Did you catch the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy? If you did, you may have noticed something about the commercials that interrupt the drama: they advertise products most often purchased by women, such as face wash, makeup and laundry detergent. That’s because the marketers know that the audience for Grey’s is predominately female, and the individuals most likely to purchase their products are women. So by placing an ad during Grey’s, they’re reaching their target market. They’re “targeting.”

In the internet world, the advent of behavior tracking tools such as Google Analytics is helping apartment marketers get savvier every day with targeting specific demographics like income, interests, geographic focus and more. By narrowing the scope of our marketing efforts, we are more effective at getting our message in front of the people who are most likely to be interested in our product.

Targeting is an effective marketing tool because it gets your property noticed. For properties that are not currently ranked at the top of search engine results, targeting allows that property to buy premium search engine placement faster than can be accomplished with organic SEO.

Even still, targeting casts a rather wide net. And now there is “re-targeting”. A person visits the State of Maryland Tourism website and then goes to ESPN to check scores and on to Facebook to read their newsfeed. Presto! Ads for Visit Maryland! appear on both of those sites imprinting the message and product. Re-targeting is a cookie-based technology that anonymously follows the target buyer all over the web. It allows us to focus the ad spend on people who have previously visited your website thereby demonstrating an interest. When they visit other websites, your property ad appears on those other sites.

While targeting is effective, re-targeting is relentless. It works for lease-up and stabilized properties facing heavy renewals or a vacancy issues alike. And by using third party or Google analytics, we can track the performance of our re-targeting ads. We know which ads drive traffic to our website, how many pages each unique visitor viewed while on our website and for how long. And with lead tracking software, we can even draw a line from initial visit to final sale.

So now you can answer, “How did it know?!”

-Brent Gratton
Director of Multifamily Marketing & Communication