Message in a Bottle - Redfin Real Estate News

Message in a Bottle

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Updated on October 5th, 2020

We’ve been experimenting with messages in various locations across Redfin.com. Recently, we placed an announcement in a message box at the top of our map page. Once the box is closed, it disappears until we run a new message.

When we released the latest version of Redfin.com, we ran our first message this space announcing our new neighborhood pages. The text was: “New! Pricing trends for every neighborhood. And more.” With “neighborhood,” we linked to a respective city page for each market. With “more,” we linked to the Redfin blog post about the features of the latest release.

map-page-message-box-red-oval-small.png

We were worried that placing an announcement across the top of the map would annoy people searching for homes. We ran the message for a week and tracked how often people dismissed the box and clicked-through to the links.

Click-Through Rate
The total click-through rate (CTR) for the message box was high (1.95%), higher than any other message location on Redfin.com. For the “neighborhood” anchor text, Seattle (2.93%) had the highest CTR and Southern California (1.35%) the lowest. The anchor text linking to the blog post had a CTR of 0.15%, which is not surprising given that it was the second link in the message.

Dismissal Rate
The dismissal rate for the message box was 1.50%. DC had the highest rate (1.86%) and Boston had the lowest (1.08%). The dismissal rate was lower than we expected. The low rate is likely due to the fact that users: 1) weren’t seeing the box; 2) were unable to find the X to close the box; or 3) didn’t mind having the box on the screen.

We’re thinking about trying out a few different treatments for the box- different colors and different length messages to test how the dismissal and click-through rates change.

What about you? Did you notice the message? Did you leave it open or click it away?

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