Facebook is undeniably one of the most powerful advertising platforms available today. With over 2.6 billion active users, it provides businesses with an unmatched opportunity to reach their target audience. However, with such a vast user base, ensuring that the right people see your ads can be challenging. That’s where Facebook Ads’ in-depth targeting comes in. Meta platform’s ability to target and deliver ads helped make it the highest ROAS platform for over a decade. In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at Facebook Ads targeting and how it can help you efficiently reach your ideal audience.
Introduction to Facebook Ads Targeting
Facebook Ads targeting allows advertisers to select specific characteristics or behaviors of your ad campaign’s target audience to ensure that your ads reach the right people. This includes everything from age, gender, and location to interests, behaviors, and even life events. Fun fact: you can even target new parents.
Great audience segmentation ensures that your ads are seen by the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. In addition, well-targeted ads save you cash that might otherwise be spent on less-relevant users. It is, however, important to note that Meta representatives insist that broad “advantage+” targeting is the most efficient method because of the platform’s layered machine learning algorithms. In summary, broad, open-ended targeting is the best practice, but there are definitely levels to FB ads audiences worth layering in.
Creating Your Ideal Customer Persona
Before you start targeting your ads, it’s essential to understand who your ideal customer is. This includes everything from their age, gender, and location to their interests, behaviors, and pain points. By creating a detailed customer persona, you can better understand the ideal user you’re targeting and create ads that resonate with them.
Understanding the Different Types of Facebook Ads Targeting
There are several dimensions of Facebook Ads targeting, each with unique benefits. There are three top-level primary types of targeting on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, messenger and the audience network: Demographic, Interest and Behavior.
Behavior Targeting
Behavior targeting allows you to target your ads based on specific behaviors, such as purchasing habits, device usage, and travel patterns. This type of targeting is ideal for businesses that want to reach people Meta identified as being at a specific stage in the buying process. These are sometimes populated with platform inferences based on user activity on the app or with tech like store beacons that ping when people visit brick & mortar locations. For example, someone might be tagged within Meta platforms as being a new parent if they recently visited a website for a diaper company.
Demographic Targeting
Demographic targeting allows you to target your ads based on specific characteristics like age, gender, and location. This type of targeting is ideal for businesses with a specific constraint on who and where they can target. We generally only recommend limiting age delivery if absolutely necessary, as many users do not provide an accurate birth year on Facebook or Instagram.
Targeting Based on Demographics
Demographic targeting is the most common type of Facebook Ads targeting. By targeting your ads based on specific characteristics, such as age, gender, and location, you can ensure that your ads are seen by people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.
For example, suppose you’re a business that sells retirement homes. In that case, you may want to target your ads to people who are over 55 and live in specific locations. By doing so, you can ensure that your ads are seen by the people most likely to be interested in your ad.
In this example, you may also want to target a specific zip code with a unique offer or limit your ads to a county; this also falls under demographics. Again, you can both add and exclude locations.
Interest Targeting
Interest targeting allows you to target your ads based on what your target audience is interested in. This includes everything from hobbies and activities to pages they’ve liked on Facebook. Interest targeting is ideal for businesses with a broad audience and want to reach people likely to be interested in their products or services. Meta ads representatives no longer recommend interest targeting as a best practice in 2023. Still, many advertisers have continued to see success from the method.
Targeting Based on Interests
Interest targeting allows you to target your ads to people who are interested in specific topics or pages on Facebook. This type of targeting is ideal for businesses with a broad audience and want to reach people likely to be interested in their products or services. For example, suppose you’re a business that sells running shoes. In that case, you may want to target your ads to people who are interested in running, fitness, and health. By doing so, you can ensure that your ads are seen by people who are most likely to be interested in your product.
How to Use Interest Targeting Effectively
Interest targeting can be a powerful tool, but it’s essential to use it effectively. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of interest targeting:
- Use broad interests to reach a larger audience
- Use specific interests to reach a more targeted audience
- Use “and” targeting to target people who have multiple interests
- Use “or” targeting to target people who have at least one of several interests
- You can also exclude users based on interests.
Creating Custom Audiences – Lookalike Audiences and Retargeting
In addition to the top-level demographic and interest targeting, Facebook allows you to create custom audiences. Custom audiences are groups of people who have engaged with your business in some way, such as visiting your website or liking your Facebook page. These event-based audiences are typically the most valuable to develop and target.
There are two primary types of custom audiences: lookalike audiences and retargeting.
Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences allow you to target people who are similar to your existing customers. By using data from your custom audience, Facebook can identify people who have similar characteristics and behaviors and deliver your ads to them.
Retargeting
Retargeting allows you to target people who have already engaged with your business in some way, such as visiting your website or adding items to their cart. By retargeting these people, you can remind them of your products or services and encourage them to make a purchase. There are several levels to retargeting based on the depth of tagged events available on your website. Site visitors and View Content make up the top of the funnel, while events like Initiate Checkout and Purchase fill the bottom of the funnel. These event-based audiences should eventually grow to be in separate ad sets and excluded from all prospecting campaigns.
Best Practices for Successful Facebook Ads Retargeting or Remarketing
Here are a few best practices to help you get the most out of your Facebook Ads retargeting campaign:
- Create a single RT campaign.
- Use a single ad set to target each unique web or app event.
- Test layering in interest and demographic targeting to lower CPA.
- Tag as many standard pixel events as possible and ensure they are properly prioritized in the business manager.
- Pass back event revenue whenever possible to enable Value Optimization.
Tools Needed for Facebook Ads Targeting: Ads Manager
Ads Manager is Facebook’s ad management tool. It allows you to create, manage, and monitor your Facebook ads. With Ads Manager, you can set up targeting, create ad campaigns, and monitor your ad performance. Third-parties sell access to other audiences that you can upload to use as a custom audience but you really only need Ads Manager to run a successful campaign.
Measuring the Success of Your Facebook Ads Targeting
To ensure that your Facebook Ads targeting is effective, it is essential to measure your success. Here are a few metrics to keep an eye on:
- Cost Per Mille Impressions (CPM) – Indicates the cost to address the targeted audience per one-thousand impressions.
- Click-through rate (CTR) – The engagement rate of the audience with the ad. Important to note that there are three CTRs, one counts ad engagements (like clicking read more), outbound link clicks to the site, and the third covers unique outbound link clicks.
- Cost per click (CPC) – The cost to get someone to click.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) – The cost to get someone to purchase (CPP) or complete the lead form (CPL), or do your specified conversion event (Cost per Conversion).
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) – The revenue generated by the ads balanced with the cost to deliver the ads. This data point is used to tell you the efficiency and profitability of your ad.
By monitoring these metrics, you can determine what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments to your targeting as needed.
A/B Testing Your Targeting
A/B testing is a powerful tool that allows you to test different targeting options to see what works best. By creating two versions of an ad set and testing different targeting options, you can determine which targeting methods are most effective for your business. You can use Facebook’s A/B testing tool to assess audience quality in some versions of the UI, but in others, you may have to set this up manually.
To do this, your campaign should be non-CBO (campaign budget optimized) or uncheck the box for advantage+ on the campaign details screen. Audience targeting is set at the ad set level. When a/b testing audiences within one campaign, ensure that the ads are the same and the opposing audience is excluded from both respective variations.
Both ad sets should have the same budget and run for the same amount of time for an even comparison.
Tips for Effective Facebook Ads Targeting
Here are a few final tips to help you get the most out of your Facebook Ad targeting:
- Target audiences with at least one million reachable accounts for scalable CPMs.
- Use the highest-quality images and copy in your ads that seem most relevant to your audience.
- Example: If you’re targeting people interested in skiing, there should be skiing-related content in your ad, or at least content skiers would be interested in, to ensure good CTRs and CPAs.
- Test different targeting options monthly to see what works best.
- Sometimes Meta tests new algorithms that allow for lower CPMs on lookalikes vs. interests or vice versa.
- Monitor your ads’ CPMs daily to ensure they’re performing well.
- CPMs tell the story of the viability of an audience. If they’re too high, it makes it tougher to deliver the ads profitably.
- Use a combination of targeting methods to reach a broader audience or to narrow it to the highest value group.
- Recently, we’ve favored multi-level targeting with both interests and custom audiences for some of our clients.
By using a combination of demographic, interest, and behavioral targeting, as well as custom audiences and retargeting, you can create ads that resonate with your target audience and drive results. With the right tools and best practices, you can make the most out of your Facebook Ads targeting efforts and achieve success online.
Are you ready to take your Facebook Ads targeting to the next level? Contact WestMetric today to learn how we can help your business grow and succeed online.
