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Meta Strategy Check: Trying to target Residential Investors, but Meta identifies them as Commercial
Posted by on January 25, 2026 at 4:51 pmHey everyone,
I’m running ads for a platform specifically for Residential Real Estate Investors. My main goal is to acquire new users while strictly excluding Commercial Real Estate (CRE) investors, as our product isn't built for them.
I’ve built a few audiences and analyzed the overlaps, and the data is pretty wild. I’m looking for a sanity check on my targeting strategy before I scale spend.
1. The Audiences I Built:
- List A (Subscribers): A 1% Lookalike (LAL) based on people who actually signed up/subscribed to my platform.
- List B (Scraped Investors): A 1% LAL based on a list I scraped from Instagram of people with " real estate Investor" keywords, filtered for safety.
- List C (Scraped Realtors): A 1% LAL based on scraped Instagram Realtors.
- Exclusion List (CRE): A 1% LAL based on a "Commercial Real Estate" exclusion list I created.
2. The Data (The "Oh Sh*t" Moment): I ran the Audience Overlap tool and found this:
- Investor LAL vs. CRE Exclusion: 67% Overlap. (Basically, Meta thinks my "Instagram Investors" and "Commercial Investors" are the same people).
- Realtor LAL vs. CRE Exclusion: 61% Overlap. (Realtors also heavily signal as Commercial).
- Subscriber LAL vs. Scraped Lists: Only 15-22% Overlap. (My actual signups look totally different from the industry pros I scraped).
3. My Proposed Strategy: Based on this, it feels like the "Scraped" lists are too dirty with Commercial signals unless I aggressively exclude.
- Ad Set 1 (The "Pure" Play): Target Subscriber LAL + Exclude CRE + Exclude Current Customers. (Since this audience has low overlap with the industry lists, I assume this is my "Blue Ocean" of hidden investors?)
- Ad Set 2 (The "Filtered" Pro): Target Scraped Investor LAL + Strictly Exclude CRE. (This removes the 67% overlap, leaving only the ~33% who are purely residential).
4. My Questions for the Pros:
- With a 67% overlap on the Investor list, is excluding the CRE audience enough to "save" that ad set, or is the source data likely just too tainted with commercial noise to bother with?
- The Realtor list has a 63% overlap with my Investors. Is it worth running a Realtor LAL if I’m already running an Investor LAL, or am I just bidding against myself?
- Has anyone else seen their "Actual Customer" LAL perform significantly better than "Industry Scraped" LALs because of lower platform noise?
Appreciate the help!
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1 Reply
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Your subscriber LAL is clean—however from my POV the scraped investor/realtor lists seem cloudy because Meta lumps residential and commercial behavior together, so exclusions help but won’t fully fix it.
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