Dynamic ads are the latest and greatest way to run ads through Facebook and Instagram - But setting them up can be a little confusing. This guide will take you step-by-step through how to set up dynamic Facebook ads for real estate agents.
Dynamic Facebook ads are a great way to market yourself, whether you’re a real estate agent or anyone else with an online business. For you uninitiated, Dynamic Facebook ads are smart ads that automatically show the right content to interested buyers. For real estate agents, this means uploading a product catalogue of your listings to Facebook, and then having the best matches show up automatically in potential leads’ feeds.
Sounds good, right? But what do you actually need to set up dynamic Facebook ads for real estate agents? Let’s go through the list together.
1.) A Facebook page. Most of us already have this, and if you’re reading this article, odds are you do too, but make sure you get one of these set up pronto.
2.) A Facebook Ad Account. You can learn everything you need to know about setting that up here.
3.) A catalog of properties you want to advertise
4.) Facebook Pixel installed on your website. Facebook has a tutorial for doing that here.
Tech giants like eBay, Zappos and Amazon are already using dynamic Facebook ads to sell their seller’s goods to more people more efficiently.
So it only stands to reason that real estate would eventually get in on the game.
We’ve all used Facebook ads before in one capacity or another. Usually, these static ads involve uploading one image (or a collection of a few images in the case of carousel ads), creating the ad, and posting it. And there it sits…
And sits…
AND sits…
Completely unchanged for the lifespan of the ad. But Dynamic ads are different. With Dynamic ads, you’re actually uploading a catalog of multiple images. In the case of dynamic product ads, different viewers will get different ads, based on their preferences.
Facebook actually chooses what to show these potential buyers based on their search history online. What that means is that dynamic ads have the potential to reach people in an amazing new way – targeting your ads to focus only on what people actually want to see.
With a traditional home buyer ad, you would create some type of home list. Probably something along the lines of “Sign up and get a list of homes under 300k in phoenix”. Good, but not exactly the kind of ad that stands out. You might run something like a special financing ad, offering zero down payment, an open house ad, or even a free giveaway, such as a buyers’ guide.
Traditional seller ads come in a few tried-and-true flavors as well. You’ve got the time honored home valuation ad, the flashy “Sell your home in X days – GUARANTEED!” promo and the aforementioned free guide, this time for home staging or tips to quickly sell a home.
These ads are traditional in part because they still work, but when you’re competing with thousands of other agents in your area, you need a way to stand out.
Traditionally at Easy Agent PRO, we’ve recommended things like niching down, attracting traffic with creative blog posts and diverting from the tried-and-true in favor of something a little more bold.
Nothing we’ve recommended in the past, however, comes close to doing what dynamic Facebook ads for real estate agents can do. Here are just some of the ways you can use these new types of ads to stand apart from the competition:
Ok, so we’ve established that dynamic Facebook ads are a great way to create ads that reach people in new and exciting ways, but how do you actually get these ads built?
The first thing you’ll need when building dynamic Facebook ads for real estate agents is a home catalog for your desired specialty or area. A catalog is a database that will include all of your property details for a new listing. Facebook recommends at least 100 (but you can get away with less than that) and requires the following fields:
Those are the required fields, but you can include more if you want, such as property description.
Facebook requires the catalog to be coded in a particular way, and this is why most agents haven’t started using dynamic Facebook ads for real estate agents yet. The process can be tricky, but Facebook has some info on how it should be coded here.
Fortunately, there are plugins for WordPress sites that can help with this, as well as companies that are able to set this up for you, if need be. Easy Agent PRO users on specific MLS boards will have access to a wizard on the backend of their LeadSites that’s built for setting up these catalogs.
You just choose your parameters, hit “create”, and a secure catalog is created in the exact format FB requires. The entire process takes 3 minutes, and it’s built so anyone can use it, regardless of experience.
To find out if you’re on one of the boards that can utilize this new tool, schedule a demo with us to learn more!
Don’t worry, while this sounds really technical and confusing, it’s actually super easy to do. The data source feed is basically a way to update for your catalog and the schedule is how often you want it to be updated (we recommend daily).
As we all know properties are sold and added every day in most MLS’s so in order for your advertising strategies to provide accurate info, you need to have a way to update your catalog daily to remove/add listings as well as update status and pricing changes.
Technically you can manually update this feed yourself on any schedule you like, but it is much simpler to set up an automated process so you do not have to manage the ad daily or worry about outdated info.
Through our Facebook Catalog wizard, we add your home listings to a secure URL that is updated automatically. You will simply enter the URL into FB along with the password credentials, one time, and the rest is automatic.
Next, you’ll want to select your geographic area.
For ads in the “housing” category, FB requires us to drop a pin on an address and target a minimum radius of 15 miles. Many home buyers will come from the same area where the listings are located, but you can also be creative here if you know your area well.
For example, if you are selling vacation or beach front properties, you can target a nearby city with a more dense population that is likely to buy in the specific beach area.
The easiest audiences to get started with would be a variety of RE “interest” categories already built into FB, these are the ones that we recommend. Interests to target can include:
Remarketing Audiences are another great group to target for your ads. Odds are you already know this, but remarketing is when you create an audience of people who have already been to your site.
If you have an existing site that gets traffic, we recommend setting up audiences for people who are visiting or interacting on your site. These are called remarketing audiences and require a pixel to be installed on your site.
You can set these up in the FB audience manager for specific pages, type of content, or how much time people are spending on your site.
Alternatively, if you are active on Facebook and sharing information on real estate and your business, there’s a good chance that you have followers who are engaging with your content, but not quite ready to contact you.
Through Facebook’s audience manager, you can create an audience of anyone who has clicked on a photo, liked a page, or watched a video through your page.
Through your Facebook ads manager, you’ll be able to create a new dynamic ad, just like you would for a traditional ad. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow to get it set up:
Pro tip for creating your ads: Facebook also allows you to use variable fields in your ads to further describe the listing and get viewers to click through.
For example on Ad #1, we can enter the number of bedrooms field into the ad and it will show the number of bedrooms for each property Facebook shows. The ad would look like this:
“When was the last time you viewed listings in the Phoenix area? Check out this (#of bedrooms) bedroom listing that just came to market.”
When Facebook selects one of the listings to show, they will automatically insert the number of bedrooms into the ad!
Additional fields that may be useful in ad copy would be bedrooms, address, city name, price, or listing agent name.
The first benefit you’ll notice after setting up dynamic ads is how much time you’ll save. Unlike traditional Facebook ads, you’re able to upload your ENTIRE catalog of listings in one batch, and still have individual ads show up for different viewers.
In 30 minutes, you can build an ad for every listing you have. By creating a variety of ads, you can hypothetically have a collection of over a thousand ads running all at once, without having to sit down and individually build each campaign.
Dynamic ads also help reduce ad fatigue from your audience. If you’ve managed ads in the past, you’ve no doubt noticed that ads have diminishing returns – Over time, people get sick of seeing the same ads in their Facebook feeds, and they stop paying attention.
With dynamic ads, you’ll be running different ads to different people, and the ads will adjust based on a lead’s interests, helping to keep things fresh.
Because Facebook has a pixel installed on your site, they can see what properties specific users are looking at when they visit.
If a prospect views homes at a certain price range in a certain zip code, Facebook’s AI can more intelligently recommend a similar listing from the catalog in an ad AFTER your prospect leaves the site.
Beyond all of those reasons, dynamic ads are cost effective. These ads give Facebook’s algorithms a lot to work with and test, which allows the entire process to run smoothly and more cheaply than with traditional ads. After some testing, we’ve been able to get our ads down to around 10 cents per click.
What’s more, after you drive traffic to your website with your first ads, you’ll be able to set up remarketing campaigns and reach even warmer leads in future campaigns.
What’s more, dynamic Facebook ads for real estate agents let you build some amazing sales funnels.
If you’ve ever experimented with audiences in Facebook and building funnels around videos and blogs (something we recommend all the time in our posts), you’ve seen how powerful that can be.
Now, imagine you want to build a funnel for first-time home buyers in the Phoenix area. You can put together videos and related content about buying a home and details on first-time home buyer financing programs.
Then you can insert an entry level priced listing catalog and use dynamic ads to target people who have viewed your financing program content with actual listings they may qualify for.
Love them or hate them, if there’s one thing Facebook excels at, it’s collecting its users data and advertising to them. With these dynamic Facebook ads for real estate agents, you’re taking advantage of the social media behemoth’s biggest strengths, and using it in your own marketing.
What’s more, every time you create a Facebook ad with an objective, Facebook takes time to “learn” how to best target your desired audience.
This learning phase can involve determining the best placement for your ad, switching between your ad copy, trying different photos, etc.
As your audience views your ads, visits your website and fills out your forms, Facebook will start to understand what your target audience looks like.
After repeating the process over and over again, your ad account becomes seasons and more efficient at finding lower lead costs and people who are more likely to convert by showing them the content they are most likely to engage with.
All that is why dynamic Facebook ads for real estate agents are so important to the future of real estate marketing.
We recommend jumping in now, while the tool is a new and underutilized by most agents.
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Connect your local MLS to Facebook to promote all properties in your MLS or create any specific niche catalog of listing you want to sell using dynamic Facebook ads. Here are just some of the ways you can use these new types of ads to stand apart from the competition: