What is the target demographic of this site?

I am very interested in attracting guests from Euope, can you give any tips?

Hi Mike, At the moment our visitors are overwhelmingly from the UK, the US and France. We target a lot of google ads at Europe at the moment, but we aren’t fully launched yet – once we launch publicly our marketing will ramp up a lot.

We’re thinking of making more detailed statistics available to our advertisers, beyond the visitor graph you get at the moment – including adding details about how many times you’ve shown up on our search pages as well as how many times your property detail page has been viewed. Hopefully this will help you to gauge how well your property headline and main photo are working. Your question has given us a couple of other ideas which we might think about implementing to help give advertisers a better idea of who’s looking at their ads.

In general terms there are several ways you can improve the performance of your property listing. Firstly, your property listing is automatically given an “adscore” by our system based on things like whether you have a property tour, the number and resolution of your photos, if you’ve got video in your advert, whether you’ve added property features, whether you’ve filled in the availability and detailed tariffs etc. etc. The value of a properties’ adscore influences its position in search results. So If a visitor is looking at the map for a large area (for instance the whole of France) then the properties with the highest adscore will tend to appear first in the search results underneath. At some point in the future properties with high adscores will appear in a “featured properties” section on the front page of the site too. At the moment all this goes on “under the hood” and we don’t make the adscore information available to advertisers. We’re going to improve this very soon and add pointers to your “todo” list to let you know what you can do to improve your adscore.

I noticed that your property is in the Bahamas – you’ve probably already found out that out maps and general geography for the Caribbean is currently in an awful mess, so it’s going to be very confusing for visitors looking for properties there. Our apologies for this. We’re revamping all of our maps at the moment, and we should have new maps deployed any day now which will sort out the Caribbean issues (as well as similar problems in other regions like South Africa and the Baltics).

Thanks for getting in touch and congratulations for being the first ever post in the forums !

Is there any up to date information on this subject?

Hi Margret, We recently slightly updated the statistics display for our agency customers, but there hasn’t been a lot of movement on this front otherwise (though I did fix the Carribean maps!). Our current focus is very much on improving our “front end” features at the moment in order to increase conversion rates and traffic for our property owners. When we’re a bit more satisfied with that we’ll probably come back and start adding more statistics etc. for our property owners.

BTW – one little trick that we did think might be useful, and which might get included in the curret front-end revamp, was an automatic “main image optimiser” – often people have several images that could be used as their main image. The Main Image for your property is crucially important, because it has to capture a visitors attention and get them to look at your property in more detail. The idea was that our system would allow you to choose several possible main images, and we would rotate these images on the site and gather statistics about which was most effective in brining in visitors. Sound like a good idea ?

Yes, that sounds like a great idea!

It sounds like a very good idea.

Is it possible to have a facility where guests can leave comments here?