What is visitor monetization really about?

When you ask a portal about their main revenue source or their main KPIs, usually they define it based on their advertising business model and the state of their market: Listing number; Pageviews/visits; Revenue; Agent or agency number or entire revenue. These revenue sources are coming from advertisers and all belong to the core business of the property portal: Property advertising.

When the listing revenue cannot produce the growth we want in the long term, either because of the competitors’ activities or the market size, and we want to innovate, or have another competitive advantage in our existing vertical portal then new business models can be developed. The main goal of a property portal should always be to connect the buyer and the seller and make the transaction happen. So every new revenue source planned along with this goal can be a success and be completing pure listings is one more step toward the transaction.

Knowledge about the user - converting them into leads

The searcher and/or the visitor is not only a value when it converts to inquiries for the agents. You, as the portal are the ones who know the most about the user. The way to the transaction can be shortened and you can create more value for everyone involved: the advertiser, the searcher and the revenue for ourselves if used wisely.

Many property portals are part of other portal families. Therefore, if we handle the users globally, not separately, we can obtain further knowledge behind the actual motivation of our visitor(s). For example, in many instances moving is connected to a job change, thus, if we use the profile of the user on a job portal we already have a picture of their financial background.

Monetization of leads

The easiest way to sell these leads is via display banners and targeted eDMs for financial companies or banks. But in this case, the lead quality is not controlled by us, we only sell the client's visits to their site and it is their job to convert them online. To create more value, produce hot leads and make the conversions faster, we can also prequalify the user since we have their past behavior history.

The average time to look for a property depends on the country and different markets, but usually, it takes weeks or months, depending if it is a for sale or a for rent search. At the first look, the visitor is only "dreaming" and looking around - and we will know exactly how they go through their decision process (what are they looking for, how much money they have, when they made a decision to increase the budget etc.). In the meantime, we can ask questions about the planned transaction and finances, so that we know how to target them later on. It is even more valuable if we collect this data across several portals, where, for example, the user is specifically visiting for a property or job search. We have to save this data and make it available for analysis along with the result of the lead when it is pushed to financial services. This way we can create patterns and target the matching visitors at a very early stage with contextual help. In essence, we are guiding them through the "funnel" easily.

You are probably already working on a similar solution, so when all this is working, a possible next level is, when the transaction of any financial service, such as mortgages or private loans can develop in real time. In the European Union the regulations of Open Banking & PSD2 are already available and in some countries, they are already working. With this opportunity, data from the banks can also be connected to the portal’s data, and with fintech players coming in, new predictive methodologies will be available for the property sector. It is still a long way until all this is completely online and integrated, but now is the time for property portals, to take action.

New competencies are needed

Successful portals should be strong at measuring and mapping out their users’ behaviors, building digital products, collecting data and composing visitor convert.

However, this is a new area: conversion has a different meaning today than what it used to. Conversion is a generated, pre-qualified lead toward a financial product in order to reach a property transaction. Also, the staff of a property portal is not always capable or has the capacity to cover these areas.

Success factors

1. An understanding to identify the visitor who is interested in the financial services based on the raw data - be it a personal loan, mortgage or anything else. This knowledge is not pure data analysis or financial and online user behavior information, it is somewhere in between.
2. We will have new products to sell - a different kind of product management is needed since this is not listing. People who are able to think in the digital world with financial product development knowledge are probably the best to manage a product like this.
3. We will have new customers - not only the visitors converted to leads but also the financial service providers: banks, financial companies, fintech companies. This clientele requires a different knowledge of the account management than what already have.
4. In the meantime, we should not forget the primary purpose of our site: help and follow up the transactions. The two businesses should work smoothly at the same time alongside each other. Neither can go ahead at the other's expense. New products should be introduced context based and also carefully planned in the user flow.
5. Not all development should be done in-house - fintech and data science can be conducted by various third-party companies, startups - they have a better handle on new technologies as well as the knowledge of what predictive data analysis needs.

New business needs time and investment

It is a choice for every portal to move forward in this direction or not, but it has to be a long term decision to be successful. Besides the business model, we also need to build up the knowledge, the competence and also the culture to make it happen.