Now you can brighten your ad campaigns with a vibrant new look and feel. Kahoots unveils the first in our new line of advertisement styles - the bold, stunning Sapphire.

Sapphire ads make special use of color and sizing to highlight your listings. A large photo takes center stage; big, bold headings underscore your contact info and bylines; and clean lines and shadowed edges keep everything neat and organized.

Stay tuned for more ad styles in the coming months. If there’s a particular look and feel you’ve been wanting to use, feel free to contact us and let us know.

With just a single word or image, a well-designed logo can mark a service as truly your own, polished and personal. Now Kahoots can brand your online advertising with company trademarks and logos, joining the distinctive feel of your custom designs with our effortless advertising technology.

To upload your company logo to Kahoots, login with manager or administrator privileges, and enter your Preferences page. Select the Contact Info or Company Info header, and choose the Branch Logo link. From here, you’ll be able to upload a 218×50 logo image for your company or office, and even preview your logo in the context of an online ad.

Once in Kahoots, your logo image will automatically appear in all your Craigslist, Backpage, and Hotpads advertisements. Please drop us a line and let us know where else you’d like to see them!

Sometimes mass-emails and phone calls aren’t the best way to communicate. Kahoots Messages give you an online bulletin-board for sharing important announcements with the rest of your office. By posting a message in Kahoots, you can be sure your colleagues will see it as soon as they sign in to work, no matter where they are.

Your dashboard shows the very latest messages from your office and broadcasts from Kahoots. By selecting the “more” button on the Messages box, you can read through your message history in detail and also post new messages.

Your Dashboard’s Suggestions Box gives you a fast and easy way to stay on top of your listings, whether they number in the hundreds or in the tens of thousands. Kahoots looks through your listings, and when it discovers something you should know about - for example, ads about to expire, or listings about to come on-market - it leaves a note for you in your Suggestions Box. And it even helps you act on its suggestions by taking you directly to the listings or tasks at hand.

Kahoots updates your list of Suggestions regularly, and you can also request an immediate update by hitting the “Refresh” button in your Suggestions Box. Note that refreshing your suggestions can take a little while depending on how many listings you have.

We want advertising to always fit gracefully into the rest of your workflow, so we’ve added new shortcuts to move instantly between editing apartments and advertising them. From any Apartment Details screen, you can now jump immediately to the Share or Post Advertisement panels. Just look for the “Post” and “Share” buttons at the top-left of your Apartment Details window.

Every day, Kahoots helps get your phones ringing by sharing thousands of listings on marketplaces like Hotpads, Oodle, and Google. Now, the Share Advertisements screen lets you take charge of this powerful feature. In the Kahoots main menu, select Share Ads under the Advertising heading.

From here, you can keep tabs on how many of your office’s listings are shared, and where. Sharing also lets you place ads on paid-only classifieds like Boston.com, if you have a membership - simply choose the listings you want to advertise today, and Kahoots will take care of the rest!

Today we’re pleased to add Backpage.com to our advertising lineup, bringing your automatic Kahoots ads to a total of seven websites (and climbing)!

We’ve also introduced something for our high-tech aficionados: interactive, Google-powered maps that zoom and pan to show nearby bus stops and points of interest.

Backpage.com: If you’re already posting Craigslist ads with Kahoots, advertising to Backpage is just as easy. In the detail window for any of your ads, a new “Post to Backpage” button will appear next to the familiar “Post to Craigslist.” Press this new button, and a templated ad will be posted to Backpage.com in a new browser window.

Interactive Maps: Your web listings and client listing sheets now feature interactive map displays. These maps will situate your listings without revealing the exact address, and can zoom and pan to show the surrounding area in detail. What’s more, nearby MBTA stops and other points of interest will be plotted on your map and fully annotated.

A legend of these nearby stops appears to the right of your map. If you select any item from the list, the map will automatically pan to show you its exact location.

We’ve also created a version of the interactive map for your own in-office use. In your Building and Apartment Details screens, look at the top of the “Locations” section for a link to the map.

The Public Description field on your Apartment Detail screen helps you spice up your advertising with a minimum of fuss.

When you’ve written an effective, rich description for an apartment, you’ll want to reuse it as much as possible. If you save it in your apartment’s Public Description field, Kahoots will use this advertising copy when it shares your ads to Boston.com, Google, Hotpads, and to other websites. We’ll also fill out the descriptions in your Craigslist ads for you, so agents will have the option of building off the Public Description, or writing their own from scratch.

By saving your best, most compelling writing in the Public Descriptions field, you’ll be sure to get the most from all your Kahoots ads.

For notes and observations that you don’t want to share with the public, use the Notes field below the Public Description. Notes allow agents to exchange information about an apartment while keeping it internal.

We’re closing June with an update to help make your workflow faster and your advertising simpler.

What’s new

• New Server:  We’ve added a fast new server to our ranks, and new optimizations for searches, to give you a speed boost in time for the peak season.
• Public Descriptions:  A new field in your “Apartment Details” window allows you to create master advertising text for a listing. This master description will automatically be filled in when agents create Craigslist advertisements (though they can still edit it, of course), and will appear throughout your Kahoots advertising to sites like Google, Boston.com, Hotpads.com, and on your own website. Write a good Public Description, and you’ll put your best foot forward everywhere your listings appear.

We’re particularly excited about our latest update to Kahoots, because we’ve expanded our web advertising in ways that we think will translate directly to your bottom line.

What’s new

• Syndicated Advertising: Over the last month, you may have received more calls than usual. This is because, without any effort on your part, Kahoots is busily syndicating your ads to a number of high-traffic websites around the country. In addition to Craigslist, Kahoots will now advertise your on-market listings on Google, Hotpads.com, Oodle.com, and Movefrog.com. And the best part is that you don’t have to do anything - just sit back and let the added business roll in. We’re happy to take your advertising even further, so if there’s any other listings sites you’d like to appear on, please contact us and ask.
• Advertising to Boston.com: If you advertise on Boston.com, or if you’ve considered it as a new venue, you’ll be happy to know that Kahoots can export your on-market listings in a Boston.com-friendly format. You’ll be able to send your ads straight from Kahoots to Boston.com in minutes, and with a minimum of fuss. Please contact us if you’d like to try it out.
• Kahoots Smart Ads: Do you ever wonder about the visibility, and the follow-up rate, of your Craigslist ads? Kahoots will now track how many times each of your Craigslist ads has been viewed. Use the data that Kahoots brings back as a measure for your ad titles, descriptions, and renter interest in different listings and neighborhoods. On your “Advertisements” panel, look at the “Viewed” column on the new ads you post.
• Branch Support: If your company has multiple branches, we’ll enable you to share listings between them, while keeping your advertising, office contacts, and other branded information separate. If it sounds like your organization could use this service, please contact us for more information.
• Speed optimizations: We’ve optimized our handling of pictures, so the photos in your advertisements will load snappier for your customers.