Generating Buyer Leads with Facebook Ads

Note: Please complete your Facebook page and Business Manager before starting this article. Here's a quick video on it.

As mentioned before, Facebook works best as a lead generation tool when you’re using Lead Forms and sending the traffic to you IDX feed - which means you’ll be generating buyers leads, here’s how to do that.

From you business manager go to your ad management section and select “Create Ad”. Under Marketing objective select “Lead generation”

Now you need to name your campaign.

Pro tip: Select a naming convention early on and stick to it. This will help you stay organized later when you’re running multiple campaigns. It can be something as simple as “Lead Type - Area”, the most important thing is consistency.

Don’t worry about split testing or budget optimization. You can always change these after the campaign is live, but they’re not important unless you’re interested in diving deeper into Facebook marketing strategies.

If your ad account isn't set up, Facebook will now prompt you to select your settings (country, currency, and time zone). Punch in your preferred settings.

Now let’s get your ad set ready.

First you need to name your ad set. Once again, naming conventions are a great way to stay organized. Each ad set should have one goal that it focuses on (eg. finding condo buyers in Liberty Village) and then should contain a handful of ads that all seek to accomplish this goal. Facebook will automatically test the ads and show the top performing ones more than the rest. So feel free to get creative with your ads, to some extent you can just throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

So to start:

Select an Ad Set name.

Select the page that you want the ad to be posted from.

You can keep “Dynamic Creative” off. 

Now its time to create your audience. This is where you choose the geographic areas you want your ads to be shown, as well as the attributes and interests in your demographic.

Setting the location: there are three ways to select the areas you want your ads to be shown.

1. Broadest: Select the city or town name, as well as a radius around the area.
2. More refined: Drop a pin on the map and then select the radius around the pin that you would like to include.
3. Most refined: Select postal codes that you would like to show your ads in. To do this select “Add Locations in Bulk” and enter your desired postal codes.

Here’s an example of those three options together:

Something to keep in mind: when creating buyers ads, don’t just focus on the neighbourhoods you have listings in - remember; buyers can come from all over.

The “Detailed Targeting” is where you get to really define who you want to show your ads to. From here you can choose job titles, life events, and interests, then Facebook will only show your ads to people who match all of this criteria.

You can also exclude people - this is handy for excluding other real estate agents so that you don’t waste money showing your ads to them.

Here’s a great jumping off point or targeting buyers (make sure you’re selecting interests and not job titles when building your audience):

Now for excluding other agents, this is where it is very important to make sure you are targeting their job title not their interest. (You want to exclude people who work in real estate, but include people who are interested in it.)

In this example I have included a few job titles, however feel free to expand in this list. You can also exclude people based on their employer.

For selecting your “Placements” you can leave automatic placements selected. This will include Facebook and Instagram, but Facebook will automatically optimize your ad placements.

When selecting your “Budget & Schedule” you can select your daily spend, and then have the ads run continuously or set an end date. For buyers leads a budget of $8/day is usually enough to see some return.

Today we’re going to make single image ads (Carousel Ads are better for sites and services that have multiple value offerings).

Facebook now prefers that you use images that display at a 1:1 ratio (square), the ideal size being 1080px by 1080px. It is highly recommended that you use images that are at least this size. Smaller images will stretch and pixelate, making your ads look less professional and trustworthy.

You can upload up to 6 different images. Here are a few that we have found work well for buyers ads, depending on what your ad objective is - feel free to download them and use them in your ads.

Pro tip: make sure your ad image is relevant to your ad message and goal. For example, don’t use a picture of a house in an advertisement talking about condominiums.

Facebook ads consist of the following:

• Text: the main body of the ad (above the picture).
• Display link: an option for making sure the link being displayed is clean (eg. shows “communities.ca” instead of “https://www.communities.ca/home/”)
• Headline: the bold text underneath the picture
• News Feed Description: Additional text that will appear in some of the larger ad formats.

When creating your ad you can enter your text on the left and see a live ad preview on the right.

So let’s make some ads.

Pro tip: it might seem silly, but using a lot of emoji’s make your ad feel more personable and increases conversion. Try to use at least 3 in the ad text, and at least 1 in your headline.

Here’s an example of the style of ad we would run for buyers leads.

This is the form that a lead has to fill out before being moved from Facebook to the link you have shared. This is where your information is gathered, a good place to start is with “Name” “Email” & “Phone Number”. However, if you would like to qualify your leads further you can add an additional custom question that only a serious lead would have an answer to - such as “How soon are you looking to buy?”.

To create your lead form, select “+ New Form”

Now you’ll see a pop up window where you get to build your lead form. It will automatically use the image from your ads. Because you’re always looking for the same information you should be able to create one generic form and us it in all of your ads.

First thing you want to do is go to the settings tab and change the sharing to “Open”. This will allow Facebook users to share your ad with their friends, and can help get your a lot more bang for your buck.

Now we can go back and set up the content of your form. Because your ad has already described what you’re advertising you do not need to re-introduce your service, and can turn the intro off:

Next we need to create some questions. If you plan on using one generic form for all of your ads then your questions and headline need to be generic enough to fit any situation. Something like “Find Your Dream Home” can work well for this.

The default sheet may already be have questions asking for the user’s email and full name, if so it will look like this.

If this is the case, then you will just need to add another question asking for Phone Number. Click “Add New Question” and select “Phone Number” under “Contact Fields”

Facebook requires that you include a link to a privacy policy, if you do no have one you can use ours: just paste this link under “Privacy Policy” (for the link text field you can just write “Privacy Policy”)

https://nuage.ai/privacy-policy/

The last step in creating your lead form is the “Thank You Screen” - this is a very important step. Here is where you reiterate you ad and set up the URL that the lead will be sent to (your IDX droplet). Once again you want to keep your text generic enough that it will work across all of your buyers ads, so you do not want to include things like the name of the neighbourhood or city.

When that is complete, you must his Finish in the top right corner. Save will save the draft for later but will not actually publish the form to your ad, if you want your ad to run you need to select “Finish”.

Violah! Your ad is ready to go! When a user clicks on it they will be presented with a for that looks like this, and when they fill it out they will be redirected to the IDX droplet link your provided.

If you decide that you are getting too many leads who aren’t serious enough and you would like to weed out some of the no-goers earlier on, you can add a custom question to your form.

There is no way to edit a form, so in this case you would want to duplicate the form, add the new question to the duplicate and rename it something else to remind you that this version has the extra question.

A great qualifying question is a multiple choice asking the user how soon they think they are going to buy.

While editing your form select “Add New Question” and under custom questions select “Multiple Choice”. You’ll be looking at something that looks like this:

For your question enter “How soon are you looking to buy?” and for the answers put “Right Away” “Within 6 Months” “Within a Year” and “Just Browsing” (all separated by hitting ‘enter’)

The reason we want to include “Just Browsing” as an option is because we need to know who is serious and who isn’t. If we only include answers that outline time frames, the people who are just browsing are going to randomly pick one in order to continue to the link, and you’ll end up getting a lot of false positives. By adding “Just Browsing” you are giving people a way to let you know up front that they are less serious than other users. 

Now just click finish and BOOM you’ve got your new, more in depth form. Keep in mind that this will have a negative impact on the number of leads that you receive, but it will help weed out a lot of the tire-kickers.

Once this is all done you can go to the bottom of the page and click the green button that says “Confirm” to launch your ads.

They will be reviewed by Facebook before being made live, and then will undergo 3-4 days of ‘learning’ where Facebook is automatically optimizing your campaign and determining which ads are the most effective, and should be shown most often.

IMPORTANT!!! You need to make sure that you link your Communities.ca account with your Facebook account in order to have the leads show up in your platform. You can do this from the app integrations section of you communities.ca account, or by following these steps. ************INSERT LINK TO HOW TO CONNECT FACEBOOK AND RAINMAKER**********