Facebook Advertising: Audience Targeting on Facebook

Getting Started with Audience Targeting Effective Facebook advertising starts with creating a compelling ad. But you also need to find and target the right audiences to show that ad to the ones that are more likely to click on it and become leads and customers. Facebook ads give you a huge opportunity to reach brand new audiences. The question is, which audiences do you want to reach and and how do you reach them? With over a billion Facebook users out there to target, the only way you'll be able to advertise in a cost effective way is if you target people who are most likely to become customers down the road. That means that you have to know your buyer Personas really, really well. Buyer Personas are fictional, generalized characters that share demographics, interests, and goals with your real and potential customers. What's your ideal customer's age, gender, location, and income level? What are their interests? Like certain TV shows, books, blogs, or clothing brands, creating a buyer Persona is a process that requires a lot of research and real customer data in interviews. But it's well worth the work because buyer Personas and targeted advertising on Facebook really do go well together. Once you have a really good idea of who your ideal customer is and what they're interested in, you'll be able to target them on Facebook much more effectively. So let's talk about how your buyer Persona fits into the options available on Facebook. Facebook's Audience Manager tool is where you'll create and manage your target audiences. When you're creating an ad here, you'll find that Facebook offers a wide range of targeting options that'll help you find the right niche. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. What kind of audience should you go after? How big or small should your audience be? How do you know if the audience that you chose is a good one? Facebook offers three primary audience, saved audience, custom audience, and lookalike audience. Let's go through the basics of each of these so that you know what your options are. Saved audiences let you target people based on demographics, agents, interests, and locations. For demographics, you have a lot of targeting options that help you refine your audience, like age range, gender, and language. For interests, you can target people interested in things that your target audience is interested in and are related to your business or product. So for example, you might target people interested in your competitors or your broader market segment, or magazines and blogs covering your market. There are hundreds of interests that you can choose from, so instead of browsing through them all, you might just want to type in one interest and then look at the suggestions that Facebook gives you. Interests, location, and demographics are only a few options for targeting. You can also target people by their political views, life events, ethnicity, and so on. Company and job titles are good ones for B2B companies. For location, Facebook lets you drill down pretty specifically from country, region and county all the way down to city, postal code or even a specific address radius. Location is not limited to just people who live in that location. You can also target people who are recently in a specific location tracked by where they use their mobile device. Another option is to target people traveling to a location which which Facebook defines as users who had a certain geographic area as a recent location that's at least 100 miles away from their home location. This is great for businesses like local attractions, restaurants, travel businesses, and so on. Or you can target everyone in a location, so that's saved audiences. Now let's talk about custom audiences. Custom audiences let you retarget past website visitors and people who have engaged with your content or app. Because these people have shown interest in your brand already, they can be your highest value audience. There are a few different ways to create a custom audience by customer file, by website traffic, by app activity, by offline activity, and by engagement on Facebook. By customer file simply means that you can target people who are on specific lists of email accounts, phone numbers, or app IDs. This is a great way to target your blog subscribers or app users. By website traffic means that you can target people who have engaged with your website, whether it's your website as a whole or specific web pages. Actually, one of the coolest things that you can do with this option is target people who visited a certain page but did not visit another certain page. So for example, you might target people who visited an Offers page but did not visit the Offers thank you page, which will help you retarget abandoned visitors. To create audiences based on web traffic, you'll need to install the Facebook Pixel on your website. The Facebook Pixel can track when someone visits your website and when they take an action like buying something, and it lets you target people based on those actions. Installing the Facebook Pixel involves a simple set of instructions for placing Pixel code on the header of your website, which we've linked to in the Additional Resources section. By App Activity means that you can target people who have engaged with your iOS or Android app, if you have one. To target people based on the app activity, you first need to register your app and set up app events. By offline activity means you can target people who have engaged with your business offline, whether it was in the store, by phone, or through other offline channels. You can retarget these people by creating an offline conversion event like those who ordered from you over the phone. By engagement means that you can target people who have engaged with your content on Facebook, like visited your Facebook page or engaged with your posts or ads, opened or completed a Facebook lead ads form, interacted with your Facebook events, or even visited your Instagram business profile. Finally, let's talk about lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences let you target people who look like your existing customer database. To create a lookalike audience, you need to first create an audience that you want it to look like, which you can do by creating a custom audience first. Once you pick a custom audience to base your lookalike audience off of, Facebook will ask you to pick a location where you want to target a similar set of people. As you're creating these audiences, it's really important to make sure that your audiences are not too broad, especially if your goal is leads. Broad audiences are best for large scale brand awareness campaigns, not lead gen campaigns. If you're seeing that the audience you've chosen is over 2 or 3 million people, you're going to want to narrow your audience down so that you're closer to 1 million tops or smaller. There will be certain cases like with retargeting or in smaller geo targeted campaigns where your ideal audience will be a good deal smaller than that. To narrow down a saved audience, all you have to do is add more detailed targeting to what you already have. To narrow down a custom audience or a lookalike audience, add extra targeting parameters like specific interests. You also have the option of combining multiple audiences to narrow them down even further. Now you should have a good idea of the targeting options that are available with Facebook. Remember, when you're creating an audience, always have your buyer Personas in mind and don't be afraid to experiment with different audiences to find what's the most cost efficient.