5 Proven Strategies for Targeting the Right People With your Facebook Ads

If you’re here, you are most likely looking to set up a brand-new Facebook campaign or are looking for ways to improve your current campaign by optimising your Facebook audience targeting. Well, you’ve come to the right place! This blog will take you through the most important aspects of Facebook audience targeting and how to make sure you’ve got this nailed.

With the ever-growing level of competition in the online advertising space having a rock-solid strategy that ensures you are hitting the correct potential customers with your spend is crucial. Guaranteeing your advertising budget goes on the right audience and squeezing those extra conversions out of your spend can be the difference between a relatively mild performing campaign and a campaign that takes your business to the next level.

These 5 key points will help you to utilise Facebooks audience targeting to ensure you get the most from your marketing investment:

Utilise Custom Audiences by adding your own data!

The most sure-fire way to hit the correct target audience for your ads is to use already collected data of your current customer base! Facebook’s custom audiences allow you to upload your own custom data segments to help find and target previous users of your site and customers on Facebook.

This is achieved by taking your previously collected data such as website users (which can be narrowed down to specific page users for more precise targeting) or any lead generation lists you may have set up already, such as a newsletter sign up list.

The main reason why custom audiences are so successful when included in Facebook campaigns is because you are retargeting Facebook users who have shown an interest in your product or service previously. Depending on the data you upload this may range from users who were casually browsing your site at the start of their buyer journey or more invested users who have actively signed up to a marketing list/visited specific product pages. This level of engagement is a key factor to consider when deciding who to target with your ad and whether it’s the right ad to being showing them based on their level of interaction with your business.

Expand on your custom data with Lookalike Audiences!

The next step to identifying potential customers on Facebook is to start creating look alike audiences from the Custom audiences you’ve just set up. A lookalike audience is exactly what it sounds like, it takes your current audience list and using Facebooks algorithm it finds similar Facebook users to those that are in your custom audience.

These lookalike audiences allow you to set how similar your new audience must be to your current customers. Typically, we recommend sticking to the 1% range to start with due to this being where you see the best performance as the bigger the percentage difference the broader the audience becomes.

Lookalike audiences are a great way to target customers wherever they are in the funnel on a wider scale. Building a lookalike audience of past converters is a great way to target other users that may be closer to the end of their buyer journey. Whereas targeting the lookalikes on website users is a great way to target those who may be closer to the start of their journey.

When it comes to testing new targeting methods for your Facebook Campaigns lookalike audiences should be one of the top priorities!

Find Customers who have are in your market with detailed targeting!

Facebooks detailed targeting is the perfect solution to find those that are in the top-of-funnel range. This targeting method is typically best used in lead generation campaigns and synergise well with offering a free brochure or sample etc. It’s a great targeting method to get people to engage with your business for the first or second time.

Detailed targeting can be split into 3 distinct categories:

• Demographics
• Interests
• Behaviours

Demographics targeting is incredibly good at narrowing down any potential audience by separating them out by either:

• Education level
• Financial (Income)
• Life events (Such as birthdays or house moves)
• Parental Status
• Relationship Status
• Work (Job, employers, or industries)

Combining these aspects with the already base level of targeting such as location, age and gender allows you to really weed out any potentially unwanted users from seeing your ad. Its important to combine these different demographics to ensure that you’re audience doesn’t get too broad and you target every parent on Facebook for example.

Interest Targeting allows you to go into a bit more depth about a user’s interests and hobbies to find potential customers. It does this with the following subcategories:

• Business and industry
• Entertainment
• Family and relationships
• Fitness and wellness
• Food and drink
• Hobbies and activities

There are many more interests available to choose from as these subcategories get further broken down into more specific areas. Using a precise interest targeting helps narrow down your potential audience so that you are only targeting users that would resonate with your product/service.

That brings us to the behaviour detailed targeting category. This subsection helps target people based on what they like to do or have done in the past, and is split into some of sub-categories below:

• Travel (travel activities and tendencies)
• Digital activities (operating system used, gaming preferences, etc.)
• Mobile device users (brands, networks, and operating systems used)
• consumer classification (by country)

On some occasions Behaviour audiences can be worthwhile targeting on their own in an ad group, however, similar to the other two categories under detailed targeting it benefits from being used in tandem with the other targeting options. For example, if you’re a company that has created an app for the iPhone, targeting everyone that uses IOS as an operating system would be far too broad. In this case you would couple this behaviour targeting with the interest and demographic targeting of your desired consumer.

Increase conversions by targeting engaged shoppers!

This option is often overlooked in Facebook campaigns as it can be quite easy to miss. Within Facebook’s targeting options sits an option for ‘Engaged Shoppers’. Enabling this purchase behaviour makes it so your ads target People who have clicked on the call-to-action button “Shop Now” in the past week. This option helps make sure that your lower funnel ads are being shown to people who are ready and willing to click through on your ads and visit your products with the intention of a purchase.

Make sure your ads are relevant to the correct audience with ad Relevance Diagnostics

There is a neat option in Facebook that allows us to see whether the ads we are serving to our targeted audience are relevant and gives us an idea of how our ads stack up against a competitor. This is done which Facebooks Ad Relevance Diagnostics. These Diagnostics are split into three main categories:

• Conversion Rate Ranking – A ranking of your ad’s expected conversion rate. Your ad is ranked against ads with your performance goal that competed for the same audience.
• Engagement Rate Ranking – A ranking of your ad’s expected engagement rate. Engagement includes all clicks, likes, comments and shares. Your ad is ranked against ads that competed for the same audience.
• Quality Ranking – A ranking of your ad’s perceived quality. Quality is measured using feedback on your ads and the post-click experience. Your ad is ranked against ads that competed for the same audience.

Using these ad diagnostics, you can determine what part of your ad may need tweaking in order to improve performance. Its important to remember that no one ad will be relevant to every audience, if your audience is quite broad you may have to think about splitting them up into multiple ads that can better get across a suitable message.

Hopefully now you’ve got a better understanding on how Facebook ad Targeting works and by using the highlighted areas above you’re ready to set up that new Facebook campaign successfully.