An estimated $14 billion a year* is spent on real estate advertising by the real estate community. Facebook now going head to head with Zillow, Google, realtor com for more of the agents’ digital ad spend with new Facebook Dynamic Product Catalog Home Listings ad units interface.
Real estate agents and brokerages can now easily upload an IDX feed of real estate listings and dynamically create home listing ads. This new Facebook ad unit allows for multiple properties directly from a MLS feed or one-time file download to be created as individual home listing ads on Facebook.
Although not 100% new, it appears that Facebook has created a simple user interface to make these types of dynamic ads more accessible for non-technical users in the real estate industry.
Users are able to add their own Facebook tracking pixels to these ads allowing for powerful retargeting.
The setup process to create the dynamic product listing ads seems fairly simple. Following is a few screenshots.
How to Create Your Facebook Home Listings Dynamic Ads
- Login to your normal Facebook ads manager
- Click on green “Create New Ad” in top right of window
- Next under Marketing objectives, click on Conversion type ad units
- Select the “Product Catalog Sales” ad unit
- You’ll create a new catalog that is one time or recurring
- Upload your CSV, TSV or XML feed of real estate listings
- Then you can group the ads by location (city) or price
- Lastly, associate your Facebook tracking pixels, image settings, and other management settings.
Impact on Facebook Ad Prices
This is a very powerful advertising option for the real estate community and surely will be widely adopted. This will surely drive up Facebook real estate ad prices due to supply and demand economics. More agents competing for the same amount of ad space limited by Facebook ad load guidelines.
Ad space is limited in the newsfeed so maybe some of the ads will end up in the Facebook community Marketplace or Facebook may be planning on launching a real estate section like Google did in the past.
Like Google AdWords, Facebook ad prices will also rise which is great for Facebook investors considering recent record spending on mobile ads.
Facebook Home Listing Catalog Unknowns
One thing that is uncertain is the exact advertising guidelines around the MLS listings. There are pretty strict rules around IDX feeds and the display of the listing agent information. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
We think that this will be used by heavily by brokerages to advertise their own listing inventory. This will give brokerages the opportunity to generate real estate leads at scale for their agents.
We are sure more details of the Facebook home listings ad product will emerge over the coming days, especially with Inman Connect just around the corner.
Opportunity
One thing is certain, with the popularity of viewing real estate listings online these ads will get tons of views.
Agents and brokerages must be prepared to handle the ad inquiries in near real time to not risk doing brand damage for appearing to be non-responsive, since 49% of real estate consumers expect answers to inquiries instantly.
Lead engagement automation solutions will need to be implemented at scale to handle both the online leads and inbound phone calls within minutes.
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