Facebook extends dynamic ad retargeting to real estate listings

A couple of years ago, Facebook rolled out an ad format tailored to retailers looking to retarget people browsing their e-commerce sites. And over the past year, it has spun off versions of these Dynamic Ads customized for other industries, including hotels, airlines, and now realtors.

On Monday, Facebook introduced a version of its Dynamic Ads product that enables realtors to retarget people who browse home and apartment listings on their sites or apps with ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Real Estate are as straightforward as the name suggests. Similar to its Dynamic Ads for Retail and for Travel, this variation takes an advertiser’s product catalog — in this case, a realtor’s home listings — and converts those listings into ads that will appear in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of people who had checked out similar listings on the realtor’s site or app.

According to Facebook’s documentation, each home listing that a realtor uploads includes an image of the property, as well as its address, price and availability. It can also include information like the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, property type, whether it’s for sale or for rent and if it’s newly constructed.

Facebook will combine the information that realtors upload about each listing with the information it’s able to collect from realtors’ sites and apps to pick out listings it deems most likely to appeal to the user. The ads link to the realtor’s site or app.

Beyond simply retargeting people who viewed a particular listing on a realtor’s site or app, advertisers can use Facebook’s tracking tools to factor in details, like the neighborhood a person viewed or the price range they set for their search, to promote similar listings they may have missed.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.