The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Real Estate Ads

OR How to Build Your Business Fast With This Red-Hot New Tool (without losing your mind!)

Online advertising is becoming more important than ever when it comes to building a killer real estate business. It’s 2017, so telling you that an online presence is a must have for your business is the sticker on the side of a can of peanut butter saying “may contain peanuts” – obvious.

Yet, when we place a word in front of “online presence” like “smart” or “intuitive”, many businesses are still lagging behind. It’s easy to create a Facebook page but getting the right message, to the right people, at the right time has always been THE challenge for advertisers – but it just got easier!

Yep, recently Facebook has extended its Dynamic Ads format to real estate agents.

“Facebook dynamic ads? – the what, now?”

Dynamic Ads enable you to laser-target people who browse home and apartment listings on your site, and present them with relevant adverts for properties when they use Facebook.

The feature takes your property listings and shows them to people who have already checked out similar listings on your site. The information for each property – for example size, number of bedrooms and price – alongside images will be combined and then FB will decide which are the most appealing – and show them to your potential customer!

Basically, instead of displaying the same generic ad to your target audience, dynamic ads let you display a specific ad or listing to a specific audience based on how they previously interacted with your website. Pretty cool, right?!

Dynamic Ads are red-hot and they are about to revolutionize the real estate industry – for those who are on the ball enough not to get left behind!

You don’t want to get left behind do you?

Well lucky for you we’ve put together this awesome guide to Facebook Real Estate Ads to get you hurtling down the track faster than your competitors.

“Really, should I care about this?”

In a word, yes. But in a few more words – Firstly, dynamic ads are only new to real estate listing. Retailers, hotels, and airlines have already used them successfully on Facebook, Google, and other ad networks. So, yes: dynamic ads for real estate are a big deal, unless, that is, you don’t care about your Facebook advertising campaigns:

Any business that sells more than one product should care about dynamic ads, aka dynamic remarketing, because it has been proven to work better. You don’t to show someone who has shown interest in Atlanta properties an ad for a Chicago listing and vice versa.

Sure, you can use geographic targeting but that isn’t as effective with people who are looking to move to a new city, for example.

“Okay, I’m listening….”

Getting customers right to your door is of course just what you want. But in case you’re not totally convinced here’s a few more reasons why Dynamic FB Ads are where it’s at for Real Estate:

•   Dynamic Ads are an untapped resource for most real estate agents – so it’s a great way to get ahead of the crowd. Local competition is often stuck using out-of-date traditional advertising – which often only has a small reach. In contrast FB has over 2 billion monthly users!
•   You can use the platform to get incredibly detailed with your targeting metrics, and get your message to the right people (really, can’t over-emphasize the importance). Get super-effective advertising by laser targeting potential customers based on location, age, marital status etc.
•   Dynamic Ads are incredibly responsive, and can be updated far more easily than traditional static Ads – meaning you won’t waste time and money investing in ads that just don’t work. Dynamic Ads gently remind your potential customer what a great selection of properties you have especially for them – when they need it!

“Brilliant! I want in….”

Thought you might!  Now, setting up and learning Dynamic Ads can seem like a hassle, but trust me, once you’ve learned the process it’s easy, not to mention incredibly effective.

So, follow our step-by-step process and you can tear it up with FB ads without wanting to tear your hair out!

Also, check out: 
Google Home Service Ads: All You Need To Know.
Top 10 Creative Ways to Use Your Spare Property Space

Your Step-by-step guide to killing it with Facebook Real Estate Ads:

Now, for the technical stuff. Don’t run off, I promise you this will not leave you gently rocking in the corner like you just watched the new version of Stephen King’s IT on repeat!

This is going to be gentle. Honest…

•       The first thing you need is a Facebook Page that represents your business.
•       Then you want an ad account with registered payment information

If you don’t have these things right now then please go set it up and familiarize yourself with the process.

Once you’ve done this then you will need to follow these steps to create successful Dynamic Ads campaigns:

Collate the properties you want to be listed by creating a catalog of all the condos, houses and apartments you have to offer. You can continually update this list as new properties become available. It’s optimal if you have at least 100 listings.

Next, set up each listing with the relevant information such as price, size and availability. Organize your Listing Feed – this will enable you to choose whether to have a single feed from your catalog or multiple feeds based on parameters you set (like all properties in one location).

First you need to set up user signals that will allow you to monitor the performance of your campaigns and capture customer intent.

Once you have done this you will receive signals to tell you which events are making an impact amongst your target customers. Based on intent signals you can include or exclude people from your campaigns – making them super dynamic. You can apply additional filters if you need to with Web Custom Audiences.

There are four main steps to creating and delivering your ads:

Step 1: Start by accessing your Facebook ad account and clicking on “Create New Ad”.

Select marketing campaign objectives and select Product catalog sales as your conversion objective.

Step 2: Then select the “Product Catalog Sales” ad unit

Step 3: Group your ads by location or price

Step 4: Then associate your tracking pixel and settings

Step 5: Provide Ad creative
Now, remember, these are dynamic ads so you need to match your ad creative (text, image or video) with the specific listing. It’s a lot more work using dynamic remarketing ads but it is worth it.

Step 6: Create an Ad

A few additional tips

For each step, Facebook will guide you through the process so you can create attractive and effective ads.

Get delivery information to see how people on FB are engaging with your ads

Now you have set up and sent the campaign it’s time to see how it’s performing. In Ads Insights you will learn lots of information such as your conversion rate, and how many actions people took as a result of your Ad – such as your click rate and engagement.

Get familiar with this because it will give you everything you need to know to tweak your campaigns so they are hyper-effective.

Finally, engage with Dynamic Ads Debugging tools to help you to diagnose and solve any problems. These tools are all available in your Business Manager and you can use them to tweak any issues that might arise as you build your campaigns.

For further detailed instructions on each section, please see the Facebook’s Developer Handbook.

I know it may seem like a lot of steps, but once you have gone through this process a couple of times you will find using Dynamic Ads easy and fast!

Top targeting tactics for real estate agents

Bringing more interested prospects right to your door, and ultimately making you more money (you know, the fun part; p).

Facebook is great for letting you really focus in on your potential customers, and has handily developed a category –  ‘likely to move,’ based on it’s hugely detailed database of customer behavior.

You can leverage this category alongside highly detailed socio-economic metrics – such as the city someone is in and their income bracket and voila! – you can figure out who is likely to move soon in your area and wanting properties that match with what you have to offer!

Do you think your competitors who are still using traditional advertising can get even close to this kind of laser targeting?

You can also hyper-target using metrics like people who are first time homebuyers or who have shown an interest in Zillow.  

Additionally, you can also use Facebook to target people based on their job title – and therefore show your Ads to local mortgage brokers. By building a rapport with mortgage brokers you can leverage this incredible source of referrals and build awareness of your business.

Work Smarter – Not Harder!

Dynamic Ads for Real Estate really are where it’s at in marketing right now for this sector. The benefits of being able to target your customers with relevant, useful ads, at a time when you know they are highly motivated to learn more, cannot be overstated.

It’s an area of marketing that’s currently fresh and not that well known amongst realtors – but this is changing fast. Because they are so cost-effective, intuitive, modern and ahead of the game more and more people are catching onto them and their ability to let you work smarter not harder.

And let’s face it..who wants to work harder?

So, sit back, put your feet up, follow this guide and learn how to nail it with Dynamic Ads!

Also, check out Google Home Service Ads: All You Need To Know.