Case Study: Habit Ad
Background
Habit Ad was a personal project that began from a realization that I rarely saw advertisements for real estate agents on Instagram and when I did they looked terrible (my mom is a real estate broker so I was more attuned to looking for them). Given that Millennials are now the primary demographic buying homes and they’re more engaged on Instagram than any other platform, this seemed like a missed opportunity. Part Canva, part Facebook Ad Manager, Habit Ad would be a tool for small to medium-sized real estate companies to easily produce and deploy well-designed and effective social media ads to generate leads.
Role: Ideation, Branding, UI design, Visual Design, Copywriting, A/B Testing, Marketing
Duration: February 2018 - May 2018
Status: Killed
Before
User Problems
Producing well-designed ads and collateral often requires a designer and marketer, resources many real estate agents don’t have.
Facebook’s Ad Manager has a steep learning curve and is aimed at marketing professionals.
Market changes and inventory turnover mean ads have to be frequently updated to stay relevant.
Millennials are now buying homes but many brokers still focus on on traditional marketing instead of Instagram where engagement is higher.
The Solution
A one-stop ad platform for real estate professionals built around Facebook’s advertising APIs that uses templates and pre-made target audiences to produce and launch Instagram ads with minimal effort.
Create
An easy-to-use guide is filled with proven design templates and copywriting to show you how to create beautiful ads that work.
Manage
An analytics tool keeps track of key metrics to show you which ads are performing best and what you can do to improve the others.
Buy
Simple location targeting, one click demographics and suggested ad budgets help users purchase ad space and connect with the best leads in the area.
Market Testing
To test the idea I designed mockup UI of the product and built a landing page to try out several value propositions through A/B testing. I then used Google Ads to direct traffic to the page and to see if I could convert traffic into signups.
Simulating The product
Once I had signal that there was a market, I worked with three local real estate brokers to simulate the service experience. The envisioned product would allow users to upload images and the product would spit out dozens of ad ideas so I built a Sketch file that would create multiple ads out of single set of images. I then ran the ads on Instagram and Facebook.
Outcome
3.53%
Top CTR on Google Adwords, 38% above B2B average of 2.55%
4.17%
Top landing page conversion rate, 77% above landing page average of 2.35%
1.45%
CTR on Facebook and Instagram ads , 46% above real estate average of 0.99%
Results
The click-through rate of our ads outperformed the real estate industry average by 46%. However, despite a positive market signal and ad performance only one of three brokers reported receiving qualified leads during the month-long test. In the end the product didn’t seem to create enough value to justify development.
$27.89
Advertising cost per qualified lead, 309% higher than industry average of $9
What I learned
Marketing is hard. Simple tweaks to copy could change ad performance immensely and the ads that worked best seemed specific to the broker and thus hard to templatize. I did become intimately familiar with the Facebook Ad Manager and have since used it to recruit participants for user testing. Also I now suspect advertising for real estate is less suitable on Instagram than, say, a cool pair of shoes. One is a big decision that often requires a personal referral and research while the other just looks cool so you buy it.
Addendum
Since testing this idea it looks like two other companies are trying to do the same thing: Property Spark and EZ Agent Ads. I wish them the best of luck.