Learning Center - Paid Search

Paid search affiliates have been running successful campaigns for Apartments.com -- Learn more about how to use this powerful tool to drive Leads and earn commissions! Paid search provides the flexibility and the great opportunity to reach potential renters using thousands of keywords. Find out here how to cover the basics and how to optimize your Apartments.com paid search campaign!

Keyword Strategy
By doing some research, you can easily create a large number of keywords for your campaigns.

Recommendations:

• Understand seasonal trends (peak months in Spring and Summer)
• Understand the Apartments.com target audience (read the Media Kit)
• Research cities and areas with active rental markets
• Research Apartments.com listings and find areas where you can focus your campaigns..

Links
Commission Junction publishers can pull links from the Apartments.com Advertiser page, including the Product Catalog state and local map pages, city/state search pages, and rental listings. You are also able to create your own Apartments.com links using the URL Builder. You may create text links to any map page, as well as any local city, state, or zip code results page on Apartments.com.

The closer you bring your site visitors to Apartment listings matching their search criteria, the higher your conversion rates will be.

Paid Search Best Practices for Publishers

• Understand your own metrics - ROI, Conversion Rate, EPC
• Make sure your keywords match the landing page
• Optimize ad copy – make sure your ad text is both grammatically correct and relevant to the landing page.
• Test with several search engines to understand your ROI as well as functionality in various platforms.
• Create separate campaigns for different geo-targeted areas
• Test your campaigns to see what converts best
• Experiment with different match types (ie: broad, exact, etc.)
• Experiment with day-parting
• Make use of SID Tracking (optional, see below)

Paid Search Restrictions

• Do not bid on the keyword Apartments.com or variations thereof.
• Do not bid on keywords for Apartments.com related company names or customer company names.
• Do not bid on keywords for Apartments.com competitor names, or use them in ad copy.
• Do not use “Apartments.com” in your display URL.
• Do not use duplicate keywords across your ad groups.

Publishers in violation of these restrictions risk removal from the Apartments.com Affiliate Program.

SID Tracking with Commission Junction
Commission Junction provides the capability for publishers to track their actions with unique information via the “SID” field. Search publishers often include their keywords or representative IDs in the SID field so that they are able to optimize their campaigns at the keyword level. For example, you can track your Paid search campaign using the keyword “Chicago” with “SEM-Chicago”:

http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-XXXXXX-10455273?url=http%
3A//www.apartments.com/partner/Rent.aspx%3Fpage%3Drent%26partner%3Dcommjunc%26city%
3DChicago%26state%3DIL&SID=SEM-Chicago

Just insert “&SID=” and the tracking name at the end of the URL string.