The Hills Sends MyNewPlace Traffic Skyward

April 24th, 2008 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Celebrity Apartments | 2 Comments »

Recently, MyNewPlace noticed that a new keyword, “Hillside Villas” had popped up on our analytics report and had been driving a noticeable amount of organic traffic to our detailed rental listing page that featured that property. “Hillside Villas” was, by far, the most searched of all rental property specific keywords.

It took us about one Google search for “Hillside Villas” to figure out what was driving all the traffic. Apparently, that apartment complex is home to Lauren Conrad and Adriana Partridge, stars of MTV’s popular Los Angeles based show The Hills.

Since the show reveals the actual location of where each scene takes place, restaurants, bars and apartment buildings, get a lot of (free?) publicity. Thus, when a scene occurs at Lauren and Adriana’s apartment, “Hillside Villas” is displayed at the bottom of the screen. We believe this to be directly responsible for the recent upsurge in organic traffic.

Traffic from typed-Keyword phrase “Hillside Villas”

It is not very often that one is able to actually visualize the connection between people at home in front of their computers and how that directly leads to patterns in a search traffic report.

We can tell when episodes are, without even consulting the TV Guide. From the graph, it appears that the season started on Monday, March 24^th, that new episodes air on Monday nights and that there have been 5 new episodes. When we checked our facts at TV.com, there had, in fact, been 7 shows, but all had indeed aired on dates where traffic spiked on our Keyword Phrase Line Graph.

We are confidently predicting that Monday night and Tuesday morning we will again see a barrage of hits on our Hillside Villas detailed listing page.

Stay tuned in to our ongoing “Hills Watch” as we make predictions on traffic volume based on how the show unfolds. Will an increase of drama on the show discourage potential neighbors from looking for an apartment for rent at the Hillside Villas and therefore slacken traffic? If more stars from the show move in, will “Hillside Villas” searches go through the roof?

Only time and analytics reports will tell.