The original 3 Mistakes New Home Builders Make with Facebook Ads article was written over two years ago – time sure does fly! While everything in the original article still holds true, we’ve decided to share a few additional mistakes we’ve seen home builders make recently. Facebook continues to be an extremely effective tool to reach potential home buyers when used correctly. To maximize your ad return, avoid these mistakes:

1) Using The Wrong Campaign Objective

When you first create a campaign on Facebook, you have to choose the objective of the campaign, or which result you want. You can choose engagements, traffic, reach, conversions, event responses and more. For the overwhelming majority of new home campaigns, you should choose Conversion.

The conversion objective works by having you first define the conversion to optimize for. After the conversion is defined and the campaign is running, the data from each ad visit is collected using the Facebook Pixel. The Facebook Pixel tracks whether or not a click resulted in a completion of the conversion. If successful, the Facebook A.I. will favor displaying the ad to those who are most likely to complete the conversion.

This optimization process is what makes conversion campaigns work so well… along with not doing what is in the next mistake.

2) Narrow Targeting: Let Facebook A.I. be in Charge

Now that you understand how the Facebook Pixel & Conversion Campaigns work, this mistake should be pretty simple to understand.

Years ago, we were able to target those that were “Likely to Move” or “Renters” or “Homeowners.” Now that we are not able to target using those options and others due to Facebook’s Housing, Employment & Credit rules, what do we do?

Answer: open up the targeting and let Facebook be in charge. We have found the best results for Conversion Campaigns by using completely broad targeting – as in everyone 18-65+ located in a minimum 15 mile radius of the community. Quite different from years ago, right?

This works because we are giving Facebook the freedom to target in ways we are not able to. Facebook Pixel and Conversion Campaigns provide instant feedback and adjustments based on the success of completing the conversion that you defined.

3) Small Facebook Budget… or rather, Misallocated Marketing Budget

How much money should you allocate to Facebook? This is a difficult question to answer without full context of your current sales, available home-sites, etc. With that said, more often than not, we are seeing the following trends:

• Facebook is exceeding Google Ad spend – sometimes by two to four times – and with amazing results.
• Fewer campaigns with higher budgets work better than smaller campaigns with small budgets.
• Campaigns for struggling communities need to be large enough to make an impact – think $1K minimum.

Here are the original Facebook ad mistakes to avoid from the 2017 article, which are still relevant today.

4) Incorrect Placements

The placement is where your ad will be shown within the Facebook Advertising network. There are quite a few options; however, the default option from Facebook is Automatic Placements – meaning Facebook decides! Oh No! This is not what you want.

The option you will want to select is Feeds. These are the ads on desktop and mobile devices within the newsfeed that the possible buyer is scrolling through. This will result in the highest quality traffic compared to the other placements Facebook offers.

But what about Instagram? Until you max out your budget on Facebook & Google AdWords – it is best to leave Instagram alone for now. If you do decide to spend a few dollars with Instagram – be sure to use a correctly sized image that will fit the platform.

5) Boring Ad Images

When advertising on Facebook, we as successful marketers need to remember that we are interrupting what potential buyers are doing. They are scrolling through their newsfeed looking for something worthwhile from their friends or brands they follow. Our ad needs to be worthy of their time. One of the easiest ways to do this is by having higher quality pictures.

The Levels feature in Photoshop is one of the easiest ways to transform a losing ad to a winning ad. See the image below for before and after!

For more photo editing tips, read Quick Photo Fix Tips – Part 1.

There you have it! Facebook ad guidelines change constantly, so we’ll keep this post updated with new mistakes to avoid. Bookmark this page as a reference to make sure you are always optimizing your Facebook ad spend!

Have a question regarding Facebook Ads? Drop us a voicemail at 404-369-2595 and we will answer your question on the Market Proof Marketing podcast!

More Facebook resources from Do You Convert:

Facebook Changes Their Rules for Real Estate Ads

Step-by-Step Guide for Facebook Custom Conversion Ads

Ep 56: The Facebook Fear Factor with Dennis O’Neil

The post Facebook Ad Mistakes for Home Builders to Avoid appeared first on Online Sales and Marketing for Home Builders - DYC.