Running Facebook ads to generate more real estate enquiries can often seem like a gamble. You have to invest time and money to achieve results, and when your ads don’t generate enquiries it can feel simpler just to give up.
But, here’s the good news! There are some super simple fixes you can make to your Meta lead ads to start achieving professional results. Here are 5 reasons your ads aren’t generating enquiries and how to fix them [+ download our breakdown of a Meta lead ad with best practice tips for each key element].
You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on advertising, but there are two key things to consider when setting up your campaign budget.
What is an optimisation event? An optimisation event is a result you want Facebook to achieve as efficiently as possible. If you’re sending your ad to a landing page you might optimise for link clicks, this means your ad would be targeted at people in your audience most likely to click the ad’s link.
Some optimisation events are harder to achieve than others, so you’ll need more budget to reach that event. It’s probably easier to find users who will click a link than to find users who will submit their details to your form, so you’ll need a higher budget. If your budget is too low to achieve your optimisation event you may want to start with a different but related optimisation event.
For instance, if you have an appraisal landing page, direct people to that page and optimise for link clicks instead of lead submissions. You may get fewer enquiries in doing this, but you will gather an excellent audience for re-targeting campaigns when you are ready to optimise for lead submissions.
Stretching out a small budget over a long period can often impact the performance of your ad.
Say you have a $20 budget and you stretch that budget over a 21-day campaign; how much would you be spending daily? That’s about 0.90 cents per day on your ad.
At 0.90c per day, you’re unlikely to achieve your optimisation event. Facebook needs 50 optimisation events to occur before an ad can leave its learning phase – this is the phase where performance is less stable and your cost per result is usually worse. So, if you never leave this learning phase because your budget isn’t significant enough per day to hit 50 optimisation events, you’ll find yourself far less likely to generate enquiries.
We’ve previously made some scheduling recommendations based on budget in our ultimate guide to Facebook advertising, so we recommend downloading that.
Several signs indicate that your Facebook ads aren’t targeting the right people:
You can also use Facebook’s ad relevance diagnostics to understand how relevant Meta has judged your ads for your targeted audience. These diagnostics are based on your ad’s performance compared to other ads targeting the same audience.
If your audience is too small to generate enquiries and conversions, or if you’re not targeting relevant people there are some steps you can take to resolve this issue.
Start by using demographic and interest targeting to reach the right people based on age, gender, location, and interests. Then test expanding and narrowing these audiences to discover what demographic targeting reaches and converts more users into clients.
You can also use custom audiences to target people who have interacted with your business in the past. This ensures that the users you’re targeting are relevant to you.
Have you heard of the marketing rule of 7? The rule of 7 states that a prospect needs 7 touchpoints from you before they’ll take action on a product or service. So, first things first, get consistent social media posting and advertising in place so that your audience is regularly hearing from you!
But, the quality of your messages is equally important for the rule of 7 to work – particularly if you’re selling a service as important as real estate. The best way to generate quality enquiries is to offer something in return to your audience. Rather than overtly “salesy” advertising that offers free appraisals try offering something unique that users interested in the property market will be curious enough to submit their details for.
Selling guides, marketing guides and market reports with information they can’t get from regular providers are excellent starting points. Brainstorm and think outside the box on what you can provide to create a sense of exclusivity and urgency for users to submit their contact details to you.
Plus, a bonus to this advertising strategy is the fact that you have an easy lead-in to conversation when you call a new lead! It’s a win-win.
Even if you think you’ve crafted a fantastic, unique offer that’s sure to generate enquiries, often an ineffective form or landing page can prevent engaged users from converting.
When it comes to advertising for enquiries you can set your ad up in a few ways. You can use an instant form, you can open an automated chat in Facebook messenger or you can link to a landing page for users to submit their details.
Our advice is to test all of these options and see which works best for you! And, to also test multiple variations of each type.
Let’s take a closer look at the reasons a form or a landing page may be preventing users from submitting their details to your ad campaign.
If you can’t work out why your instant forms aren’t converting, it’s a good idea to look first at Meta’s best practices for these forms.
Are you doing the following things in your form?
If you’ve answered no to any of these then we highly recommend adding them to your forms and testing the results. You’re likely to see an improvement in your ad’s performance.
We also recommend testing different form lengths to see whether shorter forms with fewer questions or longer more complex forms work better for you.
Many elements in a landing page can impact the performance of your ads, so it’s important to thoroughly test different landing pages against each other to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
In our time marketing for real estate agents, we’ve come across a few common landing page mistakes you should watch out for.
This fifth reason your ad may not be generating enquiries is the one we’re guessing you’ve tested the most.
Generally, when your ad creative isn’t working it’s because you’re not effectively communicating the value proposition or differentiating yourself from your competitors. Or, your call to action may not be compelling enough.
Often we find agents take an ad hoc approach when testing their content, but this approach can make it difficult to tell which ad content elements are working and which are not. We recommend running A/B tests on a single element of your content to uncover what changes to your content make a difference to your results.
Create two versions of the same ad and analyse the performance metrics, such as click-through rate, engagement rate, and conversion rate. You can then make changes depending on the result and move on to A/B testing a different element.
There are several reasons your Meta ads may not be generating enquiries. The solution is simply to test variations of your campaign until you find one that works! Consider running tests across all of your campaign’s budget, audience and content or making simple tweaks according to Meta’s best practices.
Plus, discover the essentials of a Facebook lead-generation campaign today.