Every agent running a real estate Facebook ad campaign has faced the challenge of setting up the right ad frequency. Most often than not, it’s a combination of a gut feeling and available budget but there’s a smarter way to define a better balance. Let’s have a closer look.
The reason Facebook ad frequency is important is the ad mechanism itself. Facebook ads are interactive. Users can submit real-time feedback, hide or report your ads. Negative feedback lowers your campaign’s Relevance Score and this automatically drives the cost up.
So if your Facebook ad campaign is performing poorly while the costs are going up all the time, the wrong frequency may well be the reason.
This post guides you through the basic info you need to know. First of all, we’ll see some real-life numbers. Then, you’ll get some handy tips on setting up a better frequency for your real estate Facebook ad campaign.
*Ad frequency is the number of times people see an online ad from a brand.
How to define a good ad frequency for a real estate Facebook ad campaigns
1. Digital ads frequency: what does research have to say?
As much as everyone would have loved it, there’s no universal approach to online ad frequency. It naturally varies across industries and audiences and relies on a variety of factors including brand and ad budget.
However, recent research from Nielsen found out some helpful numbers agents can refer to. The Digital Brand Effect report was conducted in Australia to find out the number of touchpoints delivering the best resonance with ads.
Here are the most interesting findings (note that the results apply to the digital ads, not Facebook ads specifically):
- 5-9 times turned out to be the optimal frequency of digital ads. It allowed to get a 51% increase of ad resonance for the campaign;
- if your campaign objective is Awareness and Intent, resonance is likely to grow with each new exposure to the ad;
Source: Nielsen Digital Brand Effect report
- if your campaign objective is Brand Preference, 3 exposures seems to work best of all.
Product category
Nielsen’s research also found out that the ad frequency depends on a product category. For example, FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) category could do with a higher ad exposure (9+). At the same time, for an industry like financial services, a higher frequency delivers lower resonance.
Presuming that real estate is more relevant to financial services than to FMCG, the general conclusion would be to aim for fewer touchpoints.
2. Facebook-specific numbers
Like we were saying, ad frequency depends on many things. Facebook ad experts mostly agree that 3 to 4 times is the best frequency. Experts from AdEspresso suggest that you start monitoring your campaign closely once the frequency is 5 and never go for more than 10. While there are industries that can benefit from higher ad frequency (like FMCG), real estate is not likely to be one of them.
Also, some of the handy ways to control ad frequency and keep the budget at bay are:
- stop your campaign once the frequency gets 6+. Your costs will go up dramatically so the first thing to do is to re-plan and save some budget;
- exclude your customers. There’s absolutely no point showing your ads to existing customers. Luckily, the Facebook ad manager has a handy feature called Custom Audiences. Import a list of your customers and they won’t see your ads.
3. Choose how to manage ad frequency for your real estate Facebook ad campaign
There are two ways you can do this:
- manually for each real estate Facebook ad campaign. In this case, you will have to track the frequency per person and Relevance Score;
- let Facebook do this automatically. In that case, there are three choices: clicks to your site (you pay per click and the ad is typically shown 3-4 times), impressions (pay per 1,000 impressions 2-4 times a day) and daily unique reach (maximum number of people once a day).
What’s next?
The best formula to succeed with your real estate Facebook ad campaign is to test various options. Just remember that once frequency goes up, it’s better to stop the campaign so you don’t lose money and re-think your strategy. Over to you now!
