A $1 billion company, Trader Publishing Company is the largest publisher in the United States producing classified and photo guide advertising publications. Like many other businesses that publish regional and local guides, Trader also has active websites mirroring the content, the listings, and the ads for some 30 titles. In the apartment rental market, Trader publishes a monthly guide called For Rent Magazine® and a related site (www.forrent.com). For Rent Magazine appears in 102 metro markets around the country. On the web side, apartment seekers can browse all the listings, by city, and in special areas including senior communities, corporate apartments, military and college housing. Nearly 100 percent of For Rent's print advertisers have opted to run their ads on the site.
| "We wanted to take advantage of the increased distribution
that Google's content-targeted advertising would give us." |
Approach
As the leading apartment rental guide publisher,
ForRent.com's online advertising goal was to grow site traffic.
More visitors would lead to more advertisers, and that in turn would
mean greater revenue. In March 2003, Marketing Manager Stephanie Krebs
says, "We chose the Google AdWords™ program to raise our
visibility, so our advertisers would see more traffic."
Krebs says there was an even more pressing challenge: Trader's number one competitor was seeing 450 percent more traffic. "We turned to Google to up the ante. Knowing our ads would show up on Google plus its network of sites, including AOL, was a big selling point for us," she says. Krebs also notes that Google AdSense, a new program that runs targeted ads on content sites, was an additional incentive. "We wanted to take advantage of the increased distribution that Google's content-targeted advertising would give us," she says.
The conversion metric that ForRent.com tracks is lead generation through online "guest card" registrations. Krebs calculates registrations divided by page views to understand the return on investment she is getting.
