How Agents Can Survive Facebook’s Ad Changes

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Big news for real estate agents! Starting on August 15th, Facebook will be removing their “likely to move” behavior from their ad targeting. Do you know how to prepare for the changes?

In this episode of Above the Noise, Vice President of Marketing Josh Stike provides three tips to help you navigate the change.


Video Transcription

Hi I’m Joshua Stike, Vice President of Marketing here at ReminderMedia. And if you haven’t been watching the news lately, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went before Congress in April to talk about Facebook’s data policies and how they’re targeting their users through advertising.

If you’re a real estate agent and using Facebook Ads, you probably use the behavior targeting likely to move. Now the way that Facebook collects this information and targets these users is by activity that it sees on its own platform as well as obtaining information from other third-party sources in order to track people’s buying behaviors and predict future purchasing. Now as a response to the controversy, Facebook is actually going to start removing partner categories starting on August 15th. Specifically,likely to move will be removed on that date.

Now it’s important to look at Facebook’s Help Center and look at the language there because what it says is it will no longer provide that option for ad creation duplication or editing. So, your ads should continue to target that group beyond August 15 until October 1 when all partner categories will be removed from the site. So, today I have three tips for you to be able to use where you can still leverage this audience that you once had after the audience goes away.

Start targeting now

So first, if you’re not targeting this audience you have to start doing it right now. Go into Facebook Ads manager, create a new campaign, and optimize for lead generation or website conversions. Once you have your campaign set up in your ad set you’re going to go into audience detail targeting, and type in likely to move into the search box. That’s going to bring up an audience of like nine point seven million people. Then you want a segment further by your geographic area either by typing in zip codes, or your town. Once you have your audience set up, create two ads. One is going to be for buyer leads. This is going to be for your most recent listings where you’re going to be promoting that and generating interest in your current listings.

The next ad that you want to set up is your seller leads. This would be anything from a lead magnet like a free market analysis, or an eBook on how to get more money out of your home when selling. This is going to start to qualify your leads separately from people that are looking to buy, people that are looking to sell. Start following up with those leads immediately, and keeping track of them in your CRM.

Create a lookalike audience

Now, if you are already targeting this behavior, great!  Now is the time to start doubling down. You want to generate as many leads as possible now, not only for your business today, but it’ll also start to give you data that you can use in the future to target this behavior later.

So, if you have been collecting leads through either the lead form through Facebook, or in your own website, you’re going to want to export that list out, and then re-upload it to Facebook as a custom list. Go into audiences, click create audience, hit custom audience, and then upload your CSV file with all of your prospects in your list. The more information that you can give Facebook—phone numbers, email addresses, names—the more likely it is to match those people. Remember, that Facebook needs at least a hundred people to make this custom audience.

Once Facebook has finished creating your custom list, go back into audiences, click create audience again, and this time choose lookalike audience. You’ll have a field there where you can choose the source. Choose your custom list as the source for your lookalike audience and Facebook will automatically start to build a new list for you. And like any marketing on Facebook, monitor the results. See what’s working, do more of what is, less of what’s not, and test constantly.

Get involved in the community

And the last and most valuable point is to get involved with the community. Facebook is changing their algorithms and how their site works constantly. They don’t always tell us. Sometimes the community figures this out, other times the CEO takes a trip to Capitol Hill and the whole world finds out.

But most importantly, you want to get involved with other Facebook users because it’s going to help you learn and be able to adjust with when they change their platform, they change their targeting, or they even change how your content will display organically from your business page.

So, join groups. You can actually join them right on Facebook. Go into Facebook, and search groups for Facebook Ads, Facebook Business Pages, Facebook marketing, and there’s a ton of information and a great community out there. You need to make sure that you’re focusing and learning about what you’re spending  your money on. So, definitely get in there, and check that out.

The takeaway

So, there you have it guys. Make sure to comment on the video, and let us know how you’re responding to the most recent Facebook ads changes. If you want to learn more about how to be more effective with ReminderMedia products make sure to check out our Product Toolkit playlist and if you’re just looking for more sales and marketing advice check out our main Above the Noise playlist here on YouTube.

As always, please if you like this, give us a like, give us a subscribe, but most importantly what you heard today about Facebook Ads manager and the likely to move targeting, take action on it today!


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