Picking the Right Audience for Your Apartment Facebook Ads

Apartment Facebook ads – when done correctly – give you incredible targeting power to show your ads to people who are looking for apartments or who have visited your site. On the flip side, if you target the wrong audience it’s easy to overspend and have your ads flop.

Here are some key things to keep in mind when using Facebook ads to correctly target your audience and prevent overspending your budget.

Set the Right Goals for your Apartment Facebook Ads

The first step is to ask what is the purpose of your Facebook ad and how will you measure it. Is the purpose to drive new leases? Bring awareness to a new property? Encourage residents to attend an event? Each of these different goals will use a different type of ad, message, images, and target a different audience. This article will focus mainly on finding the right audience to drive new leases and conversions.

Limit Your Budget

Facebook wants you to spend more money, even if the money isn’t as targeted as it could be. We recommend that you start with a small budget when using Facebook ads. This way you can try different audiences and ads to see which are more successful. Once you’ve had some success with a small budget, increase your budget to broaden your reach.

Use Remarketing Ads

Remarketing ads deliver ads to people who have already visited your site and are interested in your property. They are also cost effective. Plus, you don’t have to guess who your audience is because you’re only paying for ads being shown to pre-qualified leads.

By putting a Facebook pixel on your site, you can track visitors to your site and remarket to them on Facebook. You can exclude visitors to certain pages (like a resident portal or rent payment link) so you don’t advertise to current residents.

Test Different Audiences

If you want to go outside remarketing, figure out who your ideal resident is. Facebook can target users based on demographics like location, income, age, gender, type of home, and more. In addition, they can target people with certain interests. Facebook also has a “likely to move” category, but this can be vague and include websites like Zillow which cater to homeowners looking to buy. In our experience, using “likely to move” can lead to lots of wasted ad spend.

One way to understand your audience is to upload a list of your current residents into custom audiences and then pull a report on similar traits. You can use this report to target certain demographics, income, occupations or employers, etc. In addition, you can create a lookalike audience from your current residents or from visitors to your website.

You may also be able to integrate your Facebook audience with your property management system and target your audience based on tours, past contacts, etc. We’ve built custom integrations between Facebook and PMS’s to hypertarget our clients’ Facebook ads.

When testing different audiences, keep your budget small and take down any ads or campaigns that aren’t performing.

Split Test Your Facebook Ads

Split test your ads to see which ones perform better with your audience. This means running two ads to the same audience and tweaking the ad copy or image to see which ad is more successful. Then use the higher performing ad to drive more leads.

Looking for More Successful Apartment Facebook Ads?

If you need help driving leads with your apartment’s Facebook ads, give us a call. We specialize in targeted remarketing ads and currently have a Facebook and ResMan integration.

Photo Credit: 123rf.com/Jirsak