Did you know there’s a specific Facebook Ad product just real estate? It’s called Facebook Dynamic Ads for Real Estate and it’s amazingly powerful allowing real estate businesses to leverage cross-device intent signals to promote listings to highly relevant audiences.
As I’m sure your aware online advertising has become increasingly important when it comes to building a real estate business making effective digital advertising a must. You may have a Facebook Page and you may be promoting posts or listings semi-regularly but getting the right message, to the right people, at the right time is a challenge for all advertisers not just real estate businesses. Well not anymore, with Facebook Dynamic Ads you can start leveraging the same advertising options top e-commerce sites use to sell, suggest and remarket to their customers and thanks to Social Estate once it’s set up your campaigns automatically sync with your CRM.
This type of advertising is going to revolutionise how you use Facebook and Instagram to promote listings and reduce your workload.
How Does it Work?
Dynamic Ads enable you to laser-target Facebook users who have browsed your website or your competitor’s website, that’s right you can target Facebook users who are looking at similar listings on your competitor’s website this is so powerful! For example, a user may be looking at holiday listings on a competitors website, then they check their Facebook Feed and like magic, they start seeing Facebook Ads promoting your holiday listings. Facebook will even suggest similar listings to users based on things like land size, number of bedrooms and price. in addition to this, each Ad including the images used will be customised by Facebook based on what the user is looking for, how amazing is this it’s like 1-1 advertising but at scale.
Why Should I care about this?
Firstly, Dynamic Ads are not new they have been used by retailers, hotels, and airlines on Facebook and Google for years where they’ve been very successful, so successful it’s hard to find an eCommerce or travel site that doesn’t use them. In fact, any business that sells more than one product should care about Dynamic Ads and Dynamic Ad remarketing because it’s proven to work better than individual static Ads because Facebook can create personalised Ads for your listings on the fly, this means that instead of only having a few Ads running for 1 or 2 listings we have potentially hundreds running ad Facebook knows exactly which one to show and when because it monitors your online behaviour.
In case you’re not totally convinced here’s a few more reasons why Dynamic Facebook 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, Facebook 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 at the right time with 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 of existing and new listing as they become available, this is particularly effective for promoting holiday rentals and rental listings as they have shorter cycles and may be part of a large pool of fluctuating stock. Facebook will automatically show a user a selection of properties right when they need it!
How to Get Started With Dynamic Ads
So we have put together this simple guide to Facebook Real Estate Ads to get you up and running before your competitors catch on.
To use Facebook's Dynamic Real Estate Ads, you need an appropriate real estate product catalogue one that lists the properties to advertise. Each property in this catalogue contains all the information Facebook needs to create customised ads.
You build a catalogue using the product feeds available from your Social Estate dashboard or you can manually create one with excel.
Setting up and learning how to manage Dynamic Ads might seem like a hassle, but trust me, once you’ve been through the process once it’s easy.
Your Step-by-step guide to killing it with Facebook Real Estate Ads
The first thing you need is a Facebook Page that represents your business. We’ll assume you already have this.
Then you want an Ad account with registered payment information, if you have ever boosted a post you will already have one of these.
If you don’t have these things right now then please go set it up and familiarise yourself with the process.
Once you have the above set up follow the below steps to create a successful Dynamic Ads campaign.
Step 1 - Set up a home listing catalogue
This is available form your Social Estate dashboard and will allow you to easily create a catalogue with all the necessary information, you can find detailed instructions here [setting up your listings catalogue].
Your catalogue will contain all your current listing stock categorised by “For Sale“, “For Lease“, “Holiday Rentals“ for example. Once set up your catalogue continuously sync’s with your CRM.
Step 2 - Create and deliver ads for your home listings
There are four main steps to creating and delivering your ads:
1. Start by accessing your Facebook Ad account and clicking on “Create New Ad”. Select “Marketing Campaign Objectives” and select “Product Catalogue Dales” as your conversion objective.
2. Then select the “Product Catalogue Sales” Ad unit
3. Group your Ads by location or price
4. Then associate your tracking pixel and settings
5. Provide Ad creative, 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.
Create an Ad
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 Facebook are engaging with your ads
Now you have set up and your campaign is running it’s time to see how it’s performing. This is where Ad insights come into play and will provide you with all the information such as your conversion rate, and how many actions people took as a result of your Ad, 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 each one is quick and simple and once you have gone through this process a couple of times you will find using Dynamic Ads easy and fast!
Build your audience for real estate
Set up tracking and events to 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.
Top targeting tactics for real estate agents
Bringing more interesting prospects right to your door will ultimately lead to you selling and renting more listings making you a more effective agency.
Facebook is great for letting you really focus in on your potential customer's thanks to its highly detailed database of customer behaviour they provide targeting options such as ‘likely to move,’ ‘People who ave visited a location’
You can leverage this targeting alongside highly detailed socio-economic metrics – such as the city someone is in and their income bracket to target users likely to move soon in your area and want 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 users by leveraging metrics like “First Home Buyers”, “Job Title” which can allow you to target listings to local mortgage brokers to bring your business to their attention and generate potential referrals and build awareness of your business.
Work Smarter – Not Harder!
Dynamic Ads for Real Estate really are the future for real estate marketing, the benefits of being able to target your customers with relevant, useful ads, at exactly the right people at exactly the right time when they are highly motivated to take action or learn more, cannot be overstated.
So now that you're armed with this new knowledge it’s time to get ahead of the pack and get started with this little known nuclear advertising option. Dynamic ads are efficient and as such are extremely low maintenance, cost-effective and personalised, what more could you want?
So, sit back, put your feet up, follow this guide and learn how to nail it with Dynamic Ads!
If you have any question or need help getting this set up to get in touch with our team for assistance.