Advertise on Space Agent?

Hello, All, I keep getting advertisements to list my Airbnb on Space Agent. Has anyone else heard of this or tried it? I’m wondering what’s in it for them. Thanks for any insight.

Hi Herb,

Hopefully some of our users will chime in too. But to answer your question, it might help if I clarify what we do and how Space Agent works.

We help hosts (like yourself) advertise their Airbnb’s (and other services like HomeAway, VRBO, FlipKey) on social media. Right now we’re advertising on Facebook, with more networks coming later. You could say that we’re an Agency for your Space :wink:

Similar to an ad agency, we get paid by charging a small percentage of the ad budget. In exchange, we’re helping you build your ad, target it to people interested in traveling to your location and managing everything else throughout the life of the campaign. All you have to do is enter the link to your listing. We send weekly ad reports and you can always see how your ad is performing in real time using our dashboard.

The ad links to your listing. Every time someone clicks on the ad, they’re being sent directly to your Airbnb listing.

The benefit to advertising is that you’re reaching potential guests outside of Airbnb. You don’t have to wait for them to find you.

In terms of success, the majority of our clients end up running multiple ads with us!

If you haven’t already, you can begin building your ad for free. Just enter the URL to your Airbnb at http://www.SpaceAgent.io

Hopefully that answers your question!

-Stephen @ Space Agent
http://www.SpaceAgent.io

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Hello everyone,

I’m pinging this thread, because I was just looking at the Space Agent page.
They don’t seem to have any customer references, and their rates are quite steep. $50 per week or $150 per month recurring seems a bit high for an unproven/unknown service. If I were them, I’d ask for a small percentage of bookings. I think more people would try them if they did that.

In any case, has anyone tried this service, and if so, what were the results?

I will soon use Lodgify.
I don’t see any raeson to use such expensive service plus booking.com (price guarantee) requests you to have the same price as other platform

Hi @sylvainbg,

Thanks for the reply, but I don’t follow. Logify appears to be a site where one can create a rental website.

I also don’t follow this. What does booking.com have to do with this?

Space Agent is an advertising service.

You have the rental website and the synch of calendar between all plaforms (exemple booking.com, expedia…)

I had thought it will an other company that had similar offer. I thought they were charging an extra price in the other platforms in order to get there advertising service fees.

Edit. they are only offering ad in facebook where I don’t see it worth it.

To all my fellow ABB hosts, facebook has many FREE classes to teach you how to design ads, how to choose an audience, how to understand the results of your ads.
I can send you links if you PM me.
This service may be able to do things for you if you are not tech savvy at all, but if you managed to set up a listing or two on ABB, you have the ability to learn from the free videos, then make a decision as to whether or not you need a paid service that has professional ad personnel.

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I am quite suprised that Facebook can give good results.

As a traveller, I always want to look for different property for an area I am interested in.

I have good results with google adwords when people are looking for bed and breakfast in my city.

I don’t know if Facebook can give good results. I talked earlier to a few people on this site, who indicated that it seemed to be working for them. But I have not tried it myself.

I see. I thought Google adwords would be too expensive. Can you give details on how you set this up?

Well I had decided on different key words like:

bed and breakfast + name of my city
Bnb +name of my city
etc…

I have a total budget of 3 dollars a day max and 0,50 USD per click. It’s cost me around 20-30 dollars a month, I am usually in fourth place of ranking of the add (much cheaper than as first).I got very good return (gota client that booked for 1,5 month with it and some others, we started in april our place)

The most important I think it’s not too much expense per click and you need to get quality of your keyword at the maximum (mine are 9 or 10).

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That’s interesting. Did you use Airbnb itself as a keyword? I suppose the amount paid per click is determined by Google?[quote=“sylvainbg, post:10, topic:1309”]
you need to get quality of your keyword at the maximum (mine are 9 or 10).
[/quote]
I’m not sure what you mean by this. What does keyword “quality” mean? Can you elaborate?

You are deciding the maximum amount you want to pay per click, then it’s depends the competition the actual price you are paying. I didn’t used air bnb as keyword (I was thinking was will a person that want to stay in our city will write).

Let me give you an exemple, as a bed and breakfast or equivalent if you are chosing a keyword like something totaly different (ex play poker), your quality will be very very low. In order to get a click you will have to pay a lot more than a competitor for the same keyword.
It’s important to have keywords that are corresponding to your activity as it’s make lower your costs for a click.

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I see. It’s interesting that you have had good results using this method. Perhaps I should consider it. Has anyone else had good results with Google adwords?

We yse Ad Words and definitely noticed a huge bump in views. Theres no real way to tell if the views convert to reservations, but we are getting more eyeballs seeing our listings.

Hi @azreala,

Can you give more details? Like what keywords/phrases you used? I spent some time working on their form earlier. I might give it a go and see if it makes a difference.

@faheem,

You can see a handful of quotes from our clients at the bottom of our homepage at https://spaceagent.io/ and some of the ads we’ve ran on our How it Works page here: https://spaceagent.io/how-it-works.jsp. In terms of pricing, after much testing, we found $50/week $150/month mins to give the best results for the majority of our clients. (Keep in mind the majority of those dollars goes directly to buying ad space on Facebook for your ad.) While we’d love to be able to offer a lower cost option in the future, but this helps us drive the most quality people (more on that below). In terms of history, we’ve been helping hosts for over a year now, advertising listings to millions of people. We’ve also been in the online ad space for much longer, as our parent company MarketChorus, helps big brands target and run online ad campaigns. Hope that helps! Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if we can help answer any other questions!

@sylvainbg,

If you’re interested in using Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest just let us know. We’ve ran ads on all of these platforms with clients before. Pinterest has been very interesting.

@brook2adks & @sylvainbg,
As for advertising on Facebook yourself, yes I agree you can definitely get cheap clicks on Facebook if that’s your goal. We’ve been working with Facebook ads for years and our strategy is to pay careful attention to quality over quantity. The idea for Space Agent is to drive bookings - not brand advertising using mass impressions or cheap clicks. We try to focus on audience that will have a real interest in the property and hopefully convert.

Just as an example, if you are currently running promoted posts or website click ads from the ads manager, you may be familiar with placement options. We almost never run on ‘audience network’ - these are banner and interstitial ads on mobile apps. Running ads here (the FB default) will get you tons of cheap clicks, but our tests (and many other ad tech experts) will tell you these placements just do not convert for direct response. It’s also so plentiful (ie, jillions of impressions available) that they are dirt cheap, but you very much get what you pay for (misclicks, fat-fingers, time-on-site less than 1 second on avg, etc).

If you’ve already got some digital marketing chops or like to dig in and spend the time/dollars to get real value out of FB ads I highly encourage it. It’s super fascinating. I’d be happy to share some of our other best practices if you are interested. Space Agent was built to help less-expert marketers and we like to think we provide great targeting, service and simplicity. But we’re also renters and a couple of us are owners (which is part of our origin story), so happy to help folks where we can.

Hi @SpaceAgent,

Sorry, I missed those references.

However, I took a look at the linked listings, and I noticed that they are relatively expensive, $200 or above daily in every case. I suppose this is not particularly out of the ordinary in the USA, and at those prices, $50 a week or $150 a month does not look like that much. But I advertise my listing at $30/35 a day. For that price your charges look like a lot.

As I said in my post above, I think a business model which was based on a percentage of bookings would make more sense from the client point of view across a range of listing prices. But of course, I don’t know how your advertising model works.

I totally understand on cost. We’ve tried running cheaper ad spends but they typically just don’t deliver.

On those linked listings, they don’t represent the entire range of what we advertise. We’ve had many clients well under $100/night run ads. Right now we have two ads running for couches(!) with a nightly rate in the $35-$60 range and they’ve run half a dozen or so ads with us in the past. For these, one booking for multiple nights covers that cost and then some. We’ve also seen the additional traffic to a listing help improve search rankings on Airbnb.

On % of bookings, we do work with select booking sites as partners to offer an integrated advertising option - for these we are happy to do this type of payment model. We are working towards this with a couple big sites and we very much hope to have this option with them soon. We need to be part of their conversion tracking and payment process to do it effectively.

Hi @SpaceAgent,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Here are some followup questions and comments.

In that case, I think it would be a good idea to get testimonials from some cheaper listings.

If you set up such a system, I would be interested. Is there somewhere I could sign up to be notified when such a system was in place? And do you have any kind of timeline when such an arrangement with Airbnb might happen?

Also, note that I’m in Bombay, India. Do you handle listings in India, and if so, would you advertise them differently from those in the US (for example), and if so, how? I’m not asking you to reveal your secrets - I just want an idea of how you would go about getting the attention of prospective renters.

Glad to help! Shoot us an email at info@spaceagent.io and we’ll be in touch when we have more info.

We tailor every ad to the listing, taking into account location, events in your area, previous guests and the type of listing itself among other criteria. We typically use the English language version of your listing(.com), advertised to English speakers, however any combination is possible.