…or One Week with Facebook Social Ads

The recent Facebook Beacon controversy aside (see Mark Zuckerberg’s Mea Culpa) – Facebook’s Social Ads are one of the most fascinating advertising platforms that has been introduced to the Web over the last little while.

When the platform launched, I posited that it could be a very precise way to target real estate advertising (see Marketing Yourself with Facebook Flyers) to specific members of the network, especially if you grouped members through their physical location (neighborhood) or their employer.

Rather than just talking the talk however, I set out over the last week to really walk the walk. I created a handful of specifically targeted ads to promote my FOREM fan page (see Advertising Your Real Estate Business on Facebook) using creative I developed specifically for this campaign – the “I’m a FOREM fan” badge that you can see on the top of the right column of this blog.

The results so far… not too bad.

Baseline for my campaign.

• I set myself a $50 a day budget. Might sound expensive, but remember, Social Ads are Cost-Per-Click so you only pay for the clicks and I never even hit that daily limit.
• I set a $1 per click bid (the minimum is $0.10) so that I would sit higher in the rotation and get more impressions. Again, you only pay for when people click through, so set a bid that you are comfortable paying for but remember if it’s too low you’ll get very few impressions.

Here are my results:

When I created the ads I deliberately targeted people who had identified themselves as working for some of the larger real estate brokerages (I also threw in folks who worked at Zillow, Redfin and Move.com) and targeted the message specifically for each. I made sure that the title of the ad identified the specific company they worked for – the idea being that that would pique their curiosity.

If you review the chart, you’ll see I had the best response from Realtors who work at Keller Williams. Here’s what my ad for KW looked like.

Since I had a pretty high CPC bid, I got a decent amount of daily impressions. My best day was Wednesday, where I got nearly 1500 impressions of the ad across my campaign.

As an advertiser, I benefit somewhat from some residual brand recognition that these impressions generate but since I was trying to promote my Facebook Page, I was really hoping for people to click through the ad and visit the page.

My best day resulted in 7 clicks – not a stellar result, but again I’m only paying for these clicks, so it did help keep the overall cost down.

So, results.

I did see a steady increase over the week in the number of people who identified themselves as “fans” of my FOREM page.

As an aside, Facebook also gives you a nice demographic breakdown of your fans too.

My theory going into this experiment is that people who were curious enough about the ad to click through to see the Facebook page would then probably be compelled to click through and visit the blog itself.

Sure enough, Facebook helped send a trickle of traffic through to FOREM.

Bottom line, if you have a product or service you are trying to reach Realtors with – following a strategy similar to mine might be a good way to put yourself in front of your target market.

Now, if you’re a Realtor, and are trying to reach consumers, you might try experimenting with targeting a message to large employers in your area. Or reaching people in your city who have identified one of their interests as “real estate”.

Remember – the beautiful thing about this platform is that you can be very precise with who you’re targeting, so make sure you take the time to personalize the message to them.

Share on Facebook