This article covers Pixel and catalog requirements to use real estate ads (formerly known as Dynamic Ads for Real Estate).
Changes required to Meta Pixel and SDK
If you want to run real estate ads, the following standard events are required:
| Pixel event | App SDK event | Description |
|---|---|---|
Search |
fb_mobile_search |
when someone has searched your platform for home listings |
ViewContent |
fb_mobile_content_view |
when someone has viewed a specific listing |
InitiateCheckout |
fb_mobile_initiated_checkout |
when someone saved, liked or showed special interest in a listing |
Purchase |
fb_mobile_purchase |
when someone has contacted an agent about a listing |
It is furthermore recommended to send real estate-specific event parameters. The up-to-date list of required and recommended parameters for home listings can be found from Facebook’s documentation. The more parameters are provided, the better the Facebook’s recommendations in ads will be.
Migration from other types of dynamic ads to real estate ads
If you’re currently running other types of Facebook dynamic ads and wish to migrate to real estate ads, it’s recommended to modify your existing Pixel to include the real estate ad parameters in addition to your previous configuration. This allows you to run real estate ads simultaneously with other types of dynamic ads.
Note that dynamic product ads, travel ads and real estate ads events have an overlapping parameter, content_type, where
- dynamic product ads use
productorproduct_group - travel ads use
hotel,flightordestination - real estate ads use
home_listings
Instead of passing just one value, an array of both, e.g. content_type= ["product", "home_listings"], should be used.
Event source groups
Real estate ads use event source groups to capture intentions and to create a dynamic audience. Event source groups are created in Smartly.io Catalogs > Events. You need to connect one or more Pixels and/or mobile apps to an event source group to start capturing the travel signals.
You need to be a Business Manager admin to create event source groups. If you have created event source groups or used real estate ads before starting with Smartly.io, you can use your existing groups and have your dynamic audiences ready. You need to also select which ad accounts can use a given group.
Catalog requirements
Smartly.io’s feed format support is wider than Facebook’s. You can use various different XML, CSV, TSV and JSON feeds. If you have an existing feed, it’s likely that Smartly.io can automatically convert it to the format required by Facebook.
The up-to-date list of required and recommended fields for a real estate listing feed can be found from Facebook’s documentation. You can ignore the feed format and the field names – the only thing that matters is that your feed has all the information required by Facebook.
ℹ️ Note: Certain values for attributes (=product fields) are case sensitive. For example, the values of property_type have to be written in lower cases and exactly as mentioned in the Facebook documentation. Otherwise, it will not be accepted by Facebook and produces errors.