Video Transcription

Good morning and welcome to another episode of Tech Tuesday presented by Delta Media Group where we know that if you're invited to a festival at a commune that your Swedish friend grew up in by your Swedish friend don't go. So, today we are going to go in and take a look at a part of the system that we haven't done many Tech Tuesdays on really or haven't done one in awhile but we're going to take a look at listing settings and listing search settings. Well, not really listing settings but listing search settings so that you can see what can be customized as far as the search goes on your website and how all that stuff works. So, let's go into the Delta Net and take a look.

I'm pretty sure we did a video on this awhile ago but I know we've made a lot of updates to the system so it seemed like a timely piece to go in and take a look at. So, to get there we're going to go down to preferences and then the first of the two sets of search settings can be found here under home search. There we are. Now you can see here that I have a default state set on this site. When you go here for the first time this is going to say use site default. So if I hit that and save it there we go. So now what this page is doing is this setting is basically telling your website to use whatever the company site is using and most of the time you probably won't have a reason to change it but if you do you can go in here and you can choose a state and then that will open up several more settings for you.

So, I'll go ahead and choose Ohio because I'm in Ohio and as we go down the line you can see a bunch of other options opened up for me. Now I will tell you that most of these options are related to a specific advanced search page that not a lot of your sites will be using these days. So, most of these search settings will probably not affect the search template that you're on. However, what they would do is if you are still using that advanced search page that these settings were originally created for this would set all the defaults in that advanced search form.

Now, most of you at this point have gone to our responsive search platform and you don't actually have that advanced search page for these defaults to take effect on. So, in that case they only affect very specific things. So for example, I'll go down here and I will pick a county so we'll do Adams county because it was the first one on the list and down here, price low, price high, search type, and search area don't really have anything to effect in this case. Because if you don't have that advanced search form there are no defaults, no place to put those defaults. But if I want to limit my high end home search which would be like that elegant homes is I think the name of the predefined page. Or if you want to affect the new listings page that you would also create through the predefined pages system what you can do is change these to yes and then it will default both of those pages to the county you have selected here.

So, to make that a little clearer I'll update that and then we'll take a look. So that's updated. If I go to my page here I'll go ahead and reset this, there we go. And what you'll generally want to do is just go to your overviews page under a website and then overviews and then click preview website at the top and that will also do what I just did to reset it. So now here, if I go to buyers and then down to property search you can see I have a new listings link and an elegant homes link. So now if I click on the new listings link instead of being a wide open search of everywhere like it was before if I click on areas you can see that Adams county is defaulted there.

Now if I go to buyer's, property search, and elegant homes we'll see the same thing. So it will bring up my elegant home search which is otherwise limited as the elegant home search always is, it's just based on price. And we go to areas, you can see that Adams county is in there also. So, that is how that particular default county can affect the new research platform. Just to give you a quick idea on those, those pages are found under website and pages and if I go to new page and then click on predefined page both of those pages are selectable under this predefined page length dropdown. So that's where those come from. Now if you just set up your own search and call it new listings then yeah that would affect it. This only affects the pays that you create this way. There we go. And then filling out the rest of this and saving it. Now I already have one so there's already going to be one in my list over here. So there we are, there's new listings. So that's the one that's actually on my webpage.

All right. So, back to search settings, back to preferences, home search. There we go. All right. So, I'll take my default county off of here because we've seen what that does. Now the other piece you have here is default results view type. Now that one is actually available even if you are not using your own page defaults or for the rest of the search settings. So we'll save that and you can see that that gallery view map view dropdown is still in here. So, we'll go ahead and change that to map view and update it. And what this does is set the default view that your customers will find themselves on when they run a search on your website. So, go back to the homepage here, we'll reset.

Now in this case, keep in mind that you might not see it right away if you're testing it on your own website because you have to clear your cookies in order to see it. The reason for that is if I'm a customer and I go to your website and I run a search and then on that search page I choose the view that I want. So, let's say I go there and I decide that you have a defaulting to map view and I switch to gallery view. For me, I'm going to see gallery view by default when I come back to your site and do more searches. It's just new customers will default to that map view that you've chosen. So now if I go down here and just click on search there we go. Now you can see it started us on map view instead of gallery view. So from here I can still switch back and forth so we have this change results view and I can switch over to gallery. But that setting allows me to determine where customers will start when they come to my site for the first time.

So, let's go back over there and I'll go ahead and change it back to gallery so that I don't forget. There we go. Now, the next thing we have on this page are actual search limitations. So, what this allows you to do is set your site data to only return listings from certain areas. So right now we have a search limit in place where I'm saying limit it to just the state of Ohio. If I want to narrow it further I can click on this dropdown and I can go down here and I can select several counties and say that I just want those counties to be able to be returned in my search. Now I can also go down here and I can add additional limits. So if, say I'm right on the edge of a state line and I want to cover counties in two different states but I want to make sure that my site can only return listings that are in those counties I can do that here.

So it would be impossible for me to be on the border between Alaska and Ohio but we'll try it anyway. Aleutians east, Aleutians west, there we go. Add a new search limit. There you have it. So now I have an additional search limit in here that will further restrict my site to only returning listings from this area. So, you can see this one is not active right now and this one is active. So, that means that if I try to run a search on my site it's going to try to limit me to just Aleutians east and Aleutians west. So, I'll go ahead and delete that before I forget. But the idea there is that by default your site is going to return listings from anywhere that you have data for, so basically everywhere that's covered by your MLS. Potentially Delta client listings also so other Delta clients, it may also be able to return listings from those areas. This allows you to narrow your site down so that you're only going to get requests for listings that are right in your service area.

All right. So the next thing we have here is our Google map default view. So what this does is just set the default view for your map search. You just move this around however you would like. We can zoom out or zoom in. And basically you just center your map wherever you would like to set people up with that default view. So this is again it's a default and I would just hit update map default to update it. There we go. And what that affects is when someone visits your map search for the first time and that could either be by going to, if you have a link under here under buyers, so I have 100 buyers property search and map search that takes me there. But then I could also have my quick search defaulting to map search as we already saw and if I'm doing that it's also going to center on that view.

One thing to keep in mind there is that the view that the user is seeing is going to depend a lot on the size of their web browser and whether they're viewing it on mobile. So, what you really want to pay attention to with this map when setting the default is what it's centered on because that's what it's going to maintain. Based on the browser size this box might be a different shape or it could be a different size all together like if you're viewing it on a mobile device so but it'll stay centered on whatever you center it on in this default view.

All right. So the next thing we have in mind are if we go to preferences and down to quick search we can see all the quick search settings related to the website. So, from here at the very top I can limit my auto completer to just specific states. When I talk about the auto completer what I'm talking about is this homepage quick search field here. So, if I type in Canton and all the results it returns. So, I'm looking at that there. And then also, if I go to my search results page, there we go, and I click up here it's affecting this one as well. So, you can see all the options that appear there. So this is the quick search auto completer that this page basically is designed to effect.

So we'll go back home. All right. Now in the quick search settings the first thing allows me to just limit that auto complete to specific states. Again by default it's going to return everything that your site has data for basically based on your MLS membership. What you can do is if your MLS is showing or spans multiple states or you have MLS' in different States but you want your auto completer to only show results from the one you can use this setting to make that limitation. And you can also have multiple states in here. So if I hold down command or control, if I was on a windows machine, you can see that I can select multiple. So again, if I'm on the the border between two states and I want it to be able to return both that's how I would do that.

Now next we have the priority order for states and what this determines is what shows up in the top results section. So you saw here when I type in Canton I have a top results section. There we go. I have this top results section and then after that it breaks it down by state and then further breaks it down by county. So top results is what people will use the most. More often than not that returns the thing that they're looking for so that's where they'll make their selection. In order to help that section really function as well as it can that is what this selection is for.

So you want to make sure that you have a top state set here. If you don't it should be using what the company site is using at this point. So if you're in here for your agent's site and the company site has one set you should still be okay and you can see when I type in here I do have a top result section that's showing me only listings in Ohio. So, it looks like we're good there even though I don't have one set. So, most of these settings are about differing from the company site if you want.

So, to use this section you just go down and find the state that you want and you just drag it to the top. So if I wanted Colorado to the top I would just drag it up there and then there you go. I can also have multiple states up there again if I'm doing business in more than one state and I want them both to be able to show up in my top results section I can drag them both to the top like this.

Now the next thing on this page is the always show street name and number for selected states and what this does is further point out listings that are within the states you have selected. This works just like the other state selector so you just click on the states you want and if you want multiple you hold down control or command and you get multiple here. It shows command because I'm using a Mac but if you were using a Windows machine it would actually say control here.

Next, you can change how subdivisions are labeled in your quick search. So, if I go here and I type in, if I can think of a subdivision. It's test data so it's a wild guess for me. Neighborhood boundary. Nope, that's not it. Well you can see where it says neighborhood boundary here and then it has the neighborhood boundary name. If I type in a city you can see the same kind of thing. So if I type in city you can see city is the type of search and then Canton is the term used for that type of search. So these can also say subdivision. If you don't want it to say subdivision and you want that text to be something different that's what this setting would do. So you would change this and instead of saying subdivision Canton it would say whatever you type here colon Canton but it's searching the same data that way. So, it just allows you to customize how things appear in the quick search.

Now the next thing you have is if you want to eliminate certain types of results from the quick search you can do that with this section. So right now anything highlighted is something that's removed. So if I type in a search term into the quick search it's not going to return matches for post office or individual schools. If I wanted to take zip code out of there, I don't know why I would but if I did, I could hold down control or command and I could click that and take that out as well. So then, with that out of there if I type in a zip code, and I didn't save it so there we go, so I type in a zip code I get zip code results. If I chose to exclude zip code than someone could type in a zip code and they wouldn't see any results in the quick search for it.

Zip code's a bad example because you're generally not going to remove that but you might remove neighborhood or borough depending on where you are and where your market is. Some people even choose to remove school district. So there are some markets where that's very important, other markets where it's not so important. So they don't want it to show up in the quick search because showing things that aren't important to people you can just muddy up the works there. So, that is how that works.

Next we can set the default for search statuses that'll be returned by the quick search. So by default it's just active for sale. If I want it to also return coming soon and contingent again I could hold down the control or command and select those as well. After making any changes like this I would go to the bottom and save it and that would make the default for the quick search also return those listing statuses. So if I go here and I click on search now it returns the results and because of what the defaults are set to now if I go to listing type only active will be selected. So, from the search results page I can add in contingents and coming soons or whatever else I want there but if I want those to be included by default I can use this setting here and then when I ran that search those items would immediately be in the list.

Next you can choose whether you want it to auto submit your quick search selection. So what this does is right now it's set to false so what that means is if I go to the quick search and, the home page quick search, and I type in a quick search or a search term I choose the one I want. So we'll just do Canton. You can see that I've selected it, it's added it to the form, but it hasn't actually run the search. It won't run it until I click on search now. There we go. So now it runs it. If I change that setting to true what it will do instead is as soon as I make the selection it'll automatically submit it. So if I go to Canton as soon as I click here it would automatically submit the form and take me to the search results. So, that is what this dropdown does. You just change it to true and then as soon as you select from the quick search or from the auto completer it'll take you through to the results.

Now lastly, we have the auto completer example. Now what this does is ... Don't be alarmed by the fact that it is empty or it looks empty. If I go here and I click on that form but don't enter anything you can see I have these search examples that pop up. By default these are going to be just Canton, Ohio and Canton, Ohio area type results because this is just what we filled in. If you want to customize those to something more specific to your area assuming that you are not in Canton, Ohio, then you can use those settings to customize this. So to change it I would go over here, I would type in the name of a city, I would type in my state name, zip code, and I would fill in as many of these fields as I want and it'll show up in my example section each thing that I type in. So, it just allows you to customize those examples.

One word of warning about this is that it won't display what your current settings are. So if you go in here and let's say I fill in half of these fields, I go to the bottom and I save it, I'll need to reset my session so it might take a little bit of time for it to show up on the front side. But once it does it will ultimately show up on the front side. Where it won't show up is here. So if I go back to this page these fields will still be blank. But even though they're blank doesn't mean that there's nothing entered there or it doesn't mean that there's nothing saved. So, something to keep in mind when you use these particular settings.

So there you go. You now know everything that I know about the search system settings in the Delta Net on the agent side. So you see some of the flexibility that you have there and what you can do as far as feeding your customers to a default set of search results or a default search view. So there you have it. So as always thanks a lot for joining me, and if you have any questions, concerns, comments, feel free to send an email to support@deltagroup.com or give us a call and we can walk you through any of this or anything else. So thanks a lot for joining me and I will see you again next week.