META Paid Ad Learnings for Property Campaigns (YTD), May 2025

This was most interesting to me, as all we hear and see is how hard it is to buy a home when you’re young, but these results are throwing that in our face, with a younger audience being more keen to turn into leads. Please note that these campaigns thrown into the mix were a mix of targeting FHB + downsizers.

• 18–24 year olds delivered the lowest CPA at $51.91, indicating strong intent or efficient conversion behaviour in this age bracket—despite assumptions they’re “just browsing.”

We say this a lot, so sorry if you have heard it already, but the more targeting you put on your ads, the harder it is for robots to find your audience. When targeting, remove any gender targeting from your campaign to help improve delivery.

• Audiences labelled as ‘unknown’ gender had the lowest CPA overall ($18.42)—suggesting broad, non-gendered targeting is performing better than assumed male/female segmenting.

This may seem obvious but campaigns that target to broadly usually find lose out to those campaigns who have a hyper-local approach. This is why hoardings are so important, your buyer is usually someone in the area. The Sod rule is start hyper local and pan out as the data suggests you need to.

• The ads set to “5km radius” achieve higher CTR (2.70%), reinforcing the power of tight geographic targeting in property advertising.

Running campaigns not with Sod, Boo! Below are our averages for the year to date.

• Average CPA: $64.33
• Average CPM: $25.87
• Average CPC: $2.66
• Average CTR: 1.2% (or 120 clicks per 10,000 impressions)

1. AI Creative Optimisation (Advantage+)

   • Meta is pushing more automated creative and audience delivery.
   • Use it for high-budget campaigns with multiple creatives, but manually control copy for compliance and brand nuance.
   • Early testing here at Sod, has seen mixed results.
   • Advantage+ gives power to Meta to use your creative however they wish, so if brand is important to you, we don’t recommend this. If you are ok with letting Meta robots test to get you results, go for it; they will get you results.

2. Conversational Ads

   • Messenger and WhatsApp-based lead flows will become more prominent, especially in verticals where lead follow-up is critical.
   • We’re looking at building our AI Bot text to help further qualify the leads, let me know if you want to find out more (a test to see who is reading my emails).

3. Offline Conversion Tracking

   • Meta’s integrating more with CRMs and call tracking tools. Syncing sales data back into Meta will let you optimise toward actual buyers, not just leads.

4. Vertical Video Dominance

   • Instagram Reels and Facebook Stories are getting more weight in delivery algorithms. If you’re not using vertical video with subtitles and branding in the first 3 seconds, you’ll miss out.

5. First-Party Data > Interest Targeting

   • With signal loss continuing, uploading custom audiences (e.g., past enquiries, open-home attendees) is becoming more valuable than interest targeting.