We had a very challenging 1.5 years and we continue to do so. Like many sectors, the pandemic break-down impacted the real estate industry as well. In this article, we will discuss the importance of app marketing for real estate apps and check out some apps that are successful in this.
Real estate applications got more and more attractive for users because of Covid-19. As traditional open-houses became harder to organize due to the pandemic, real estate apps provided virtual tours of real estate. Today, people can check out many houses in just a few minutes.
As there is a ton of potential in this category of apps, competition is fierce. Real estate apps are trying to build the perfect mobile user acquisition strategy which will increase their user base, boosting their revenue. Let’s check out what these apps are doing to defend their places in the market.
Finding The Right Competitors
First of all, let’s identify the strongest players in the category. One of the best ways to do that is to use app store optimization tools and check out the organic rankings. With our Keyword Explorer, we can immediately see the organic leaders for the keyword “Real Estate”.
To start our app competitor analysis, let’s start by mentioning that Real Estate is definitely a popular keyword. With a search score of 49, more than 12,000 apps are ranking organically for this search term.
Trulia, Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com appear to be the most prominent apps. They have lots of positive reviews, which certainly help their App Store Optimization strategy.
One of the main goals of any app marketing is to increase app visibility. The easier it is to come across your app, the more people will download it. The apps that rank in the top 3 for the keyword ‘real estate’ have rather close visibility scores. Although Zillow seems to be leading the race by a small margin.
Once you have identified the right competitors for your application, you can observe their strategies and adapt them to your own mobile user acquisition strategy. This way, you will have more time to identify new approaches and increase your success.
Boosting App Growth With Apple Search Ads
Let’s take a step back and think about real estate apps. If a person is looking for a real estate app, the chances are that they will download any app that will fulfill their needs. Thus, if your app appears at the top of the search results, organically or through Apple Search Ads, it would not be implausible to steal users who were originally looking for your competitor.
The key factor here is determining the right keywords. Not only can you target these keywords in your metadata for your App Store Optimization strategy, but you can bid on these keywords in Apple Search Ads to gain impressions.
Since the release of iOS 14.5, Apple Search Ads is perhaps the most effective way to conduct iOS app marketing. Especially categories like real estate apps can benefit from this user acquisition platform. Supporting our argument, we can see that Real Estate apps are not very active on traditional mobile ad networks. Their paid efforts are mainly focused on Apple Search Ads which makes sense.
So how do you find these keywords? Well, examining your competitors’ strategy would be one of the first things to do. However, finding long-tail high user intent keywords is usually more difficult.
With an app store optimization tool such as our Keyword Research feature, you can use seed keywords to generate new ideas.
As you can see, a keyword such as home for sale can be useful for including in your Generic Campaigns.
Competitor Campaigns
We have identified the right competitors, and we have found the right keywords for ourselves. Now it’s time to get some impressions! Trulia is the only app that ranks organically in the top 4 for the keyword “Real Estate” and doesn’t run Apple Search Ads. Without a doubt, this allowed their competitors to gain significant impressions from their brand name.
As you can see the keyword “Trulia” has a search score of 56, which is pretty impressive. However, because they do not run Apple Search Ads, we can see that other real estate apps are showing their ads for this keyword. Through Search Ads Intelligence, we can see that Zillow is receiving nearly 70% of the impressions from this paid keyword.
Even if you run Apple Search Ads, you can lose impressions to competitors if you are not careful. As you can see above, Realtor.com is getting most of the impressions from the brand keyword Zillow.
As we observed in this category which has been getting more competitive over the last months, app marketing is a process with many details. The commonality across all mobile user acquisition strategies seems to be the fact that research is key. Having the proper toolkit will make the process easier and more efficient. If you want to experience our all-in-one dashboard, schedule a demo with our experts today.
