Finally, an automated ad solution to reach and convert home shoppers on Facebook and Instagram
Dynamic ads were created to solve a fundamental problem for businesses looking to promote large catalogs of products. After struggling to maintain a multitude of diverse campaigns, the question was forced: how can I scale my advertising if I have to build individual campaigns for a catalog of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of products? Facebook answered with dynamic ads, a system allowing advertisers to set up a campaign template once, then connect a product feed to promote the entire inventory. Advertisers responded: Brilliant.
However, the initial rollout of dynamic ads was constrained to eCommerce. And while other online businesses were able to adapt this new technology for their goals, it wasn’t custom. In Facebook’s 2016 Q3 earnings call, Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook, announced successes, with the help of StitcherAds, for a new product: dynamic ads for travel. With the success of this first product, she stated, there would be a new emphasis on vertical-specific ad formats to better address specific industry goals and requirements.
Now in 2017, it’s real estate’s turn. StitcherAds now offers dynamic ads for real estate, allowing agents to show ads to people that are interested in buying or renting a new home. This new product helps target that noncommittal home-browser with relevant ads showing location, neighborhood, the number of bedrooms/baths, price, or other real estate specific details—and it’s all automated.
"Apartments.com is always working to connect renters with their future homes efficiently. We’ve been very pleased with the performance of dynamic ads and StitcherAds (our Facebook Marketing Partner). They’ve helped to turn Instagram into a credible direct response platform."
JACK ROBLING, SENIOR MANAGER, ONLINE MARKETING, COSTAR
Dynamic Product Ads vs. Dynamic Ads for Real Estate: What’s The Difference?
- Feed - A standard DPA feed has 9 required elements, mostly centered around eCommerce. Dynamic ads for real estate require real estate-specific feed elements like listing address and geo coordinates. To add more flexibility to creative and campaign configuration, StitcherAds also incorporates additional custom elements that are specific to a client’s needs.
- Data - Previously real estate businesses were able to add custom feed elements to DPA to make the ads work for their goals, however this data was unstructured, meaning it can’t be used for proximity intelligence or other key features. By adding these required real-estate-specific elements, Facebook is able to use this structured data to recommend better user and listing matches. For example, with longitude and latitude coordinates, combined with property details, Facebook can recommend a similar nearby listing.
- Creative - Using dynamic image templates (DIT), real estate businesses can highlight details about the listing in the ad image, by pulling information from the feed. Most commonly, we’ve helped clients add location information, number of beds/baths, property type, and price. The image template is laid over an image in the feed, then populated with the specified feed data. Eye-catching images lead to better performance overall.
- Conversions - For eCommerce, conversions = sales. In real estate, a conversion is most generally tracked as a new lead. Upon click of your ad, users can be directed to the URL for the listing seen. After that initial click, new leads can be captured through phone calls, lead forms, app events, etc., which will then be tracked as a conversion.
- Offline Tracking - Since dynamic ads for real estate are structured for real estate, they’re more extensible. We offer third party tracking for measuring offline conversions. For example, if a user clicks on ad, then calls the phone number for the listing, we’re able to attribute that conversion back to the ad originally viewed.
And the biggest difference of all? It's outperforming non-vertical-specific dynamic ads. In transitioning one of our real estate clients from dynamic product ads to dynamic ads for real estate, we were able to get DARE to outperform already successful and tested DPA ads in just 3 weeks. Both in return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost per lead (CPL).
