In the past 8 months the top 3 small unit home rental listing sites have added banner ads to their sites. When looking at the Alexa data two out of the three sites starting losing traffic when the banner ads were added. The third top site just added the banners ads within the past few weeks so it might be early to say if the trend will continue.
My guess is that property managers are not as bothered with these ads as the people searching for the rentals are. People looking for rentals makes up a large portion of the traffic to these rental sites, so if they are put-off by the banner ad experience they might not be returning.
So why are these sites adding these banner ads? My guess is money, and lots of it. From what I know, two of the top three companies are owned by a major New York media firm and as soon as those companies were acquired they placed banner ads on their sites. The media firm is a publicly traded company so I am guessing that was a move to make the shareholders happy. As for the third company, they have received many millions of dollars in funding (very unique approach) and my guess is they are in need of cash.
Could there be other causes - sure. Again, I am guess guessing at all this. Another idea is that the major search engines have detected those banner ads and have since downgraded them in the search engine rankings for lack of a good online experience.
[tags]home rentals, banner ads, traffic[/tags]
Related Articles
No user responded in this post
Leave A Reply