Facebook Ad Targeting
When it comes to Facebook ad targeting, your options and capabilities are endless. Facebook offers an extremely user-friendly audience builder that gives you the ability to reach pretty much anybody. Due to constant updates and profile crawling, Facebook is able to read your activities both online and offline. It may sound creepy, but it is true. Instead of dwelling on the privacy invasion that one may think about when reading this, how about you shift your focus toward leveraging it to your advantage.
Audience Research
Think about WHO you are most likely going to be showing the ad to.
Start on Google and find the competitors. You can type in the name of the competitors and see if FB recognizes it. That is a stationary tactic.
On your personal Facebook, you can type in almost anything on the search bar and find where people are hiding. Locate large groups of relevant people by searching something like “pages liked by people who like “digital marketing.”’
Do some digging on Google and Facebook, and use your creative mind to come up with an audience profile.
Volt Digitals target audience is business owners or co-owners age 30+ who speak English and have little to no technology experience.
This works perfectly because it doesn’t limit me to location, only language. We have had clients in Australia and Canada. The job position or title is available on Facebooks detailed targeting. And if they have minimal technological experience, then that is probably the main reason we are even communicating with them.
Your audience profile will be different for every type of company. So, analyze your target market, and get creative!
FREE: A downloadable template used to build page following!
Demographics
This is huge when it comes to targeting. Demographics are age, location, gender, education, work, financial situation, relationship, generation, ethnicity, political views, and home life.
These are available to be poked at and utilized in your audiences targeting.
It is all the characteristics of the people you are trying to reach. If you put an ad for adults in front of teenagers, guess what? It won’t perform well.
Make sure you have your demographics dialed down for you audience profile. Look at the people who use your competitors. Copy your competition. It is working for them for a reason.
You will see options and recommendations from Facebook, use them to your advantage. Say you target people interested in ‘Digital Marketing,’ Facebook will probably suggest ‘Social media marketing’ as an interest.
It would probably be wise of me to choose this option as well unless the target market is a selective niche.
Interests
As mentioned above, Facebook helps you by suggesting interests similar to what you’ve already thought of. When it comes to Facebook ad targeting, you should build up a list of interests on a piece of paper before even starting to build the audience. Get your audience profile on lock. Do prior research and create the ideal customer before starting to build it on Facebook. Match up as many interests as Facebook recognizes, and then utilize the suggestions.
Interests are simply things that your target market (TM) would likely be researching or looking for. Facebook knows you and what you do more than you realize.
When thinking about interests, consider the following:
- Competition
- Credible websites and magazines
- Celebrity endorsement
- Entertainment (sports)
- Similar Industries
- Leisure activities
- Lifestyles
Are you targeting New England Patriot fans? Use Tom Brady as an interest. And stack some other players on top of that. Target the team itself. The coach. These will all be options available to build your audience.
Behaviors
Your actions are analyzed every day without you knowing it. Here is a pretty dialed list of behaviors available for Facebook ad targeting:
- Annual salary
- Net income
- Type and style of vehicle
- Vehicle price and age
- Types of charity
- Digital activities
- Business purchase behavior
- Grocery shopping behavior
- Retail shopping behavior
- Buyer profiles (outdoor enthusiast, luxury brand purchases)
- Travel habits
Get inside the mind of your audience profile. Act like you are one of them.
You can target somebody by the type of device they’re on, whether it’s iOS or Android, iPhone 6 only, all Apple products, ect.. In addition, you can choose if you want it distributed on mobile or desktop. Split test with these two options.
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are extremely important to use because they act as a filter for retargeting only to the people who know of you. ‘Warm’ traffic consists of people who have encountered your brand before. Whether they fire a Facebook pixel by going on to the website or engage with your profile, either way, both people are considered ‘warm.’
‘Warm’ traffic consists of people who have encountered your brand before. Whether they fire a Facebook pixel by going on to the website or engage with your profile, either way, both people are considered ‘warm.’
I can create a custom audience based on the Facebook pixel results, or I can upload an email list that was built by using a lead ad. Either one works, but just export any email list into an Excel document and upload it as a ‘Customer File’ in the custom audience section.
Then, stack onto the specific small audience you just created. Getting even more in-depth with targeting, Facebook allows you to make a Lookalike Audience (LAA). It will generate a broader audience of people with similar interests and behaviors as the people from your initial upload.
Utilize these options and stack them on top of detailed targeting.
Author
Christian DeVaul
is the founder of Volt Digital. He has past experience as a freelancer with digital marketing for companies that vary from the automotive industry to online brands. He enjoys performing digital services such as video editing, web design, app wireframe mock-ups, analytic reporting, and all social media management for businesses.
