Roughly 70% of Americans use Facebook and the average person spends about 35 minutes per day on the social platform. This is a huge change from when it was first created by Mark Zuckerberg while he was studying at Harvard.

If you are a real estate agent, Facebook is a great marketing channel because you can target ads to a specific audience. For example, you can target ads to people who live in a certain location, have certain interests, or are a certain age.

This guide provides everything you need to know about using Facebook ads to generate more leads. Learn how to create effective ad campaigns that target your audience, get the most out of your budget, and measure your results so you can continue to improve your performance over time.

Facebook Ads Manager: The tool of the trade

One advantage of real estate Facebook ads is that they can be created by anyone.

This is made possible by the powerful but easy to use Ads Manager tool. Ads Manager is a platform that lets you create, revise, and manage ad campaigns. Creating ads is a step-by-step process, so there’s never any guesswork. This is helpful for busy realtors like yourself.

You can use Ads Manager to find out how many people your advertising will reach, depending on how much you’re willing to spend. This makes it easy to budget for the number of impressions and clicks you want to get.

This app has a feature that lets you see how well your ads are doing in terms of return on investment so that you can make changes to get better results.

First things first: Setting up for success

Before you can publish Facebook ads for real estate listings, there are a few prerequisites you need to do. These include:

1. You will need to create a separate Facebook business page for your agency or brokerage as it is against Facebook policies to use a personal profile to create commercial or promotional materials. Simply visit this page and fill out all the required information, including your business name, category, and description. Once your business page is created, you can customize it by adding a cover photo, uploading a profile picture, filling out the About page, and including your phone number and website. You can also create a vanity URL (formatted as @yourbusinessname) to make your page easier to search for.
2. Before creating any ads, it is important to first delineate who they are meant for. This requires a little market research, but you can use data from past sales to create customer personas that represent your ideal clients. Based on these personas, you can then create different target audiences for your ads, such as buyers, sellers, first-time homeowners, property investors, and the like. You can also use email lists, page likes, and even interest groups to build your ad targets. You can save these audiences in a list so it’s easier to create and run ads for them in the future.
3. It’s a good idea to start small with your ad budget and gradually increase it as you learn what works. A useful rule of thumb is to keep your Facebook ad spending below $10 a day when you’re first starting out. Be aware that ad costs can vary depending on your target audience; it’s typically more expensive to advertise to a specific niche audience.
4. Ads Manager organizes your promotional content into campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Get to know the ad campaign structure so you can organize your promotional content effectively.
5. You should decide on a payment method now. Ads Manager accepts credit cards, certain debit cards, and PayPal. For ease of transaction and financial auditing, it is best to use a corporate credit card to pay for ad placements.

Working with Ads Manager

After completing all the necessary steps to prepare for advertising on Facebook, you can visit the site www.business.facebook.com and click “Create Account.” You will be asked to provide some basic information about your business, including the business name, your name, the corporate email address, and the company website. This will take you to the Ads Manager main page.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your first Facebook ad:

1. Choose an objective

   After you click on the “Create Ad” button, you will be asked to choose your Campaign’s goals. Below are a few examples of how real estate professionals can use various objectives:

1. Name your campaign

   You can name your campaign whatever you want, but it’s better to have a convention so everything is more organized. For example, you could use a format like this: Product/Service_Objective_Audience_Version. So if you were running a campaign whose goal is for people to view your listings in Beverly Hills, your campaign name would be: “Beverly Hills Listings_Website Visits_Buyers_Version 1.”

2. Select your audience

   Facebook’s Ads Manager tool allows you to target your ads to very specific audiences, which can be based on demographics, location, behaviors, and interests. You can also save audiences so you don’t have to keep setting up targeting parameters for each ad. There’s also a lookalike audience feature that lets you create new audiences that are similar to ones you already have. In addition, Facebook has a special ad category for housing opportunity that promotes listings for the sale or rental of a home or apartment, homeowners insurance, mortgage insurance, mortgage loans, housing repairs and home equity or appraisal services.

3. Place your ads

   If you want to advertise on Facebook, you can choose to put your ads in the desktop or mobile newsfeed, the right-hand column, or Facebook Marketplace. Pay attention to how your campaign is doing to see which placement gets you the best results, and then put more of your budget towards that one.

4. Set a budget

   Budgets for ads should be something that can be kept up with for at least 30 days. It is also helpful to clarify what the goals are. For example, if the goal is to generate 100 buyer leads in 30 days and the real estate ad conversion rate is about 11%, then the budget should be for at least 1,000 impressions.

5. Set up your creative

   At long last, you get to design ads that people will see. Regardless of which format you use, keep these best practices in mind:

   1. Short ad copy with between 40 and 80 characters tends to perform best. Keep it short and sweet for the best results.
   2. If you want your ad to be more than 20% text, it will be seen by fewer people. This is because ads with a lot of text are not given as much distribution.

Dynamic ads for real estate

Facebook has an ad format that is good for real estate professionals called dynamic ad. It uses machine learning to predict which product is most relevant to a user. You do not have to create, target, and publish advertisements. AI will do it for you.

Before you can take advantage of Facebook’s catalog ads, you need to create a Facebook catalog with at least 100 listings. You also need to install a Facebook pixel on your site so the platform’s AI can understand user behavior and come up with better ad recommendations.

Measuring and analyzing your Facebook ads’ performance

You can’t just post real estate ads on Facebook and expect them to perform well. You have to monitor their performance to get the most bang for your buck.

Ads Manager includes a reporting tool that allows you to see how your ads are performing. To use it, go to the Measure & Report tab and select “Ads Reporting.”

You’ll encounter four important metrics that you can use to measure how effective your ads are:

1. This measures how many people interacted with your ad, including liking, sharing, or commenting.
2. This metric indicates how many people across Facebook saw your ad.
3. The Impression metric is similar to Reach, except that it factors in repeat views.
4. This tracks all the clicks related to your ad, whether it’s on the CTA button or the “Read More” prompt in your caption.

Ads Manager can also show you these conversion metrics that verify if your ads are indeed pulling their weight:

1. Click-through rate (CTR) is a metric that measures the number of people who visit your website after seeing your ad. Cost per click (CPC) is a metric that tells you how much it costs to complete this action. If your CPC is high, it may be an indication that your ad creative is not effective in enticing users to click through.
2. This figure represents how much it costs to get a user to take your desired action, such as filling out a lead form, calling your office, or watching a video. A lower CPA indicates more efficient conversions and a higher return on investment.
3. How frequently your ad is served to users impacts how often it is clicked on (CTR) and how much you pay per click or per action (CPC/CPA). Low CTR and high CPC/CPA can be improved by refreshing your ad and trying new messaging. This is known as “ad fatigue.”

Remember that metrics give you the data you need to improve campaign performance if you are dissatisfied with the results.

You can increase your CTR while lowering your CPC and CPA by adjusting your targeting, value proposition, ad creative, and placement. You will eventually find the combination that brings in the most leads while spending the least amount on marketing.

 Successful Real Estate Facebook ads Examples

1. Vakil Housing – Address customer pain points

This real estate company uses the customer’s pain point to create an effective ad.

The ad is saying that if you buy a house through them, you will be able to keep your whole family together. For some people, this is a very important issue because they may have a lot of children or extended family members that they need to accommodate.

By focusing on the pain points of your customers, you can create more effective Facebook ads for real estate. By understanding them, you will be able to answer questions such as:

• What problems do they face when searching for a home to buy?
• Why would they want to sell their current home?
• What are their interests and key features they’re looking for?

Asking these questions and using the answers to create effective real estate ads will produce interest in your offering.

Some of your real estate prospects may be looking for a solution to their housing problems on Facebook. Creating Facebook ads for real estate that focus on the customer’s pain points can help your audience connect with your ads on a personal level.

2. JSP Realtors – Use satisfied customers’ testimonials

JSP Realtors created Facebook carousel ads using testimonials from customers who have bought or sold their homes through the company.

It’s better to let your customers talk about your real estate services than to try and tell people yourself. This way, you’re using social proof to build your brand’s credibility. Most people will believe the testimony of another person over anything you might say yourself.

You can use your customers’ testimonials in your Facebook ads to build brand awareness and trustworthiness. It is a great way to address any objections your prospects might have.

3. Zac McHardy – Use Facebook Live to create a virtual tour of a property

Zac Mchardy, a realtor, decided to make viewers feel like they were part of a special house tour by using a live tour of a listing that is not yet on the market, with no edits, no crops, and no scenarios.

furthermore, the Facebook Live’s genuineness allows the development of rapport between the realtor and the spectators, which turns out to be remarkably useful.