We're starting to get a bit of a problem with what we're calling "drive-by advertisers".
The root of the problem is that people have a low perceived value placing an ad on Rentability, because it's free to advertise your property with us. There are lots of other free ad sites out there that, because they are free, can't afford to do any promotion and get very little traffic. Holiday home owners will place ads on these sites, but using an R-selection strategy - basically making lots of adverts on a lot of sites, but putting very little effort into their ad because they don't expect much return. This is actually a false perception of Rentability - although it's free to advertise with us we aren't a "free" site (although we give away so many credits to people who sign up now that we don't expect the early adopters to pay anything for a couple of years). We charge for enquiries, so we can afford to actively promote the site and we've worked very hard to make a site which makes your advert look as good as it can.
The upshot for us is that we're getting quite a few ads which just have a single photo and some copied-and-pasted text (sometimes, bizarrely, ALL IN CAPS or with messy line breaks and lots of spelling mistakes). These scruffy ads will bring down the quality of the site if we don't do something about them, and potential holiday home renters will get a bad first impression of our site and leave before seeing the better adverts.
It's a difficult problem for us because we don' want to be turning advertisers away, but we have to find a way to get them to invest a bit more in their advertisement. The solution we've come up with, which we'll probably be implementing in the next few weeks, is to have a "adScore". Each advert on the site will be scored according to a whole bundle of criteria - for instance are there spelling mistakes ? Have they made a Property Tour ? Is the text all in caps ? Is there more than one photo ? etc. etc. The total score for the advert will then be used to bias that advertisements' position in the search result listings.
So - we won't stop people putting crappy adverts on the site, but if they don't put any effort into making their ad then it's unlikely to appear high in the search results - it'll always be last on the list. This gives people an incentive to improve their ad, and it means that visitors coming to Rentability will see the most attractive adverts first - which hopefully means they will be more likely to stick around and actually book one of our advertisers properties.
