Are Facebook changes truly affecting home builders and developers advertising success?

Short answer: No, if you know how to make it work for you.

Facebook has recently announced some major updates that affect the way real estate can be advertised on their platforms. These new limitations, set to happen by December 31st, 2019, seem as they will have major consequences on advertisements for new home builders and developers. But if you learn to work within the system, you can make the system work for you. 

Why Did the Updates Occur?

The announcement from Facebook came as the result of a settlement agreement with various civil rights organizations to help combat and prevent discrimination from advertisements on Facebook. So, they have made changes to the way that housing, employment, and credit ads are targeted to Facebook users.

What Are the Changes?

While Facebook made many changes to comply with the settlement agreement, there are 3 major changes that affect new home builders and developers (when an ad account has been specified as dealing in the real estate industry, or dealing with housing.)

1. You are no longer allowed to target consumers by age. The default age range is now 18–65+. This could especially impact 55+ communities.
2. You are no longer allowed to target by gender. And we all know that women drive more of the purchasing decisions.
3. You are no longer allowed to target by zip code. The minimum is now a 15-mile radius. 

What Can Be Done?

These Facebook changes seem overwhelming about what can be done with advertising on their platforms. However, if you’ve already implemented newer strategies to take advantage of Facebook’s AI, the disruption will be very minimal – if any at all. While instead if you’ve been using the old approach, you’ll see an overall decrease in performance.

Conversion-focused campaigns are the answer because they allow Facebook's AI to find the best prospects for you based on the result-based objective you select.

At Blue Sky Marketing, we've been running highly successful campaigns tracking and optimizing for conversions for over a year. We've moved our clients, when possible, to conversion campaigns instead of traffic campaigns. Our team works hard to keep our builder, developer, and real estate clients always ahead of the curve and as Facebook agency partners we have access to resources, training, new strategies, and early news like this.

What Are Conversion Campaigns And How Do They Work?

Conversion campaigns use the Facebook pixel on your website to track visits from your Facebook ads and optimize for the desired KPIs tracked. That helps us identify a persona and for the actions that that person is most likely to take on your website. Those actions are defined as conversions. As the campaign runs, Facebook collects data on what common features the prospects that complete the conversions and then targets people similar to those that converted with Facebook ads.

Let’s Talk More About Your Facebook Strategy

Don’t let these Facebook updates affect your success. Make them work for you and your business. Contact Blue Sky Marketing today to discuss what we can do for your Facebook and social media strategy.