The Tools & Structure of a Real Estate Facebook Ad Campaign

This is Part 2 of a 3-Part series on creating real estate Facebook ads:

• Part 1: Introduction to Creating Real Estate Facebook Ads
• Part 2: [Your Are Here] The Tools & Structure of a Real Estate Facebook Ad Campaign
• Part 3: Creating Your First Real Estate Facebook Ad Campaign [Step-by-Step Guide]

Welcome back to the series…

Last week we talked about everything you needed to know before getting started with a real estate Facebook ad campaign.

Hopefully you followed along last week and decided on your why and your what for this campaign that you are wanting to create.

So whats next? This week we are going to talk about the two tools that Facebook gives you access to for creating an ad campaign, Ads Manager and Power Editor. We are also going to talk about the structure of the ad campaign.

TOOL #1: FACEBOOK ADS MANAGER

The first tool that is offered by Facebook for you to create and manage your ads is called Facebook Ads Manager. It can be found by clicking on the drop down arrow in the top right corner of your Facebook screen, and then clicking on “manage ads” or by visiting https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/ from your favorite web browser.

When you log into Facebook Ads Manager, you will be taken to the “Manage Ads” screen and it will look like this:

The main items for you to recognize on this screen are the following:

• Account – Make sure that this lists your Facebook Ads account
• Spent Last 7 Days – This gives you an overview of your ad spend for the past week, broken down by day.
• Create Campaign Button – This will walk you through the creation of an ad campaign, including setting up ad sets, and ads.
• Create Ad Button – This green button located in the top right corner of the screen is a shortcut to create an ad. It still walks you though all the same steps as the create campaign button does.

TOOL #2: FACEBOOK POWER EDITOR

The second option you have for creating an ad campaign is called Power Editor and it can be found within the Facebook Ads Manager. If you look in the image above you will see a tab for Power Editor just under the Facebook search bar when you are in Ads Manager.

So what is different about Power Editor?

To start off with, the first thing that you may notice is that it has a different look and feel than Ads Manger. Some people like it better, while others seem to like Ads Manager better, its really a personal preference.

This is the main screen that you will see with Power Editor:

Regardless of your personal preferences on the look and feel of Power Editor vs Ads Manager, I highly recommend that you get to know and use Power Editor as your ad creation tool for all Facebook ads that you run.

Why?

Because using Power Editor gives you a lot more control over the ads, and ad campaigns, that you create. It also gives you a better estimate of the target audience and potential reach for your ads than Ads Manager does.

THE STRUCTURE OF AN AD CAMPAIGN

Most times when you think about doing advertising on Facebook you just think about running an ad, however there is more to it than just creating a single ad with an image and a headline and putting it out in front of your target audience.

Just as building a home takes a number of steps, some that must be done before others, creating a Facebook ad is very similar.

There are three stages or levels to every ad.

Level 1: Campaigns

The first level that every ad campaign has is the campaign level. Whether you are wanting to create a single ad that runs to a single audience, or a multi-ad campaign that runs to a number of different audience with different budgets, you must create a campaign.

What is at the campaign level?

At this level you choose 3 things:

1. The Name. This can be anything, but I would recommend that you make it something that is descriptive enough to help you remember what this campaign is trying to achieve. For example, “Get more Facebook page likes” is a good name to help you remember that your goal with that campaign was to gain more Facebook fans.
2. The Buying Type. You have the choice between auction and fixed price. If you are unsure of which to go with, start out with auction.
3. The Objective. Currently there are 14 different objectives for you to choose from. Clicks to website, website conversions, page post engagement, page likes, and event responses tend to be the objectives used most by real estate agents. However, you will want to consider each objective and pick the one that best aligns with your goal for the ad campaign. We will go more in-depth on this next week.

You only need to create one campaign for each objective that you have. However, you may want to have multiple campaigns if you have a few different objectives.

Why would you have more than one objective?

Many times there are a number of different things that you are trying to achieve with Facebook ads. You may want to run some ads that are designed to help you grow your Facebook following, others that are designed to market a property that you have listed, others to advertise your home sales services, and others targeting potential home buyers to persuade them to use you as a buyers agent.

In this scenario you would create different campaigns for all of these goals, and you would choose the Facebook objective that most closely aligns with the goal.

Level 2: Ad Sets

Once you have created your campaign, it is time to move on to the second level – the ad sets level. All ad sets must have the same objective that you choose in the campaign level. For example, if you choose “clicks to website” as the objective at the campaign level you cannot change that at the ad sets level.

While you can only have one campaign for your goal, you may have multiple ad sets within that campaign.

Lets look at an example: If your campaign was titled, “1234 Main Street – Home Sale” and had an objective of clicks to website – you may be trying to drive people to a single property site that you created for the home that you have listed – you may want to have 2-4 ads sets.

Are you wondering why you would want more than one ad set here?

The answer is due to what you control at this level.

What is at the ad sets level?

At this level you choose 6 things:

1. Budget. You can choose between a daily budget and a lifetime budget.
2. Schedule. Your first option is when to schedule the ad to start. You can also decide when the end date of the ad will be – or you can make it an ongoing ad. You can also create a custom schedule for the times of day that you would like the ad to appear if you chose to use a lifetime budget.
3. Audience. Choose between a saved audience, custom audience, or you can create a new audience that you would like this ad to target (more on this next week).
4. Placement. You currently have 5 options available for where you want your ads to appear.
5. Optimization and Pricing. Facebook recommends the you optimize for link clicks (pay per impression), but you also have the option to optimize for daily unique reach, link clicks (pay per link click), or for impressions. For pricing you have the option to “get more link clicks at the best price” which is recommended by Facebook, or to “set the bid you’re willing to pay per link click”. All of these optimization and pricing strategies can (and probably should) be tested to see what works best for you.
6. Advanced Delivery. You have 2 options for delivery – standard or accelerated – for the delivery of your ad. Standard is recommended but you can choose accelerated if you would like your ad to be served faster, rather than being spread out throughout the day.

The great thing about the ad sets level is that is is where you can really begin to split-test your ads.

What do I mean?

Lets continue to use the example above. We are creating a ad campaign for our listing at 1234 Main Street.

Ad Set 0001

In this first ad set you may choose to set a budget of $5.00 per day, a schedule of 1 week, an audience of people who live within 5 miles of your listing who are between the ages of 35-55, placement on the desktop newsfeed & mobile newsfeed, optimized for clicks to website (pay per impression), and standard delivery.

This may be one possible target market for this listing, but is it possible that there is more than one target market?

Of course!

Maybe you would want to create another ad set that has mostly the same settings, but this time targets people who live within 25 miles of the city that your listing is in, and who are between the ages of 25-65. This would be a much larger and broader audience than the first.

You could even create a third ad set that targets fans of your real estate page. Or friends of the fans of our real estate page.

In this example you would now have 2 to 4 ad sets that are all targeting the same objective – the same campaign – but each ad set would be targeting a different audience. You can create ads for each of theses ad sets in the next level.

Level 3: Ads

Now that you have created your campaign – and have created one or more ad sets – it is time to create the ads that will go in each ad set.

Now that we are on the third level in, lets take a little recap of what each level is for:

• Level 1 – Campaign: This is the objective level.
• Level 2 – Ad Sets: This is the targeting, scheduling, and budgeting level.
• Level 3 – Ads: This is the design level.

In the ads level you can create multiple ads that have a different look and feel, but still target the same objective. You can use this level to test out your ad copy and/or your images to see which combination results in the best performance of your ad.

The best way to split test ads is to create multiple ads that are nearly idenical, changing just one variable in each ad.

What do I mean by that?

To continue the example from above, if you are trying to sell a home that you have listed – 1234 Main Street – you could create an ad that has the following details:

• Image: Front of the home
• Headline: “Everything you could want in a [neighborhood] home…”
• Link: You could use a link to a single property site that you have for this home

So that would be ad #1. What could you do to create more ads?

Create another ad that is the same as above, but uses a different image. In fact you could do this to create 3-4 ads with 3-4 different images – all other details being the same.

But we can take it even further…

Lets say that you created 3 ads – using 3 different images – you could also create 2 versions of each of those ads to test out 2 different headlines.

This would give you a total of 6 ads in one ad set.

• Ad 1: Image 1 with headline 1
• Ad 2: Image 2 with headline 1
• Ad 3: Image 3 with headline 1
• Ad 4: Image 1 with headline 2
• Ad 5: Image 2 with headline 2
• Ad 6: Image 3 with headline 2

Since you have multiple ad campaigns, you could then copy all 6 ads into each campaign.

Note: If you are using targeting for dramatically different target audiences in different ad sets, you may ant to change up your ads for each ad set to make them more relevant to that target market. This could be used best to customize ads to specific age groups by using language or references that would best connect with members of that age group.

Moving From Theory to Action

So there is all the info you need to know before you create your first real estate Facebook ad campaign.

Last week you determined your why and you what for the ad campaign that you are creating. If you haven’t read Part 1 of this series click here to go read it now!

You also now know the two tools that Facebook offers for creating and managing ads- Ads Manager & Power Editor – and you know the three levels of the campaign structure – Campaign, Ad Sets, & Ads.

Now its time to take all of this information and put it into action…

Next week we will be walking through the process of setting up your first ad. This step-by-step tutorial will have images for each step, as well as examples of ads that you could use to achieve the objectives that we will discuss.

If it seems complicated to you, don’t worrry. Next week we will break it down even more. We will talk about each of the objectives and when to use them. We will go more in-depth into the scheduling, audience, and placement of your ad sets. And we will also go more in-depth into creating a multi-ad campaign, and talk about some ways to split-test different ads.

See you next week!

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