Before starting to create a Facebook dynamic ads campaign with real estate ads, make sure you have a home listing catalog. Your website and mobile apps also need to send the correct pixel and SDK events for the targeting to work properly.
Campaign
To start creating a real estate ads campaign:
- In the Campaigns view, select the Facebook platform tab
- Click Create > New campaign > Dynamic Ads Campaign
- Under Choose Catalog in the Campaign tab, select a home listings catalog
Creatives
Creatives in Facebook dynamic ads campaigns are based on templates and generated dynamically. It is possible to define multiple templates and choose which ones to use with each ad set by selecting Choose creatives on the Audience tab.
Template Tags
In dynamic ads, the creatives are generated based on templates that can contain dynamic and static content. The list of available variables can be seen after clicking the Template Tags button.
ℹ️ Note: If you want to use Custom label 0, Facebook requires that at least 20% of items in your catalog have the label.
Link
For the ad link, you have two options:
- Use the default URL specified for each home listing in the catalog
- Define a dynamic URL template
With the latter option, you can direct the user to the appropriate search/content page with all the user-specific selections (for example, listings in a specific city). In case your URL requires the variables in a non-default format, you can use the transforms described above. Ask your account manager to help with these.
Smartly.io Image Templates
Setting up Smartly.io Image Templates can be done in catalog settings. One catalog can have multiple Image Templates and you can choose the one you want to use with each creative.
Image Templates support all data from your catalog.
Using different catalog images for different Image Templates
If you are passing more than one image in your catalog's image field (needs to be in an array), you can configure different image templates to use different images. Images being passed are identified by sequential numbering: "image 0", "image 1", "image 2", and so on. For example, if you have different types of imagery in image 0 and image 1, you can create two different image templates in order to see what kind of imagery performs better.
Audience
Select first the Event Source Group you want to use to build the dynamic audience. If you haven't created a group before you can do it here. Real estate ads use Event Source Groups to capture user intentions and to create dynamic audiences. For more information, see Technical requirements for real estate ads.
In dynamic ads, the dynamic audiences are defined with event-based inclusion and exclusion rules: whether a person has searched, viewed, initiated checkout or contacted a real estate agent. You can also combine static targeting rules with the audience. Those can be accessed by choosing Show native targeting options.
The default way is to use recency and event type, for example to retarget users who have viewed a home listing in the past 14 days but haven't contacted a real estate agent in the last 14 days.
ℹ️ Note: Dynamic audience retention times are created in seconds in Facebook. What this means is that when tiering audiences into different ad sets based on recency (for example, searched within 0-1 days, 1-10 days, 10-30 days, and so on), always remember to set the end time of one targeting as the start time of the next one. If you set the durations as 0-1 days, 2-10 days, 11-30 days, you will miss a 24-hour window with each audience.
FAQ
How can I ensure my URL template works?
When you have launched your campaign or added a new creative, after some time, you'll see the option View dynamic post on Facebook in creative preview. This will open one example dynamic post generated for the campaign. When clicking the ad, you'll be directed to an example link using the URL template you've specified.
If you're unsure whether your link will work, you can launch the campaign in a paused state and come back after an hour to check the link before setting the campaign to run.
How does Facebook choose the items to be shown in the ads?
These are based on the behavioral data gathered from the audience visiting your website or your app. The recommendations are being developed constantly and they consider the locations, user preferences and what's popular for other users. In many cases, (typically link ad or the first card of the carousel) the user gets retargeted with items that they have seen last. However, that's not always the case as Facebook might decide that something else is more relevant for the user.
Can I prospect with real estate ads, that is, use broad audience targeting?
Real estate ads is available for both retargeting and broad audience targeting.