve UX on Your Property Website (and increase conversions)
Most importantly, ensure you have clear CTAs in prominent areas of the page to direct users to the actions you want them to take, such as viewing available floor plans, exploring amenities, and most importantly, contacting your leasing staff.
by threshold | Apr 28, 2021 | Creative, Design, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Written by Weylan Lee, Senior Graphic Designer at Threshold
User experience and user interface (UX/UI) design are both in high demand, especially for digital spaces like apartment websites and mobile apps. With this high demand comes many tools that cater towards UX/UI design. At Threshold, we use Adobe XD, which is a design tool that allows us to create and prototype interactive experiences like websites, digital products, and mobile apps. With this tool, our teams are able to design, animate, prototype, and collaborate more efficiently, experiencing our designs just like an end user (i.e. our clients’ residents and prospects) would. This has significant advantages both for us internally as well as for our clients and their end users.
How Adobe XD Improves the Real Estate Marketing Client Experience
First and foremost, Adobe XD allows us to present our compelling and amazing website designs more comprehensively and engagingly for our clients. With XD, instead of designing static pages and leaving it to the imagination how they will animate or link to one another, we are able to incorporate engaging user experiences and interactive functionality that enhance our client’s brand and optimize for conversions from the very beginning. Our clients are able to view and experience their website designs just like a viewer would on a live website. They can scroll down a web page, click on links and buttons, interact with CTAs, as well as interact with things like galleries, floor plans, location maps, and much more. Plus, with the ability to leave comments and replies right on website designs, using Adobe XD allows our clients to make more informed decisions and provide accurate feedback, streamlining our collaboration with our clients.
How Adobe XD Improves Collaboration for Creative Real Estate Marketers
For our internal teams, using Adobe XD has allowed us to design more immersive and impactful website experiences and made our internal collaboration more efficient – which also benefits our clients! Our designers are able to experience and interact with their website designs in real-time as they are designing. This allows us to create more impactful, engaging user experiences and ensure that a website not only looks amazing and functions properly, but also provides a great experience. Adobe XD also allows for the creation of brand-specific design libraries, which our designers use to ensure that a client’s branding (fonts, colors, buttons, and more) is applied consistently throughout each page of an entire website. Even better, the collaboration tools within Adobe XD allows our designers and developers to share website assets and details more efficiently, reducing project timelines and ensuring a smoother transition between design and development.
Why You Should Work With a Real Estate Marketing Agency That Uses Adobe XD
To sum it up, by using Adobe XD, our teams are able to create impactful user experiences that our clients (and their current and future residents) will enjoy. The improved and efficient collaboration between our internal teams and our clients and project teams means that we are able to reduce project timelines and ensure we are creating the highest quality websites for our clients. Our project teams are able to spend more time on creating amazing and impactful website designs with great experiences. At the end of the day, that all leads to increased conversions and customer loyalty among our clients’ prospects and current residents.
by threshold | Apr 12, 2021 | Digital Marketing, General, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
With Facebook preparing to implement an update to their platform related to iOS 14, many advertisers are wondering what the update means for real estate marketing. To summarize it briefly, this update will affect the treatment of 3rd party data tracking, effectively limiting its use on the Facebook platform. This change comes as no surprise for many in the advertising space, since it coincides with a general rise in user concerns around data privacy that have made 3rd party data use a hot-button topic in recent months, even among some lawmakers. Facebook is just one of multiple platforms that have responded to this trend by distancing themselves from 3rd party data tracking or removing it from their platform entirely.
So how does the iOS 14 update affect digital apartment marketing strategies on Facebook? Here are the details:
Facebook Users Will Have a Chance to Opt In to Data Tracking
Facebook has worked with iOS 14 to develop an opt-in approach to 3rd party data tracking. While the update is already part of the code of iOS 14, at the time of writing this post, the update hasn’t been pushed live yet. Facebook announced that it would push this update live sometime in Q1 2021.
Once the update does go live, Apple users will see a prompt on their phone asking if they want to allow Facebook to track their data after they have left the Facebook app. Unless a user opts in when they receive this prompt, Facebook will not gather 3rd party data about that user from other apps, nor will it share their Facebook data with other apps.
Facebook Will Limit Conversion Tracking
Facebook has also developed a tool called Aggregated Event Measurement, which limits domains to 8 conversion events that can be used for campaign optimization. This means if you want to track conversions based on an action taken outside of Facebook (e.g. filling out a contact form on your property website), you’ll only be able to take data from 8 of those outside-Facebook conversions into account when it comes to understanding audience behavior and optimizing your ads for further conversions.
This will not impact optimization strategies which optimize and report on fewer than 8 conversion events on domains outside of Facebook, but for those who prefer to optimize based on larger aggregates, this update may impact the information available for an informed optimization strategy, leading to less precise optimizations.
Even if you optimize based on conversion events within the Facebook platform (e.g. ad clicks), it is still best practice to verify your domains in case you ever need to use the Aggregated Event Measurement tool to optimize over multiple conversion events on domains outside of Facebook (like your property website).
How These Changes Will Impact Facebook Apartment Marketing
Luckily, due to previous platform changes directed specifically at housing, finance, and credit ads, many apartment marketing teams are already a step ahead of the game compared to other industries that have been enjoying more advertising flexibility. Still, Facebook ads for apartments could be impacted in certain key ways.
Depending on how your team is optimizing Facebook ads and whether your strategy relies heavily on 3rd party data tracking, these changes could have anywhere from no impact at all to significant impact on your Facebook ad performance. Here are some of the main areas that could be affected.
- Retargeting campaigns that rely on data about a user’s behavior outside of Facebook (e.g. visiting a property website) would not reach users that have chosen to opt out of 3rd party tracking. However, apartment marketers can still retarget users who have interacted with a property’s other ads or posts on Facebook, because this relies solely on 1st party data.
- Conversion tracking will be limited and conversions may go under-reported as a result. This does not necessarily mean that fewer conversions are occurring, but it does mean real estate marketers will have less information for the purposes of campaign optimization.
While these changes will impact some of the flexibility you have with digital ad campaigns, there are ways to avoid a significant dip in performance as a result of these platform changes. We recommend relying on digital advertising strategies that focus on 1st party data (actions taken on the Facebook platform) rather than on 3rd party data (a user’s behavior outside of Facebook) moving forward, especially as these platform changes are unlikely to be the last restriction on 3rd party data tracking we’ll see in upcoming months and years.
by threshold | Mar 16, 2021 | Digital Marketing, General, Marketing, Tech/Web
People around the world are becoming more aware that their data is being leveraged, and not everyone is comfortable with that. Although data aggregation has been part of the internet experience since the genesis of Web 2.0, it hasn’t always been clear to users what info is being gathered and why. As more users have become aware of the prevalence of data aggregation, some have pushed for increased oversight governing how a person’s data can be used. As we anticipate the possibility of federal legislation to address these concerns as well as the likelihood of further platform changes like the various ad targeting changes implemented by Facebook and Google in 2019-2021, we can expect those changes to impact apartment marketing in 2021 and beyond.
Any website that offers a personalized experience leverages your data in some way, whether that data is your current browsing behavior, demographic information, or credit history. When sites gather your data through cookies or 3rd party data exchanges, the ultimate goal is typically to gain a holistic representation of who you are so that the site can improve the user experience, show you content you’re more likely to engage with, and ultimately profit off your attention in some way (consider, for example, retargeting ads for items you recently viewed on an ecommerce website).
Let’s pause to briefly lay out some definitions: Cookies are small files saved to your computer that record what websites you’ve been on, what you’ve clicked or viewed, and sometimes what passwords you’ve saved. Cookies allow a website to see where else you visited before you arrived at your current digital destination. Third party data exchanges are when one platform obtains your data from another platform in order to combine multiple sets of data to get a fuller picture of who you are and how you behave online. For example, Equifax might sell your data to Google so that Google knows how much money you make in addition to the information they already have about your search history.
How Rising Concerns Around Data Misuse Have Changed the Advertising Landscape
Although data aggregation is often relatively innocuous, there are ways in which it’s vulnerable to misuse. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Cambridge Analytica purchased the data of millions of Facebook users without the users’ consent and used it to inform political campaigns, was for many the catalyzing event that set off a surge of concerns over data aggregation. “Who has my data, how much do they have, and why?” Many users wondered. “Who is protecting my data from misuse? And who is held responsible when misuse occurs?”
In the wake of this expanding concern, legislators have been pressed to address this situation with clear legislation restricting how data aggregation tactics like cookies and 3rd party data exchanges can be used. The CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) was the first example of a state legislating around data use. If you’re constantly being prompted to accept the use of cookies by sites you visit, that’s because of the CCPA, which has spotlighted cookie tracking in particular. Not only does the CCPA affect specifically Californian websites, it also has the potential to affect any website getting traffic from users in California, so more and more websites have rushed to cover their bases by adding these opt-in prompts.
The CCPA isn’t the only legal follow-up to the rise in data privacy concerns. Facebook also came under fire in 2019 because it allowed advertisers to use Facebook’s data aggregation to target ads in ways that violated the Fair Housing Act, leading the platform to establish restrictions on ad targeting capabilities specifically for housing, loan, and finance ads. Google soon followed suit, introducing new housing, loan, and finance categories in Google Ads and restricting the targeting capabilities of those ads.
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was also implemented by the EU in May 2018 with the aim of giving individuals more control over their personal data. It applies to any enterprise that is processing the data of a person inside the EU.
Apple was the next major platform to launch changes to its data use policy, implementing new requirements for apps in the App Store on devices running iOS 14. Apps that engage in data tracking through tools like the Facebook pixel or cookies must now prompt users to opt in to this data tracking. Only after a user has opted in may that app collect their data.
Additionally, Google announced in March 2021 that it would be phasing out 3rd party data tracking entirely for users browsing the internet on Chrome. Their new strategy is called FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), which adds users to various audience “cohorts” based on their browsing behaviors. Advertisers can then target their ads to cohorts, but cannot further refine their targeting on a user-by-user basis. We expect Google’s strategy to direct the rest of the industry, as many platforms will be taking their cues from this media giant. We can likely expect additional platforms to implement similar changes.
How Data Regulation Will Affect Apartment Marketing
Since the housing industry has already been the focus of certain early data use regulations, prompting the changes made by Facebook and Google in 2019 and 2020, apartment marketers are ahead of the curve somewhat when it comes to data regulation changes. However, more changes are likely coming, and it’s not entirely clear what they might be. Right now, it’s a waiting game to see how data regulations will be legislated and what further changes individual platforms like Facebook and Google may implement either in response to or independently of new regulations. It’s worth noting, however, that congressional committees have held hearings on data privacy, so a federal regulation of some kind is likely, we just don’t know what the specifics will be.
We also don’t yet know how 3rd party data or cookie tracking limitations will be reflected in advertising platforms if regulations are created to restrict them. It’s unknown whether these platforms will update their internal algorithms for ad targeting to reflect or counteract the new data restrictions, and if so, how they would do it. While Google and Facebook have already updated their policies around 3rd party data tracking, a federal regulation could require further updates from these platforms.
Still, there are preparations that can be made in anticipation of these potential outcomes. Many vendors are now planning ahead for the potential that cookie use will become restricted. Since cookies track your browsing behaviors across multiple websites, eliminating this element means the focus has to be on 1st party behavioral cues—what you’re doing right now on their website, including in-site searches. Vendors are also looking to rely more on 1st party data and less on 3rd party data.
Cookie removal would affect the platforms where many real estate marketing agencies conduct their advertising. Long-tail tracking will be more challenging, as will multi-session lead attribution. Single-session lead attribution, however, could still be tracked effectively.
Retargeting campaigns relying on 3rd party data tracking (e.g. targeting users who visited a property website) may become a thing of the past, depending on how data use is regulated in the future. Paid Search campaigns, however, will likely be unaffected, since they rely on current, 1st-party user search behavior, not on behaviors that have been tracked using a cookie.
Real estate marketers using advanced chatbots that use cookies to predict user needs (like what floor plans someone might be interested in, for example) should be aware that upcoming regulations may necessitate a downgrade to a less sophisticated chatbot. More immediately, you should ensure that your website prompts a user to accept the use of cookies, if you haven’t done so already. Otherwise you risk being sued by the state of California.
Rest assured that once we know more, we’ll cover it on ThreshNews. Check back for the latest in data regulation and how it’s impacting apartment marketing in 2021 and beyond.
