December 2010 IDX Broker Agent Newsletter

Welcome to our December Agent Training Newsletter!

This month's newsletter will go over how to capture more leads using IDX Broker features. We'll also look at more effective ways to use advanced fields, and how to set up and customize dynamic title and meta tags.

In Jan 2011 we will be in New York for Inman Connect in New York City. Stop by our demo booth throughout the show and we'll answer any questions you may have. Our CEO will be on the "Designing Great Experiences" panel, Wednesday, January 12th from 10:50-11:35am. If you plan to attend the show, you're welcome to RSVP via the IDX Team Facebook Page. We look forward to meeting you!

Best regards,
The IDX Team
help@idxbroker.com

Customizing Your Account For Lead Capture

You IDX Broker account includes a set of Lead Management features that allow you to modify your lead capture settings. These settings can be found in the Lead Registration Preferences area of your control panel.

These settings give you the ability to fine-tune your lead capture settings in a way that delivers the most leads to your lead management tab. You can either "force" or "request" visitors to register, at which point your search, results, details, or photo gallery pages bec. For property detail pages, you can specify how many listings you want your site visitors to see before prompting them with a registration form.

The force setting requires the site visitor to fill out and submit a sign-up form before navigating past that page. For example, if you force users to register after seeing two details pages, they must fill out and submit the sign-up form before they are able to see additional details pages.
The request setting will prompt your site visitors with a sign-up form and also a link they can use to bypass the form and continue browsing without giving up any information.

Which settings capture the most leads?

If you are new to IDX Broker, or are just starting to explore the Lead Management features in your account, choosing your lead capture settings may be challenging. While these settings provide a lot of control over the functionality of your front-end IDX pages, they don't provide you with the information you need to know where to start. Over on Active Rain, we crunched some numbers to show you which lead capture settings work best. The results we found were surprising. According to our analysis, forcing registration after the 2nd or 8th details page may produce the most leads if you wish to force your site visitors to register. If you would rather request registration, you may have the best results requesting registration after the first details page viewed, or before they are able to view photo galleries.

It may take some time and experimentation to find the lead capture settings that work best for your website, and your market. However, this information should provide a good place to start. Have you had success with lead capture settings completely different than we've described above? Come on over to Active Rain and tell us about it.

Advanced Field Types

Many of you like to feature custom links on your home page. Often these are custom links broken out by neighborhood or subdivision, price range, or any combination of predefined search criteria. When building custom links using a field like subdivision, it can be tricky to get the search results just the way the client wants. Some MLS's present their Subdivision, Neighborhood, or Community Name fields to listing agents as free text fields, and often those fields do not apply any standards to the data Agents are able to add to the MLS. When this data comes over to us via IDX, we may be forced to display a very long list of Subdivisions, including many variations of the same Subdivision name.

Sometimes you will need IDX Broker to pull listings that include a particular word in their Subdivision name, and sometimes you will want IDX Broker to only return listings that match a precise search term. Below, we'll explore three different ways that IDX Broker can be used to find a particular predefined search result. We will use Mid Florida Regional data and the Subdivision field in our examples.

On your Advanced Search Management screen in IDX Broker, you will see a small dropdown menu above each field. This menu gives you several search "type" options for that field. By default, most of your advanced fields will be presented as a list of values. You can easily change a list field into an open text field. The three options we'll focus on for this field are Wild Text, Text, and Keyword:

Advanced Fields Options

Wild Text will search for listings containing the word or phrase entered into the field. For example, if we type in "Brookside" into the Subdivision field for Mid Florida Regional, we'll get listings with subdivision names that contain the word "Brookside." So, on our results page, we'll see listings from the Brookside, Brookside 1, Brookside Bluff, etc. subdivisions.

Text will search for listings that match the word or phrase entered into the field exactly. For example, if we type in "Driftwood" into the Subdivision field for Mid Florida Regional, we'll only get listing with "Driftwood" as the subdivision name. We will not see listings in Driftwood Ests, Driftwood Isles, etc. in our search results.

Keyword allows you to enter in multiple search terms separated by spaces and acts as an OR operator. For example, if we type in "Crystal Waters" into the Subdivision field for Mid Florida Regional, we'll get listings with subdivisions containing either "Crystal" or "Waters." If you want to search for the phrase "Crystal Waters" using a keyword search, you can place quotes around the search term.

Using the appropriate option for your advanced fields will ensure that the correct listings are consistently pulled from our data on a daily basis and prevent ongoing link maintenance. Knowing how our different search functions work is the key to creating custom links that display only the listings that you would like to present to your clients.

SEO Options: Dynamic Title and Meta Tags

One easy way to make your IDX pages even more search engine friendly is to take a few minutes to customize the dynamic title and meta tags of your property detail pages. Using dynamic title and meta tags will make search engines more likely to crawl your IDX pages by providing unique content for each detail page title and description. Your dynamic title and meta tags can be set up in the SEO Options area on the Global Preferences page in IDX Broker.

The first step is to switch all three of these preferences to "Yes" to activate them. Then, enter in the content you would like to use for your title and meta tags into the boxes provided. You can use a combination of static text and available dynamic tags to create unique and relevant content for each of your detail pages. Once activated, IDX Broker will automatically insert the contents of the dynamic tags in place of the title and meta tags you are using in your global or page wrapper.

You can find a full, in depth walk-through on how to use IDX Broker's dynamic title and meta tags here in our online Knowledge Base.

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