If you’ve tried to get real estate leads with Facebook ads lately, you must have noticed that it’s costing you more to get people to click and engage with your paid promotions. The Facebook ads cost-per-click (CTC) for real estate and all other industries is increasing.
Most real estate professionals including real estate agents, brokers and real estate investors are forced to increase their Facebook ads budget, but they are still not getting the results that they used to two years ago. Many realtors have started wondering if it’s even worth promoting their brand on Facebook.
The bad news is that the cost will increase more and the click-through-rate (CRT) will decrease in 2022. The reason is that the number of advertisers will go up and at the same time, they will spend more money on Facebook ads.
In this guide, I am going to explain four strategies to help you ensure that Facebook ads are still profitable for your real estate business in 2022.
Table of Contents
That’s how Facebook is getting costlier for advertisers
Let’s first crunch some numbers to know how Facebook ads are getting costlier.
According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, there are about 7 million active advertisers on Facebook. The total number of Facebook users is 2.4 billion. It means that there are only 342 active users per advertiser.
Likewise, the cost-per-click (CTC) for Facebook ads has gone up with the increasing competition.
While the CTC was $0.43 in Q2 of 2018. It went up to $0.63 in Q2 of 2019.
On top of that, the Click-through-Rate (CTR) is going down with each passing year. It means that fewer people are clicking on Facebook ads.
The CTR for Facebook Newsfeed ads in Q2 of 2018 was 2.24%. It came down to 1.20% in Q2 of 2019.
According to a study conducted by a landing page company, the conversion rate across industries for Facebook ads is 9.2%. An average advertiser spends about $64 for nine conversions.
While it looks great at a first glance, the conversion rate doesn’t mean that you are getting clients.
If someone clicked a home listing link on your Facebook ad, this will be counted as a conversion. So each and every conversion doesn’t contribute to your ROI.
Now that you know how Facebook paid promotions are getting costlier, let’s discuss some strategies for getting more people to click and engage with your ads without spending more money in 2022:
First, make people trust your brand
Gone are the days when you showed an ad with a few featured homes listings to get people to sign up.
Now you need to make sure that you are first warming up your audience and then directing them to sales or service pages on your real estate website.
You should make your prospects trust your brand before selling your services.
In order to achieve that, you need to first show them ads which educate them about the home buying and home selling process. Only after they trust your expertise, you should show them the ads promoting your service as a realtor or investor. In the first contact, you should try to win over the trust of your prospective clients.
Property buying and selling guides and neighborhood guides are some of the educational ads that you can promote when targeting new leads.
In a recent article, I discussed 20 different types of lead magnets for real estate Facebook ads. Some of them fall in the criteria of educational promotions.
While you’ll need to show your ads twice to the same user, I have seen that this lowers the cost-per-conversion in the long run and also increases brand credibility.
‘Retargeting’ and ‘lookalike’ audience
With Facebook following strict policies for housing ads – limiting the targeting options for real estate professionals, it has become more important for you to double down on two awesome Facebook ads features: ‘retargeting’ and ‘lookalike audience’.
Retargeting means that you are showing your ad to the user who has interacted with your brand online in different ways, while a ‘lookalike’ audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers.
In a recent article, I discussed the best practices to use retargeting and ‘lookalike audience’ of Facebook ads. Check out this article to know more about these features.
While it’s been a good practice to retarget your prospective clients and create lookalike audience to reach new prospects since the Facebook introduced these features, the strategy you need to adopt in 2022 is to retarget with audience segmentation.
Let’s say for example, you are promoting a free seminar or event to educate people about home buying and selling process. Many people would land on the sign-up page after clicking Facebook ad, but won’t fill up the form to register for the event. Now you need to retarget these people with a different ad – probably a video ad – in order to get them to register. This type of retargeting strategy is very effective.
Avoid ad fatigue
Ad fatigue is a major reason for a massive increase in CTC, CPC and CTR. It means that if you run the same ad for a long period of time, it will start getting fewer clicks and engagements.
There are three ways you can reduce Facebook ad fatigue and get more clicks and conversions for the same budget:
- Keep changing Facebook ads creative. Facebook lets you run ads with carousal, single image, single video, slideshow and canvas. Keep changing the ad creative and use dynamic ads for the same ad frequently (rotate at least once a week).
- Keep changing different elements of your Facebook ads funnel including copy, images, video and landing pages.
- Keep a tab on Facebook ads frequency. Don’t show ads to the same users again and again, particularly when they are not converting. Facebook ad frequency is the average number of times each person saw your ad.
Promote videos as much as possible
Facebook is definitely biased towards video and it will get more so in 2022 and beyond.
Studies show that since video ads get more engagement such as clicks, likes and views, your ad will reach more people organically. This will reduce the cost-per-result.
You can use drone videos of featured listings or video testimonials for Facebook promotions.
Conclusion
So these are the best Facebook advertising practices that real estate agents (realtors), real estate investors and brokers should follow in 2022 to keep their promotional campaigns profitable.
Let me know in comments which of these strategies you are currently using and whether they helped you get a better ROI on your Facebook ads.
Leave a Reply