6 tried and tested ways to target and reach your audience with Facebook ads
After working with Facebook ads for 6 years, and in the marketing industry for 11+ years, I have some tried and tested ways to target and reach your audience with Facebook ads (AKA Meta or Instagram ads), that you can use to get conversions (which means purchases of your product and sign ups) for your business.
First of all, I know it can be daunting, but you *do* need to start with Facebook Ads Manager to properly target the way you want to.
Today I’m going to talk about six options in total, but in actuality the subject is huge, and I’ll really only just be scratching the surface of the topic. So think of this article as a starting point. For your own venture you will have to choose the right targeting for you, based on budget, goals and personal strategy.
Six targeting options for Facebook ads
1—Broad (with optimisation after results)
When we refer to broad targeting, we often mean only stipulating location and the age range your product/service is suitable for. As there is no point promoting your ads to children if they can’t buy your product. *E.g. United Kingdom 18-65+*. However, **what is tempting for a lot of people who try broad targeting is to add more to the targeting based on assumptions**. For example, I think my product is mainly interesting for young people so I will target people under 30.
In reality, the people who are prepared to buy from your business or sign up can be truly surprising, so it’s best to let Facebook learn about what these people look like, then go back and see where the conversions happened.
In your report look at: placement, age, region, time of day and more. Use these to inform new ad sets/campaigns or optimise the existing one**. I’ve also noticed that it’s tempting for people to want to include additional ‘Interest targeting’, and while this is a totally legitimate way of reaching your potential audience, you can’t know for sure what is ‘working’ so I suggest keeping them in separate ad sets or campaigns.
Pros of broad targeting
Lets Facebook do the work of finding your customer for you
Allows you to get high volumes
Things to watch out for
Unless you are using dynamic ads (we’ll save this one for another time) it’s very hard to control different types of messaging to different groups of people
It can be expensive at first because Facebook needs to figure out who will covert from a large pool of people (often millions)
It’s a cold audience for your company if your desire is conversions
2—Interests
This is the one that I think is most easy to get your head around. I will target who I think or know my customers like. Similar brands, hobbies, competitors and more. **I recommend categorising these interests selections into campaigns or ad sets so you can tailor your messaging to the needs of your target audience**. So for example if you have a travel campaign it makes sense to talk about why your brand or product is perfect for this target audience, whether you address them explicitly or subtly.
Interest campaigns are still considered top of funnel campaigns, so through you can use them for conversion campaigns. They are also useful for targeted brand campaigns.
Examples of interests you can target are: Ryanair, Airbnb, Digital Marketing and more.
Pros of interest targeting
Easy to categorise your messaging because you know who you are taking to
It’s easy to understand and use
Things to watch out for
They can be expensive, as mentioned they are top of funnel campaigns
They are hard to exclude from other interest campaigns. I have excluded them from each other in the past and found high overlap
You’ll regularly encounter a situation when you want to target an interest that is not in Facebook targeting (even if there is a business page)
◼︎
3—Status targeting
I am making up a term here and combining different types of targeting under the same idea. The first status I am referring to is to do with an education or income status. On Facebook you have the option to target people according to what level of education they have had or even their household income (currently only available in the U.S.).
The other status I wanted to discuss is actually considered language or broad targeting. For example you can target expats in a country or people who speak the second language of the country by selecting language and location. Of course this only makes sense if you have a product or service that is available in their language. However, it can also be a way to relate to people. Have a few words or a phrase in their language and then continuing in the language your offering is in.
Do note, however, that even though Facebook detects them as speaking a language, it does not mean that they only speak that language, in fact, Facebook interestingly uses a variety of tools to categorise your language. One of these factors scarily is the language you type in! If you say you only speak English on your profile but are constantly typing in Spanish. It will put you in both categories.
Pros of status targeting
You are targeting more tangible things not assumptions, for example you can assume someone who likes a certain magazine would be interested in your product, but there are no assumptions in whether someone is a student or has a certain household income
It’s still fairly broad so you can achieve high volumes and reach
Things to watch out for
Overlap. I previously mentioned that Facebook will happily categorise you under two or three languages so there is a chance people will see both ads depending on what types of campaigns you are running
Facebook’s targeting is highly effective but it’s not always accurate. It’s possible you may be targeting someone who was a student but is no longer, or that when you target household income you reach someone who lives in the house but doesn’t earn enough to consider your product
4—Friends of people who like your page
This is a really good audience to use when you are starting out. You are targeting the wider community of people who already know about you (due to liking your page) or due to affinity may be similar to the people who have liked your page, and are interested in your company. In my experience this campaign has always worked in some way. There is a likelihood that they are familiar with you or are a similar demographic to someone who they are connected with.
Pros of friends of fans targeting
Easy to set up
Works for a variety of brands, businesses and industries
Things to watch out for
I couldn’t think of many cons of this group other than it’s likely got overlap with other targeting options such as lookalikes (we’ll talk about this next)
In addition it’s important to keep the size of your page in terms of fans grow so that you don’t exhaust the audience quickly and become over-reliant on it
5—Lookalike audiences
Facebook Ad marketers will be very familiar with this one. In all jobs this has been a sure-fire way to get conversions. It’s essentially people who look like your customers to a varying amount. You create this audience by taking a list of your customers and uploading them to Facebook, then selecting a percentage of how similar you want to create the lookalike audience.
So 1% is very similar and 10% is less so and offer a good wider pool. In the past different variations of percentages have worked for me before: 1,2,3,8 and 10%.
The lower percentage you select, the smaller your audience will be. Also, don’t be alarmed about using a high percentage, this doesn’t equal that they are the least likely to convert. I have witnessed it being the strongest campaign for companies. Good practice is to have a few variations as campaigns or ad sets.
Pros of lookalike targeting
You are targeting people who look like people who have previously converted with you, not assumptions about who your customers are
Very effective way to get results
Things to watch out for
Make sure you exclude smaller percentages from larger ones to avoid overlap
GDPR - you have to make sure you have permission from customers to use their data to upload it to Facebook to create the audiences
Becoming over reliant on them for your conversions especially if they are static audiences
Can require technical knowledge to get set up, especially if you want to audiences to be dynamic
You will need to get the Facebook Pixel installed on your website
6—Website Custom Audiences
For those unfamiliar with this targeting, this is the: I went on a website and the company starting following (targeting) me on Facebook. Provided that visitors to your website accept cookies for this kind of retargeting (under new GDPR laws) you can target people who have visited your website. You can select varying lengths of time: 30, 60, 90 days for example, so that if you selected 30 you would be retargeting people that have landed on your website in the last 30 days. If they haven’t converted by then, then they will simply stop being targeted.
These customers have expressed an interest and may need a reminder to covert. You can retarget them with additional messaging about your brand or business, or make them aware of relevant deals surrounding that product, or remove any risk they may be worried about by converting. This can actually get very sophisticated, and can help you create a funnel within your Facebook ads, but like I said this article is more of a starting point, so we can delve into that another day.
Pros of Website Retargeting
You are reaching a warm audience who already know who you are and therefore more likely to convert
Things to watch out for
That you test your conversion window, you don’t want to keep bothering people and wasting your money on people who are simply not interested
Your CPA (Cost per Acquisition) should generally be lower than your broader audiences, so if this starts to get high, you will want to go back to the drawing board on your strategy to make sure you are getting it right
You will need to get the Facebook Pixel installed on your website
And there we have it. 6 tried and tested ways to target and reach your audience with Facebook ads. Let me know below or on our social channels if you have any questions OR feel free to share your experience with audiences below.