In this post, let’s look at testimonials advertised on Trulia.com.
Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. FTC (link and emphasis added)
Under the revised Guidelines, an advertisers can no longer find safe harbor in the disclaimer: Results may vary. [Note: To the best of my knowledge, Trulia did not use this disclaimer either on Trulia blog or Trulia.com.]
I have one question for Trulia regarding the testimonials it selected to appear on Trulia.com (Business Solutions). Given the many testimonials on the Trulia blog, they chose these to appear on Trulia.com, which gets much more traffic than Trulia blog, I suspect.:
——-> 1. Do these testimonials represent the typical results real estate agents will achieve on Trulia or are they atypical results?
10 leads from Trulia in 6 months that all closed escrow — that’s awesome, IMO. But is it typical of results agents can expect on Trulia? Or is this an exceptional case? C’mon Pete, is this typical?
According to Joan’s Trulia profile, she is a “Multi-million dollar producer. #2 Top Closing Agent of 2008 and #3 Top Written Agent of 2008 for Keller Williams Realty, Rancho Cucamonga, California”. [Curiously, there is a Joan Patterson of Keller Williams, California ( the same Joan?) that recently made the HomeGain "Gold Club".] Joan seems to be a superstar. So, her results on Trulia may be exceptional.
One call or email every day is amazing in my book. Good for you Elizabeth. But is it typical of other agents using Trulia? Sami, can you answer?
[Interestingly (disturbingly?), the word "about" was in Elizabeth's original quote on Trulia blog but excluded from the quote that made it to Trulia.com (link) Why? Glitch in the Matrix?]
On Trulia blog, Rob’s stats were referenced as from an early adopter. Do these early adopter stats continue to represent typical page views where agent ads appear on Trulia? (Aside: I’m not sure I agree that a page view is an ad view, but that’s another can of green worms).
While page views are nice, IMO the real effectiveness of an ad, and more indicative of an actual “ad view” is how many visitors click to an agent’s website. Trulia blog said, “Rob is able to see his Trulia page views turn into visitors to his website and then convert the visitors into actual clients.” I’d like to know how many of those 100,000 page views turned into website visitors.
My advertising point is this—- since Trulia knows the true value of an ad is sending consumers to an agent’s website, why tout a page view testimonial (and leave out the actual visits to Rob’s website)? Could it be the actual visitor count was puny? C’mon, for transparency’s sake, give agents the full monty, chaps.
Questions, questions, questions….. and only green crickets chirping. Truly a shame.
Technorati Tags: trulia, real estate marketing, testimonial advertising, ftc, federal trade commission
