You’re planning on starting a real estate advertising campaign soon and you’re worried about other agents seeing your ads. They will click on it and cost you money. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve talked to agents who have done it themselves. Sometimes just to see what happens when you click and other times to cost their competition money.

With Facebook ad targeting you have a few different ways to block people from seeing your ads. The absolutely easiest way is if you have the agents in your marketplace email addresses or phone numbers. Then you could just upload and exclude the audience. However, most of the time we do not have that list. So how to stop them?

Facebook allows you to target people by interests, job titles, industries, etc… The problem with targeting by job titles is that agents put so many different job titles. From Sales Representative, Broker, Broker of Record, Real Estate Agent, Realtor, etc… its hard to get them all. You could also go by employer but the problem there is since most create a page they list their page as their employer which then leaves hundreds of them sometimes. At the very least you’ll have to list every brokerage in your area. Targeting by employers and job titles can only get you so far.

You can exclude audiences based on interests. This is actually where you have one of the most effective options for targeting agents. Agents have specific interests that no one else would have on Facebook. So for example, let’s take agents in Ontario. The regulatory body in the industry is the Real Estate Council of Ontario. Do you know how many in the general public are going to be interested in RECO? I would be willing to bet that its over 90% agents. So exclude people who are interested in RECO. So who is the regulatory body in your area?

After you target that look at local boards, provincial/state boards, and other organizations and groups that only agents would like.

Will you stop every agent from seeing your ads? Of course not, stopping them all will be impossible. You can stop a lot with the methods above.