SUCCESS STORIES APARTMENTRATINGS FROM ADSENSE

ApartmentRatings.com
Case study : ApartmentRatings.com : www.apartmentratings.com

Business

Jeremy and Katie Bencken were fed up with the driving, bother and rushed decisions associated with finding rental housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and decided to do something about it. In 2000, they started ApartmentRatings.com, a site for apartment hunters to obtain information such as peer reviews in order to make informed rental decisions. What started as a sideline for the couple has grown into the largest independent apartment-hunting site on the web, with 560,000 pages and traffic comparable to larger, commercially-funded sites for rental housing. Today, the company is located in Austin, Texas, and the site reaches approximately 30 percent of apartment hunters nationwide. Site users praise ApartmentRatings. com as a "brilliant resource," saving grief for a countless number of users in the process of apartment hunting.

Approach

"Google serves up very relevant ads. The content matching is impressive, which makes the ads helpful for our visitors." Jeremy Bencken Co-founder

Advertising is the company's exclusive source of income; however, the Benckens face several challenges in selling ads. With a staff of five, they don't have a large pool of resources to sell directly to advertisers. To remain unbiased, the Benckens don't accept ads from apartment complexes and instead rely on movers, renter's insurance providers, and roommate locators to fill their inventory. To add to the challenge, the rental housing market is highly localized, yet the Benckens note that it can be difficult and time-consuming to find and recruit advertisers in smaller markets.

"We were in a 'Catch 22' situation," recalls Jeremy Bencken. "We weren't big enough to have a sales force dedicated to selling ads, but we couldn't become big unless we sold advertising." In 2003, the Benckens learned about Google AdSense contextual advertising and realized that it could "move them along the growth curve."

Results

The Benckens are now running AdSense ads across virtually all of ApartmentRatings.com, their blog, OhMyApartment, their forums, ThinWallsTalk, and their classifieds, Apartments-and-Rentals.com. Jeremy is pleased that advertisers come from across the U.S., including smaller metropolitan areas. He notes that AdSense complements his use of other Google products such as Google AdWords campaigns that drive traffic to his site, and Google Sitemaps, which make the newest content on the site available on Google search.

Besides being pleased with the revenue he's generating from AdSense, Bencken notes that "Google serves up very relevant ads. The content matching is impressive, which makes the ads helpful for our visitors."

After gaining experience with AdSense, Jeremy further improved his results by making adjustments to ad placement and size. He uses 300 x 250 medium rectangles containing four ads each and 160 x 600 wide skyscrapers – both with colors that blend well with the site. He also places ads at the end of apartment reviews to enhance the user experience by giving visitors a useful next step once they've finished perusing a review. With just these minor ad format and ad placement changes, he was able to improve his CPM by 45 percent and his clickthrough rate by 91 percent without disrupting the user experience.

AdSense also helps the Benckens adjust to seasonal fluctuations in advertising demand. During summer, call for rental properties is at its peak, and advertisers tend to less aggressively promote their services. Other times of the year, advertisers are hungry. "AdSense is flexible and adjusts to whatever the market is doing, without us having to intervene by raising and lowering prices, which can be difficult," says Jeremy. In addition to AdSense, the Benckens rely on Google business tools such as Google Sitemaps*** and Google Analytics to increase visibility of new site content in Google search results and to gain valuable insight into their site's audience.

Since they started the company, the most important lesson the Benckens have learned is that real estate requires a local focus. Concludes Jeremy, "AdSense does the work for us and has allowed us to tap 100 percent of our market, since we can reach both small and large metropolitan areas, versus serving only a few big advertisers. AdSense has made a tremendous difference in our business."

About Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a program enabling online businesses to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to specific web content and search pages. With service levels ranging from online sign-up to dedicated support management, a broad range of sites profit from AdSense. Thousands of Google advertisers also benefit from AdSense by gaining exposure on sites across the Google Network, which includes many of the Top 100 Media Metrix sites such as AOL, About.com, Amazon, Ask.com, and Lycos.