Facebook Meets Real Estate: Dynamic Ads

“Real estate is an area we’re betting big on as a company. We think it’s content that consumers want to see.”- Keith Watts, Facebook real estate and financial services chief.

In the recent past, Facebook has been dipping its toes into the real estate industry, introducing more and more useful features. And yet another one of these is Dynamic Ads, released several days ago. As it gradually gains traction, eventually it will affect most businesses being marketed on Facebook. The real estate industry will also be influenced heavily, which means more profit for the skilled and prepared agents.

What Dynamic Ads Are for Real Estate

Dynamic Ads are the combination of Facebook’s platform and audience coupled with broker’s listing data. Now brokers are able to more efficiently reach their target audience based on location, age, gender, and interests. This is a form of re-targeting clients. Facebook will cooperate with brokers to retrieve previous property searches from the brokers’ websites. By using that data, Facebook is able to add property listings fitting to the searches of an individual user to that user’s news feed. More relevant ads – more satisfied clients – more closed deals. Sounds like a charm, doesn’t it?

PROS

-You’re going to target customers who are clearly interested in your services and whose interests and preferences have been taken into account. These are not cold clients to you anymore, and you less rely on blind luck.

– Facebook allows each listing to include the price, the address, the number of bedrooms, for rent/for sale options, and availability. Your potential clients receive the full description and all the information they need to find out if the property’s worth considering or not.

CONS

– Facebook’s algorithms are constantly changing. There is no way to determine the internal workings. That limits your control over the outcome.

– Dynamic Ads are a tool aimed at targeting improvement. It can’t figure out what your typical customer profile is, it deals with the secondary data only. It cannot be used as a primary means of advertising, only as a complemental channel to make your Facebook campaign even more relevant and tailored to your target audience’s tastes.

Taking the first step

While it sounds like common sense to target people who are “Likely to move,” you should also consider additional variables to attain even higher ROI on your ad spend – how about adding household income (HHI) to the equation? By adding the annual HHI above $100,000 and San Diego zip codes as filters, we narrow down our target group to fewer than 3,600 people. So it’s two hits with one shot: we significantly reduce waste in ad spend, thus increasing cost-efficiency; and make sure we get a limited group of people maximally interested in making a purchase, financially capable of it, and small enough to work with. So far, we’ve come up with 4 filters for Dynamic Ads that demonstrate the highest conversion rate.

Geography: by selecting zip codes in your market
Age: 28 – 65 years
Income: HHI between $100,000 – $149,999 per year
Behavior: consumers that are “Likely to move.”