Hey BP,
I have spent a lot of time, effort, and energy learning how to use Fb ads efficiently in my business. I am about to launch my first campaign looking for motivated sellers. Who has used Fb ads? Have you had success? What particular niche in real estate investing are you using the ads for? I would like to start a conversation and see who has used them successfully and who would like to use them, but is struggling to keep up with the constantly changing platform. Then there is the Fb Pixel. Is anyone utilizing that as well? Interested to see what your thoughts are.
If you have question, post them in this thread and I will do my best to answer them all.
@Jerryll I love you buddy and I know you are an SEO expert, but at some point, I am going to have a thought-provoking mutual beneficial discussion with somebody on these forums about FB ads. You cannot hijack literally every thread on this topic (or maybe you can?)…
@Nick Britton please share your insights and experiences running FB ads - if that is indeed why you joined this discussion. I’ll wait.
@Nick Britton I think we understand who the OP is. What kind of ads did you run?
@Mark Sewell I am putting together various images and copy to rotate through and test my target market. Once i find what is working, I will turn the rest off. There are countless way to identify an audience using Fb criteria. What I am really after are the look alike audiences and putting the Facebook data engine to work for me.
My ads are specifically targeted for lead generation. I will keep you posted of the progress and how the funnel pans out if you like.
I started with this, using lead generation and also traffic objective. I was uploading lists to FB as custom audience. For a time that was working. The first time I tried it, I had a lead within a matter of hours. But that was well over a year ago, before the big revamp.
Targeting is not what it once was. FB has given way less demographics, particularly economic/financials, to target specifically. You can target top 10% earners, for example, by you cannot target people that have low credit scores. FB tries a lot harder to protect privacy.
I also have been experimenting with lookalike audiences. I use lookalikes for website visitors and I also use lookalikes for some of the lists that I have uploaded. Just not sure that I have done enough of this to really provide adequate sample size for FB to work its magic.
I agree with you @Ryan Ray that it is easy to over define an audience. Need to let FB do the work. I have heard several people make this statement, folks that are getting deals and doing deals.
Tell me more about your funnel.
Mark- you definitely have the right approach to not try and over-target your audience, especially when you are using a multi-layer approach with retargeting. The algorithm is way smarter and more efficient than we could ever be, so keep the top of your funnel wider and see who comes in. Once you get a good number of people coming through to your lead generation landing page, you can test LLA at the top of the funnel too, but I still think it's better not to shrink your "net" based on who you think will be interested when initial engagement costs are so low.
Is Facebook telling you that your LLA are too small (you can see this on the Audiences page in BM)?
@Angela Russo thank you for this.
No I think FB is good with just about any audience over 1000 basically - or that is what I gather anyway.
Maybe I should try to organize my thoughts better and show/share somehow what my funnel (really just a handful of campaigns) looks like. Will try to do that soon.
@Ryan Ray
In my limited experience with Facebook ads I would say there’s a lot to take into account. The pixel is definitely a big help but only IF you do your due diligence in creating the right audience for the ads.
I would split test a couple of different audiences meaning try and switch a few different things but only a small bit at a time so you can keep track of what’s generating more traffic. (You can do this by starting out with a small budget for different ad sets like $5/ day for 3-5 days)
Once you have the best audience picked out make sure the media you’re putting out is compelling and original and split test these too. no one wants to click on your typical ‘we buy houses’ ad.
One final note would be to invest into making a good website. If someone is brought to your site but it looks unfinished an unprofessional it’s doubtful they’ll turn into a lead.
I hope I didn’t just say everything you’ve already heard! Best of luck.
@Angela Russo here is what I have been doing (this month):
Origination Campaigns
Origination: New Views -- Video View Campaign (2 short video ads) -- Wide local audience (See below)
Origination: Reach Local -- Reach Campaign (3 short video ads) -- Uploaded lists as custom audiences, didn't skip trace.
Origination: Lookalikes -- Video View Campaign (2 short video ads) -- Lookalikes of video viewers and website site visitors
Also one or two post boosts, which I don't expect much from. One video and one static.
Retargetting Campaigns
ReTGT: Engagement -- 3 different ads sets -- Audiences: 3 phases based on time frames
ReTGT: Traffic -- 1 ad set, with static images (before/after) -- Audience: Watched retargeting videos (this one got me 62% of outbound clicks the site).
ReTGT: Video Views - 1 ad set, with 3 videos -- Audience: Site visitors, recent viewers, or otherwise engaged with content.
Spent $452 this month before shutting it off (just a couple days ago).
But this has been my best month so far, getting it somewhat dialed in now, at least in terms of driving people to the website.
307 total outbound clicks ($1.47 per click), and about 55,540 impressions. This 0.55% per impression, which is about what you would get from a direct mailing. But what would it cost to send 55,500 postcards in a month?
But zero leads, so...
Probably will regroup and create a new set of campaigns for August.
The local 'wide' audience looked like this:
several zones on a map (geographic radius), Age 47 to 65+
Interests: Home Improvements, The Home Depot, Lowe's or AARP
@Angela Russo here is what I have been doing (this month):
Origination Campaigns
Origination: New Views -- Video View Campaign (2 short video ads) -- Wide local audience (See below)
Origination: Reach Local -- Reach Campaign (3 short video ads) -- Uploaded lists as custom audiences, didn't skip trace.
Origination: Lookalikes -- Video View Campaign (2 short video ads) -- Lookalikes of video viewers and website site visitors
Also one or two post boosts, which I don't expect much from. One video and one static.
Retargetting Campaigns
ReTGT: Engagement -- 3 different ads sets -- Audiences: 3 phases based on time frames
ReTGT: Traffic -- 1 ad set, with static images (before/after) -- Audience: Watched retargeting videos (this one got me 62% of outbound clicks the site).
ReTGT: Video Views - 1 ad set, with 3 videos -- Audience: Site visitors, recent viewers, or otherwise engaged with content.
Spent $452 this month before shutting it off (just a couple days ago).
But this has been my best month so far, getting it somewhat dialed in now, at least in terms of driving people to the website.
307 total outbound clicks ($1.47 per click), and about 55,540 impressions. This 0.55% per impression, which is about what you would get from a direct mailing. But what would it cost to send 55,500 postcards in a month?
But zero leads, so...
Probably will regroup and create a new set of campaigns for August.
The local 'wide' audience looked like this:
several zones on a map (geographic radius), Age 47 to 65+
Interests: Home Improvements, The Home Depot, Lowe's or AARP
If you got 307 links clicks without one response, I think there has to be an issue on your website. There are a bunch of landing page tools that people use for things like that, maybe one of those would be worth trying? Or try and emulate websites that you know convert, there have been a lot of podcast guests that have websites they use to get leads.
Sometimes if your website is too slow it will cause people to bounce as well, that's another thing to check. A lot of people put way too many plugins combined with a slow theme and slow hosting to get a high bounce rate.
I was thinking this as well. But I do sometimes get leads. Maybe organic search or whatever, a couple from a mail campaign, but it isn't that NOBODY clicks.
Speed is fine. Using carrot site.
Could be other factors -- need more credibility, whatever. That is really my primary theory at this point.
I was thinking this as well. But I do sometimes get leads. Maybe organic search or whatever, a couple from a mail campaign, but it isn't that NOBODY clicks.
Speed is fine. Using carrot site.
Could be other factors -- need more credibility, whatever. That is really my primary theory at this point.
Have you tried using the form directly on Facebook? Results for me showed that it worked slightly better than a straight website link.
I had it set up but I really didn't allow it to do it's majik. I should try it again.
@Mark Sewell - I agree with @Aaron Taylor, if you got 307 click-through to your landing page, I would expect that you should get at least a few leads, so I would split test/optimize your landing page design and offer. What is the desired action from your landing page & where would they go next in the funnel?
I may have mis-understood from your description of your different sets, but what is your objective on the retargeting campaigns? You want to focus on conversion (or lead generation if you test your lead forms again). You already got the engagement & video view on the origination campaign to create your retargeting, so you don't want Facebook to optimize those same objectives.
Also, just to confirm- that 307 number is your Link Clicks, not your total clicks, correct? You will see the stats separately in Ads Manager, since opening the post larger, clicking on the video, liking, commenting, clicking read more - all count separately for "Clicks total." 0.55% is on the lower side of what I would expect from a successful ad, but not a horrible place to start if you can work on getting them to convert on the back-end.
I would add a third layer of retargeting using the landing page Pixel to catch the people who have already visited but not become leads. Since you only have 300 so far, you won't need a large budget to reach them again. Think of the "abandoned cart" mentality from e-commerce to pull people back in when they don't immediately convert.
@Ryan Ray
In my limited experience with Facebook ads I would say there’s a lot to take into account. The pixel is definitely a big help but only IF you do your due diligence in creating the right audience for the ads.
I would split test a couple of different audiences meaning try and switch a few different things but only a small bit at a time so you can keep track of what’s generating more traffic. (You can do this by starting out with a small budget for different ad sets like $5/ day for 3-5 days)
Once you have the best audience picked out make sure the media you’re putting out is compelling and original and split test these too. no one wants to click on your typical ‘we buy houses’ ad.
One final note would be to invest into making a good website. If someone is brought to your site but it looks unfinished an unprofessional it’s doubtful they’ll turn into a lead.
I hope I didn’t just say everything you’ve already heard! Best of luck.
You should 100% always have at least your general pixel set up on your website, even if you aren't currently running ads. You can't go back and collect data from the past if you don't do the leg-work initially - and putting in one line of code into your website header is pretty low effort anyways. The more data your pixel brings in even before you need it, the better you will be able to use it if/once you do get your campaigns active.
@Angela Russo yes I have had the pixel set up from the start.
@Angela Russo I had 307 outbound clicks. I specifically checked this on BM. These are not just clicks to my FB page. Although my carrot site dashboard shows less than 307 hits over 30 days so there is some discrepancy.
I have been retargeting page visitors (website my FB page) just as you describe and this is responsible for almost 2/3 of my site visits.
The idea was to do this- show short videos and RE Target. I decided to run the first ads using three different objectives: video views, traffic and engagement. This would allow me to retarget those that (a) visit the site (b) watch a certain amount of the videos or (c) otherwise engage with my page or content.
I think I am just coming out with a fun silly ad to start that succeeds in getting views, but then I need to qualify them and continue the discussion. Here is where I need improvement I suspect, that gradual ‘filtration’ to get to a more narrow audience that is closer to the folks I am looking for.
@Mark Sewell I agree it seems like you have the top of your funnel set up pretty well, and it is usually pretty cheap to get video views or engagement but effective for getting your name out/ building brand awareness.
What conversion objective are you using for your retargeted audience campaigns? Just hitting the landing page or completing your form/hitting the thank you page?
I have been following this discussion and have not chimed in until now. Here is my two cents on the subject of FB ads for REI:
I am a member of a nationwide mastermind group for real estate investors. We have about 150 people in the group from all over the nation. We all help each other succeed and grow our businesses because we are not in competing markets, and membership is limited per city/area. We have discussed FB ads many times and many members of the group have tried them at one time or another. Not one single person has had success with them as far as being able to actually generate motivated seller leads. Ans a few people threw a massive amount of money into them, as they were determined to make them work. They did not succeed. The general consensus for the group is that FB ads can be good for brand awareness and recognition, but they are not good for generating motivated seller leads. FB is full of people that are on the site because they are bored. They are scrolling along looking for anything that catches their eye. They may click a pretty picture or a short video out of boredom, but that doesn't mean they are actually motivated to sell a property. If you are getting activity but no actual leads, I would think these are people that are more curious than motivated sellers. No amount of tweaking your ads, videos or website will convert them. They are just not actual leads. They are looky loos just browsing around.
The best use we have come up with FB ads is to use them as part of your follow up. You skip trace your lists and obtain email addresses for leads and then serve ads to people on FB by uploading their email addresses. That way you are only targeting people on your list and it is more for brand recognition than anything else, as part of a follow up sequence. For example, you send out DM then serve the list ads on FB, use retargeting and tie in some RVMs. This type of multifaceted approach is what we as a mastermind group have determined works best. As the old saying goes, it is best not to put all your eggs in one basket...
@Mark Sewell I agree it seems like you have the top of your funnel set up pretty well, and it is usually pretty cheap to get video views or engagement but effective for getting your name out/ building brand awareness.
What conversion objective are you using for your retargeted audience campaigns? Just hitting the landing page or completing your form/hitting the thank you page?
More thought is required, probably. Need to take a good hard look at the structure of my funnel. Right now my plan is run video (wide net) and then retarget... but probably my retargeting is all over the place, not well organized yet.
I been doing retarget campaigns for multiple objectives, including traffic, more video views and even engagement again. I am showing them different ads at different points in time. I'd like the person to some of the initial ads, and them some follow ups over time.
So I gather from your earlier comments that it is not good practice to retarget for the same objectives that I am using for my primary origination campaigns? Can you expand a bit on that - that sounds like it is good insight (or I just misunderstood).
I have been following this discussion and have not chimed in until now. Here is my two cents on the subject of FB ads for REI:
I am a member of a nationwide mastermind group for real estate investors. We have about 150 people in the group from all over the nation. We all help each other succeed and grow our businesses because we are not in competing markets, and membership is limited per city/area. We have discussed FB ads many times and many members of the group have tried them at one time or another. Not one single person has had success with them as far as being able to actually generate motivated seller leads. Ans a few people threw a massive amount of money into them, as they were determined to make them work. They did not succeed. The general consensus for the group is that FB ads can be good for brand awareness and recognition, but they are not good for generating motivated seller leads. FB is full of people that are on the site because they are bored. They are scrolling along looking for anything that catches their eye. They may click a pretty picture or a short video out of boredom, but that doesn't mean they are actually motivated to sell a property. If you are getting activity but no actual leads, I would think these are people that are more curious than motivated sellers. No amount of tweaking your ads, videos or website will convert them. They are just not actual leads. They are looky loos just browsing around.
The best use we have come up with FB ads is to use them as part of your follow up. You skip trace your lists and obtain email addresses for leads and then serve ads to people on FB by uploading their email addresses. That way you are only targeting people on your list and it is more for brand recognition than anything else, as part of a follow up sequence. For example, you send out DM then serve the list ads on FB, use retargeting and tie in some RVMs. This type of multifaceted approach is what we as a mastermind group have determined works best. As the old saying goes, it is best not to put all your eggs in one basket...
Are you in Mike Hambright's group?
This does mesh with what the guys at Carrot say... they recommending using it for retargeting.
There are a few investors that have had success but not many.
You know one of those people happens to be a guy name @Michael Quarles who happens to know a bit about advertising for motivated sellers. He commented in another thread that @Jerryll Noorden and I were participating in just recently.
He noted that they were getting leads for less than $22 per lead, but the leads were not all super high quality. But the cost was low enough that it really didn't matter - managed to pick up 3 houses in June, from these FB leads.
He shared his results from 2 campaigns... and I hope he doesn't mind me reposting the stats here:
—
205 Leads (Form)
83,552 People
214,300 total
$21.58 Per Lead (Form)
$4,424.69 Total
Even if I were only able to close one house for $4425, I'd be OK with that, at least in the beginning.
FB retargeting has worked well for me in my tech companies.
Our top of funnel leads come from LinkedIn ads and company posts (think DM lists for you).
When they visit our site, we tag them for retargeting on FB. So when they're home at night in bed scrolling through their FB book feed, they see our ads as warm leads instead of cold.
I think @Braden Smith is on to something. Get a list, warm them up with call to action in a DM piece sending them to your site, then tag them for FB retargeting.
@Jerryll Noorden what alternative lead generation strategies do you recommend?
@Mark Sewell I agree it seems like you have the top of your funnel set up pretty well, and it is usually pretty cheap to get video views or engagement but effective for getting your name out/ building brand awareness.
What conversion objective are you using for your retargeted audience campaigns? Just hitting the landing page or completing your form/hitting the thank you page?
More thought is required, probably. Need to take a good hard look at the structure of my funnel. Right now my plan is run video (wide net) and then retarget... but probably my retargeting is all over the place, not well organized yet.
I been doing retarget campaigns for multiple objectives, including traffic, more video views and even engagement again. I am showing them different ads at different points in time. I'd like the person to some of the initial ads, and them some follow ups over time.
So I gather from your earlier comments that it is not good practice to retarget for the same objectives that I am using for my primary origination campaigns? Can you expand a bit on that - that sounds like it is good insight (or I just misunderstood).
So Facebook is going to try and get you the lowest cost for your objective that it can, but acknowledges that different people are more or less likely to take different types of actions on Facebook. For example, there may be some people who watch videos all day long or like every post under the sun but will never provide their contact info to a lead form. So you would still get those people with a video view or engagement objective for cheap, but the algorithm would be less likely to show them the same ad for a lead generation or conversion objective since they are not as likely to respond.
So at the top of the funnel, video views and engagement campaigns with a broad audience are a great way to get your "own" interest target group because they cared enough about real estate to watch or engage. Additional ads will continue to give you more brand recognition with those objectives, but your ultimate goal is leads. You definitely want a campaign with the retargeting audience that focuses on the lead objectives to narrow further to the ones who are most likely to provide their info.
What specific action do you want the prospect to take on your landing page? Or are you just sending them generally to your website?
I wanted to say that this is helpful.
So far, I have been just sending them to the site. I have several pages and all have lead forms.
I have been considering doing some more in-depth video, a kind of info-session that a prospective seller would need to sign up for (we can call it a webinar with no upsell). But to be honest, I am still wrestling with the content that I should include. I want to provide some useful information, but not sure how far I want to delve into the math. I'd like to help them understand what it is that RE Investors are looking for, and give some guidance there about who might be more willing to work directly with us, a buyer, vs. those that might prefer to work with a realtor. No wrong answer there. Obviously I am wanting to tread carefully with this, because it will likely steer away a lot of folks.
Think like a person that has a property they NEED to sell, one that is truly motivated and has a real NEED and not just a WANT to sell... a truly DISTRESSED seller... if you were in that position, where would you go to find someone to buy your house? I know if I was distressed and looking for help, I wouldn't be looking on Facebook. Everyone knows that FB is full of BS, so I think many people don't trust things they see on FB, and for good reason. There are so many fake posts, fake accounts, scams and just plain old BS it is ridiculous. The platform has really degraded in my opinion. The same happened with Craigslist. It was useful at one time, but now it is just garbage. And the site is saturated with advertisers now that many people either don't get on there much anymore and/or just skip over any and all ads. There is just too many of them.
Have you seen this old thread? https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/87/topics/404163-facebook-ads-for-motivated-sellers
And these?
https://carrot.com/blog/facebook-ads-real-estate/
http://leadpropeller.com/blog/facebook-advertising-for-real-estate-investors/