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Project Overview
Domain.com.au is one of the largest property portal in Australia with most comprehensive mobile products offerings. Our mobile site and apps are very functional with fantastic on-the-road tools that help our users with their property hunting and inspections. With Domain traffic from mobile devices now surpasses the desktop traffic, our audience have definitely migrated to mobile technology.
Organisation
Team
Damon Pezaro, Matt Siddons, Henrique Marassi, Kon Konovalov, Kate Mack, Irina Belova, Scott Talbot, Gary Lo, Johan Sugiarto, Praveen Prasannan and plenty more talented people in Domain team
Project Brief
Our Domain iPhone app was first built in 2009 as the first major real estate app in Australia. 5 years later, in 2014 we have 2.7 million downloads for our apps across iPhone, iPad and Android - that means approximately 1 in 8 Australians have downloaded our app, and this is excluding the usage of our m-site. Our mobile site has 1.6m visits by 380k unique users in June’14.
Our focus on the mobile products are to ensure that 1. Users are able to perform core function of property search wherever they are, and 2. Sync all of their actions to user’s account irrespective of platforms 3. Provide an over and beyond service by assisting users with extra tools such as ability to upload their own inspection photos, notes, and fill in inspection checklist, even to getting the nearest mortgage lender information easily
Project Need
Domain mobile products have continuously evolved. Since its conception, we tracked our audience behaviour, industry trends, monitor feedback and learn what exactly our users want to have from a property portal app.
With these observations, we introduced innovative products such as Finger Search - an Australian first product where users can draw on our map certain area they want to search. This enables our users to search on certain street by drawing a straight line, or a certain boundary area by say drawing a circle or rectangle. This feature is being used 200,000 times per month.
We introduced Notifications on our Android app - again, first real estate app in Australia that pushes alert to users when there are new properties for their saved search - we sent 45,000 notifications in the first month.
Our apps also aim to help users to personalise their property search. There are a lot of considerations when buying a property and a 15 minutes inspection can be too short of a time to make one of the biggest purchase decision. So we introduced tools to help users during the inspections: Allowing upload of photos taken during inspections, ability to write notes, and inspection checklist which help users to rate every aspect of the house and give it an overall score.
In summary, our mobile products are continuously evolving. We have been Australian first for many of our features that our users prove to love and really use.
User Experience
Great user experience is the core of our product. We tested our products wireframes and design with our (internal & external) stakeholders prior to releasing them. We have done user sessions group, a/b testing, and beta releases to gather feedback.
As a result, we have mobile products with higher engagement than our website because it is just very easy and faster to use. Our mobile users returns to the app more frequently, they also dwell deep into the app more than our website users - number of shortlisted properties on mobile is almost 5 times more than the website.
What we found with our multiplatform products is that it touches our users and fulfill their property searching needs on different time of the day and different day of the week. On weekdays during transit time, our mobile products are more frequently used, but at lunch time, our desktop is still the preferred platform while at night, tablets are the most popular device. On Saturdays, with the inspections, both smartphones and tablets are peaking in usage and engagement.
From these we are pleased to know that we have provided our users with a great user experience on all of our products irrespective of platforms and allow users to continuously be engaged with our brand.
Project Marketing
With half of total traffic coming from mobile devices, we’ve adopted a mobile-first strategy and have developed a range of technology capabilities to drive mobile search, usability, conversion
and targeting of prospective users with highly personalised advertising.
This strategy involves investment to develop our wider marketing technology stack into an integrated platform. Measuring migration and conversion of users across platforms, channels and campaigns to give us a post attribution view of platform consumption habits.
We informed our passionate user database of the significant update to the mobile products and we spread the news through our sales team to agents as well. We believe if the agents are happy to use and evangelise our apps, then the property seekers they engage with will be informed as well.
On above the line advertising, we used mainstream media including TV ads, outdoors large format billboards, bus stop posters, retails screens, transit and more. On the digital side, display ad banners in msite, websites and apps, email, social, video and search advertising rounded out the channels used to help build the personalised campaign and connection with users.
Relevant messaging and re-engagement of users throughout the property buying journey through mobile is a priority for help us maintain our position as Australia's favourite property app.*
*By highest consumer ratings for iPhone, iPad and Android as at 11/7/14
Project Privacy
All data collected by Domain from the users adheres to our Fairfax Media company wide ”Privacy policy" and “Conditions of use”. In Domain apps and website, links are available in the Login and Sign Up pages. We have also available a link “How we treat your information”, to allow the user to read up on this before submission.
Best Audience Migration to Mobile Technology
This category recognises migration of an audience from a traditional media to a mobile platform.
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