Facebook Ads: Targeting Methods for Choosing an Audience
When it comes to developing an excellent social media advertising strategy, one word stands out: targeting.
Targeting your advertising campaigns to reach the consumers in your market is essential to enhance your return on investment (ROI). Fortunately, social media platforms provide many options when it comes to targeting your ads towards your market, making social media marketing one of the most cost-efficient advertising opportunities online.
Today, we will discuss some of the various targeting methods available for use when running ads on Facebook.
Facebook Targeting Methods
Facebook is designed to automatically show your ads to people who are most likely to find your ads relevant. It is also intended to provide further in-depth ad targeting methods to ensure successful ad delivery with three audience selection tools. In addition to these audience selection tools, Facebook enables the ability to create audiences within these tools that are defined either very broad or narrow in scale; this is done with Facebook’s several filtering options listed below.
Core Audiences
Core Audiences – Core Audiences are an audience defined by criteria such as age, interests, geography, and more. Utilizing Core Audiences allows your business to set rules for where your ads will be delivered and provide the ability to adjust your target audience to reach a wide range of users, or a highly defined group of users, based on the criteria you select to target.
- Location – a great option for small local businesses seeking to attract local customers
- Behavior – a great option if you’re seeking consumers who habitually purchase products similar to that in which your company is selling. Target your ads based on consumer behaviors, including device usage and prior purchase patterns.
- Demographics – A great option if you’re seeking to target consumers by age, gender, relationship status, occupation, education, and more.
- Connections – A great option if you’re seeking to target users who are connected to your Facebook Business Page or RSVP’d to a Facebook Event. This option even allows you to exclude these users from your audience if your objective is to reach a new audience.
- Interests – A great option if you’re seeking to reach an audience with interests similar to your company’s niche. From sportfishing to ballet, utilize keywords here to make your targeted ads more relevant.
Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences – Custom Audiences consists of a list of contacts uploaded to Facebook by the business running the ad – utilize this method to get in touch with consumers who already know your business. This option allows businesses to reconnect with consumers who have previously engaged with the company, both offline and online. This list can be cultivated from an existing set of contacts, a CRM program, an email distribution list, or any other method to collect and store consumer data.
- Contact Lists – connect with previous customers and your contacts on Facebook utilizing data from your CRM program and email lists and retarget them.
- App Users – If you have an App, you can install the Facebook SDK tool and create relevant ads to drive users to complete in-app actions to make purchases.
- Website Visitors – utilizing the Facebook Pixel described below, you can automatically create a custom audience of people who visit your website or those who take a specific action on your website, such as exit the browser with a full cart. Utilizing this method, you can retarget consumers with ads displaying products they have previous viewed on your website.
Custom Audiences can also utilize data from website visitors to target consumers who have previously visited your website. However, to use this method, a Facebook Pixel is required. A Facebook Pixel is a website code installed on a website. It is used to collect data to track conversions from Facebook ads, optimize ads, build targeted audiences, and remarket to people who have taken previous action on the website.
Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike Audiences – Lookalike Audiences consist of users whose interests are similar to those of your current customers. Utilizing this method, you can reach new people who resemble or “look like” your existing customers in terms of interests. This method is most often used in conjunction with custom audiences because lookalike audiences are enabled by cloning an audience. The custom audience typically serves as a source audience to reach and connect users with shared interests and traits to the source audience. Create lookalike audiences from:
- Custom Audiences – The Facebook platform will construct an audience of users who strongly resemble the users in your previously created custom audience.
- Website Visitors – Providing the Facebook Pixel has been installed on your website
- Page Followers – Generate an audience who resembles users who have previously “liked” or “followed” your Facebook Business Page.
As you can see, Facebook provides several targeting methods to help your ads find the people who are most likely to engage with your business, which in turn enhances your ROI, brand awareness, and conversion rates. Whether you are defining your audience for smarter ad targeting, trying to get in touch with people who already know your business, or trying to reach new people who are similar to your current customers, Facebook targeting methods are crucial to your marketing campaign’s success. Make sure to align your campaign objectives with your targeting and monitor your campaign analytics to optimize and adjust as necessary to maximize your return on investment.
