Does it Pay to Advertise on Houzz Pro+?
Originally written on September 23, 2016; Updated on January 27, 2021
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Corey Halstead
Owner, HALSTEAD.
As a leading website providing remodeling and home-improvement ideas and inspiration, Houzz quickly jumped to the top of the remodeling industry’s radar. But does spending advertising budget on Houzz’s Pro+ program reap the benefits that it boasts for construction contractors, building product manufacturers and dealers, and designers?
The online media giant, Houzz, has created a large audience in a jiffy. And as the digital world knows well, he who has the attention can monetize that traffic in many ways. Over the years, Houzz has looked to do this in many ways, including product sales, paid placements, advertising for contractors and designers, and most recently, as an all-in-one SaaS tool for home improvement professionals. More on that in another article. Here, we focus on Houzz Pro+ advertising geared for industry pros, shining some light on the benefits and challenges.
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Show up in the Houzz top 10 results.
Visibility on a platform like Houzz is crucial. Why put the effort into the platform if ideal prospects can’t find your business? Whether you’re a design/build firm, or a building product dealer or manufacturer, one of the benefits of Pro+ is that it increases your business’s visibility by reserving one of the top 10 search results on each page for Pro+ users within the relevant geographical radius.
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Show up under multiple categories.
Your company’s visibility also grows with the option to list your business under multiple home improvement categories — currently you can only list it under one with the free version. For example, if your company designs and builds ingound swimming pools but also offers swimming pool maintenance services, you could list it under “Design and Remodeling” as well as “Home Services,” which widely expands your advertising reach.
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Photo-tagging to help the right clients find your images.
With the mindset of treating Houzz as much like social media as possible, the most important focus is to boost the photo impressions, especially in this digital age. Promoted ads on Houzz do increase the numbers of profile clicks and profile impressions somewhat, but photo impressions appear to remain predominantly an organic pulse. For consumers who are far along in their research for an upcoming remodeling project, and as a result are bottom of funnel and looking on Houzz for home improvement professionals to content directly, this might not be such an issue. But more often than not, unique site visitors are simply looking for ideas and inspiration, in which case Pro+ members are no more visible than businesses with the free plan.
Pro Tip: To help your photos perform better, list your photos under as many relevant tags as possible — BUT not more than those that are truly relevant. This is something you can do with just the free membership. Be careful though; we know you want to just tag your photos in every single category to get more views. However, if someone searches for outdoor living design ideas and your photo of a master bath project pops up, the customer will just scroll right past it. Marketing is about being in the right place, with the right message, at the right time. That is, content AND context. Be creative with your tags, but keep them hyper-relevant so that you don't pay for unqualified, irrelevant attention.
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Show me the numbers.
A while back, Houzz introduced a new analytics tool called Pro+ Dashboard. It allowed businesses to track (to a certain degree) the progress of their profile by examining data like the number of ad impressions (or the number of times they were shown), the number of clicks your profile received, and how well your photos performed.
While the ability to track some data is helpful, Houzz’s analytics tool is not capable of tracking arguably the most important factor for capitalization on your leads — where the leads come from. Many contractors have raised concerns that since they can’t decipher through which features they are gaining leads, they can’t tell if it’s Pro+ that helped them out or if they could have landed the same business with the free membership. Therein lies the problem with Houzz advertising. With more effective contractor marketing like paid Facebook and Instagram Ads, for instance, the advertiser can control all the levers. We can see and put to use all the data, and manipulate creative, targeting, budgets, and campaign structures to drive ever better return on investment. We can report on all of the important performance indicators, and with cutting-edge analytics and form and call tracking, we know exactly where each lead is coming from. That is not possible with Houzz - it’s a locked-up tight system in which they only reveal the information they want to. In today’s world, that lack of transparency in digital marketing is less than ideal.
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But really-does advertising on Houzz actually work?
Every business in the remodeling industry is unique, so promoted ads on Houzz may prove beneficial for your company, or they may fall flat. But one thing is for sure - building a well-developed, voraciously interactive free profile that includes promptly replying to questions and posting high-quality photos (tagged in relevant categories) is a necessary first step. Be sure to make it easy and efficient to contact your business. Get customer reviews on your profile.
After your foundational profile is developed, you could do a trial on paid Houzz advertising. The budget necessary to test things out will depend on how many service categories you want to promote and how large you would like your geographical coverage radius to be (a recent company recorded paying approximately $1,500 per month to cover around 6k miles).
Or, you could lean on HALSTEAD. Because we have the data from hundreds of industry-specific case studies (yes, we only work in the landscape and design/build industries), we can help you speed things along. We've seen inside a lot of both free - and paid - Houzz accounts.
What are the results we’ve seen first-hand? We have yet to see a reason to pay for Houzz Advertising. Now, note that this is as of late 2019. As with all things digital and marketing, we never write anything off completely. Things change, platforms change, and consumer behavior changes. We often say we don’t offer digital marketing, we offer construction marketing. Along those lines, we didn’t just decided that there are better ways to spend clients’ marketing budgets than Houzz, we did tests. Let the data speak is our motto. A few years back, we did a test for an Architect client. He has been paying for 3 regions for years, but was never happy with the amount of tracking data he received, and never seemed to think he was getting much of value in return for the spend. So, we compiled what little data Houzz did provide from the Dashboard, and shut off the paid ads. We optimized thoroughly the organic, free profile - tags and well-written, optimized copy everywhere. We waited and tracked via Google Analytics and the Houzz platform. We saw nothing but a dramatic drop in completely bogus leads. The valuable aspects of the platform continued to perform for the firm.
So if and when you try to cancel — the Houzz rep will always try to give you a deal for half-off the regions you had previously paid for, to keep you active. Every car salesman tactic — you'll see it (if you haven't before). And of course, like always, the Houzz rep will want to schedule a call with you to discuss anything — even something that should be addressed via email. So while it may hard to cancel, we certainly recommend you diving into the data of what’s producing true ROI. As of 2019 it doesn't pay to play on Houzz.
So what did we do with the extra budget from our clients’ experiments? We re-allocated them to efforts that drive big return.
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Better contractor marketing: Alternatives to advertising on Houzz.
Allocating your marketing budget elsewhere can lead to much bigger returns across the board. Keep that free Houzz profile updated and optimized, and let’s talk strategy. Effective construction marketing today involves numerous components working together seamlessly, working towards a common goal. That’s why we call them systems at HALSTEAD. The main pillars of the strategies we deliver for our clients - the ones that generate reviews from owners saying they’ve never seen results like the ones we deliver before - are organic search, paid search, paid social, and content development.