Turn ad spend into real estate leads worth following up.
Marketing With Wakaz plans and manages Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads for real estate businesses across the United States. The focus is relevant inquiries from people ready to buy, sell or rent, not form fills that go nowhere. Campaigns have been running since 2021.
Different campaigns, different opportunities
Depending on your services and market, a campaign can be built around one of these outcomes. Few accounts should chase all of them at once, so the account is structured around whichever one matters to the business.
Demand in real estate is not one thing
At any moment, a market holds people at very different stages. Treating them as a single audience is how ad budgets get wasted. A real estate decision also rarely happens in one sitting: a buyer may research for weeks, compare listings, sort out financing and attend showings before committing, and a seller may sit on the idea for months.
Advertising can put a business in front of these people and open a conversation. It does not compress the timeline or manufacture readiness. What it can do is generate inquiries consistently and let the business decide which ones are worth pursuing.
- Active buyersSearching for a home right now
- Considering sellersWeighing whether to list
- ResearchersStudying an area or property type
- RentersLooking for something available now
- InvestorsScreening for opportunities
- Past visitorsShowed interest, never called
Google Ads vs. Facebook and Instagram
The two platforms answer different questions. Comparing them fairly means looking at what each one does rather than declaring a winner.
Reaches people already searching.
When someone types a query into Google, they have a specific intent, and the campaign is built to appear for the searches that match your services.
- Search campaigns, plus Display and Performance Max where they fit
- Keyword research and search-intent analysis
- Negative keywords to filter irrelevant clicks
- Geographic targeting to the market you serve
- Conversion tracking and landing-page review
Example searches: “real estate agent near me”, “sell my house”, “home valuation”, homes for sale in a named city.
Reaches people before they search.
Someone scrolling a feed is not typing “homes for sale” into a search bar, but a well-built ad can still reach a homeowner thinking about selling or a renter open to a move.
- Audience approach built within housing category rules
- Ad copy and creative direction
- Lead generation forms inside Facebook and Instagram
- Retargeting past website and ad visitors
- Daily monitoring, testing and optimization
In-feed forms are easy to fill out, so copy and creative do much of the work of reaching the right person.
Geographic targeting
Real estate is tied to location more than almost any category. Wider is not automatically more leads, and narrower is not automatically better leads. It depends on where you work and where the demand is.
Retargeting
When tracking allows it, retargeting reconnects with people who visited but did not inquire. In a market where decisions take time, staying visible matters. Housing rules shape how some audiences can be built.
Lead quality
Counting submitted forms is the easiest way to misjudge a campaign. A better read looks at relevance, area, buyer or seller intent, timing, and whether the inquiry turns into a consultation, showing or transaction.
Neither platform is automatically better or cheaper. The right mix depends on your goals, market, budget, services and the data your campaigns produce.
Real estate ads follow special platform rules
On Meta, real estate ads must run in the Special Ad Category for Housing, which removes targeting by age, gender, ZIP code and certain demographics and requires a minimum geographic radius rather than tight neighborhood targeting. Google applies its own restrictions to housing ads, limiting audience segments tied to demographics or protected characteristics.
Campaigns cannot target or exclude audiences based on protected characteristics. They lean on geography and message-based qualification instead, configured to each platform’s current requirements to comply with fair housing law.
Compliant by design, not by workaround.
From understanding the business to daily optimization
Before anything launches, we learn the real estate services offered, the market and geographic area, the property types, the lead objective, the landing pages traffic will reach, the advertising budget, and any existing data worth using.
- Plan around the objectiveCampaigns are built for the outcome that matters, whether that is buyer, seller, rental or consultation inquiries.
- Build and trackAccount structure, audience approach, keywords, ad messaging, geographic targeting and conversion tracking are set up before launch.
- Launch and review dailyOnce live, accounts are checked every day: bids adjusted, weak creatives paused, stronger performers given more budget, audiences refined.
- Test continuouslyDecisions come from what the account actually shows rather than assumptions, so testing keeps running as data comes in.
- ReportReporting keeps you informed on what the spend is producing. This is ongoing work, not a one-time setup.
Following the path from ad to transaction
The advertising side does not control the whole path. Once a lead comes in, the outcome depends on how fast the business follows up, the property available, market conditions, pricing, service quality and the sales process. Tracking ties the early stages to the later ones. Attribution is never perfect, and no honest setup will claim it is, but good tracking gives a reliable enough picture to make decisions.
The ongoing work behind the account
None of it runs on autopilot. The value is in the ongoing decisions: what to pause, what to scale, where the budget is leaking, and what to change next.
A form is not the same as an opportunity
Real estate inquiries vary a lot. A contact might be outside the market area, after a service you do not offer, browsing with no near-term intent, gathering information only, ready to talk about buying or selling, or interested in a rental. All of these can show up as “leads” in a report.
Optimizing only for volume quietly steers a campaign toward the cheapest, easiest contacts, which are often the least serious. It is usually more useful to optimize toward relevance: inquiries from the right area, about the right services, from people who respond.
The page decides the outcome
Ads bring the click, but the landing page decides whether it becomes an inquiry. A campaign can send plenty of traffic and still generate little if the page is unclear or does not match the ad.
A good real estate landing page makes a few things obvious: the service offered, the geographic market, the type of opportunity, the next step, how to make contact, and what information you need from the person.
The metric that matters depends on the goal
The useful measure changes with the objective and the sales cycle. More leads at a lower cost is not always the better result: a smaller number of relevant inquiries from serious buyers or sellers can outperform a flood of cheap, unqualified contacts.
Return on ad spend is one useful figure, but it is not the only measure of a campaign’s value, especially where a single transaction can be worth a great deal and the sales cycle runs long.
Common problems we look for and fix
- Broad or loosely matched keywords pulling in irrelevant traffic
- Missing negative keywords draining budget
- Ads running outside the intended market
- Weak or generic ad messaging
- Missing or misconfigured conversion tracking
- Traffic sent to a generic homepage
- Keyword and landing page that do not match
- Spending without a defined objective, or deciding on too little data
- A poorly chosen campaign objective
- Weak creative and generic messaging
- Geographic strategy that misses the market
- Lead forms tuned for volume, bringing low-intent contacts
- A weak landing page or missing tracking
- Changing campaigns too often to gather stable data
- Judging success only by lead count
- Failing to follow up quickly with new inquiries
Performance depends on several things at once: the offer, the market, the creative, the landing page, the tracking, the sales process and the follow-up. Weakness in any of them affects the result.
A few honest answers
The business still handles the sale
Advertising generates the inquiry, but you need a process for it: respond quickly, confirm what the person needs, check the market area, understand whether they are buying, selling, renting or investing, and book a consultation or showing when it makes sense. Not every lead becomes a client, and no campaign changes that.
Real estate agents and buy-sell businesses
We have run lead generation campaigns for real estate agents and Realtors and for businesses focused on buying and selling property. There is no single template: a listing-focused agent needs a different message and offer than one building a buyer pipeline, and the account is built around your specific goal.
No universal number
A workable budget depends on your market, search demand, competition, business model, the value of a client, how well leads convert, and the lead volume you want. It is worth separating two things: the money paid to the platforms to run the ads, and the work of managing the campaigns. A realistic plan accounts for both.
Sometimes, not always
Google reaches people already searching, while Facebook and Instagram reach relevant audiences earlier or bring back past visitors. Used together, one catches active demand while the other stays present during the long stretch when a buyer or seller is still deciding. Some businesses do better starting with one and adding the second once results are stable.
Real estate advertising, answered
Google Ads shows the business to people searching for real estate services or properties, such as agents, homes for sale in an area, valuations or rentals. Campaigns are built around the searches that match your services, with negative keywords filtering out irrelevant traffic and conversion tracking measuring which searches produce inquiries.
Yes. Facebook and Instagram can reach potential buyers and sellers who are not actively searching, using copy and creative to speak to each side. Because housing ads run under Meta’s Special Ad Category, the targeting relies more on geography and message-based qualification than on demographic filters.
It depends on the goal. Google reaches active search demand, while Facebook and Instagram reach people earlier or bring back past visitors. Many businesses benefit from both, but the right choice depends on the market, budget, services and objectives rather than one platform being better than the other.
There is no single answer. Spend depends on the market, search demand, competition, the value of a client, how well leads convert, and the results you want. The money paid to the ad platforms is separate from managing the campaigns, and both belong in the plan.
Keyword research, search-intent analysis, account structure, ad copy, geographic targeting, negative keywords, bid and budget management, conversion tracking, landing-page review, ongoing testing, daily monitoring, optimization and reporting.
Campaign planning, audience strategy within housing category rules, ad copy and creative direction, geographic targeting, conversion tracking, budget management, daily monitoring, testing, optimization and reporting across Facebook and Instagram.
Through conversion tracking that connects ad clicks to actions like form submissions and phone calls, along with monitoring what happens to inquiries after they come in. Attribution is never perfect, but proper tracking gives a reliable read on what the campaigns produce.
Enough time for the platforms to gather results and for the account to move past its learning phase. The exact window varies with budget, market and how many conversions a campaign generates, and decisions made too early on thin data tend to be wrong.
Tell us about your market and your goals.
If you run a real estate business in the United States and want Facebook Ads or Google Ads managed properly, we can review your situation and talk through what a campaign would involve.
Business type · Market & service area · Advertising goals · Services · The leads you want