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How to target your audience on facebook


9 Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for More Conversions

One of the key advantages of social ads over other forms of advertising is the ability to laser-target your audience.

Smart Facebook ad targeting can help you reach the people who are most likely to be interested in your brand. With advanced targeting options, you can go a step further and reach the people who are likely to be interested in specific products, and who have already shown they’re willing to shop.

All of this helps you achieve higher conversion rates with your existing ad budget. And show us a Facebook advertiser who doesn’t love a higher ROI!

1. Target your competitors’ fans using Audience Insights

2. Use Custom Audiences for remarketing

3. Find people similar to your best customers with value-based lookalike audiences

4. Improve targeting with Facebook ad relevance diagnostics

5. Target people who have recently shopped from Facebook ads

6. Find your unicorn content

7. Get ultra-precise with layered targeting

8. Combine two unique audiences together

9. Use broad targeting to find your target audience

Bonus: Get the Facebook advertising cheat sheet for 2022. The free resource includes key audience insights, recommended ad types, and tips for success.

How does Facebook ad targeting work?

Facebook ad targeting helps you define the audience that will see your ads. It can improve the effectiveness of your campaigns — but it will also affect the cost of your ads (in very simple terms, reaching a larger audience is more expensive than reaching a smaller one).

On Facebook, ad targeting is based on three different types of target audience:

  • Core audiences, which you target based on demographics, behaviors, and location.
  • Custom audiences, which allow you to reconnect with people who have already interacted with your business.
  • Lookalike audiences, which allow you to target people similar to your best customers but who may not know about your business yet.

9 tips for effective Facebook ad targeting in 2022

1. Target your competitors’ fans using Audience Insights

The Audience tab in Meta Business Suite Insights offers a ton of valuable information that can help you understand your Facebook followers. You can then use the data to learn how to target potential new followers and customers.

It’s such a treasure trove that we’ve got an entire article dedicated to using Audience Insights for better targeting.

But our favorite Audience Insights strategy is to use the information it provides to learn who you’re competing with on Facebook, then target your competitors’ existing fans.

Here’s a quick how-to:

  • Open your Audience Insights dashboard in Meta Business Suite and select Potential audience.
  • Click the Filter button on the top right of the page and use the basic targeting options like location, age, gender, and interests to start building a Facebook audience that matches your target audience persona.
  • Don’t click Create audience just yet. Instead, scroll down to the Top pages section to see which pages your target users already connect with. Copy and paste this list into a spreadsheet or text file.
  • Go back to the Filter selection tool. Clear your existing filters and type the name of one of your competitors’ Facebook Pages in the Interests box. Not all competitors will come up as an interest, but for those that do…
  • Check out the presented demographics information to see if you can gain any additional audience insights that will help you target your ads more precisely.
  • Create a new audience based on these new demographic insights, then test it against one of your existing audiences.
  • Or, simply click Save and you’ve got an audience based on your competitors’ fans.

Of course, you can further target this audience to make sure you get the best fit for your specific business and campaign goals, but this is a great way to start finding relevant people on Facebook.

You can find more details in our Audience Insights how-to article.

2. Use Custom Audiences for remarketing

Remarketing is a powerful Facebook targeting strategy to connect with potential customers who have already expressed interest in your products.

Using Facebook Custom Audiences targeting options, you can choose to show your ads to people who have recently viewed your website, people who have looked at sales pages, or even people who have looked at specific products. You can also choose to exclude people who have purchased recently, if you think they are unlikely to convert again soon.

Before you can use Facebook Custom Audiences based on website visits, you need to install the Facebook Pixel.

Once that’s done, here’s how to create your remarketing audience:

  • Go to Audiences with your Ads Manager.
  • From the Create Audience dropdown, choose Custom Audience.
  • Under sources, click Website.
  • Choose your pixel.
  • Under Events, choose which types of visitors to target.
  • Name your audience and click Create audience.

Another option is to create a custom audience based on data synced from your CRM. For this option, you’ll create your audience within Hootsuite Social Advertising.

  • In Hootsuite Social Advertising, create a New Advanced Audience.
  • Choose to target existing customers.
  • Click Connect Add CRM account to connect your CRM data from Mailchimp, Hubspot, Salesforce, or whichever CRM solution you currently use.
  • You can get quite specific about who you want to target with your audience based on whether they are existing customers or leads, and whether they have bought within a specific timeframe.

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You can then use your advanced audience to create a Facebook ad campaign directly within Hootsuite Social ads.

An advantage here is that you’re not relying on Facebook pixel data, which may be less robust since the introduction of iOS 14.5.

Find more details in our blog post on how to use Facebook Custom Audiences.

3. Find people similar to your best customers with value-based lookalike audiences

Facebook Lookalike Audiences allow you to build targeted lists of potential customers who share characteristics with all the people who already buy from you.

Value-based lookalike audiences allow you to more specifically target people who share characteristics with your most valuable customers.

Before you can incorporate customer value into a lookalike audience, you need to create a customer value custom audience:

  • Go to Audiences within your Ads Manager.
  • From the Create Audience dropdown, choose Custom Audience, then choose Customer list as the source.
  • Choose your customer list, then from the value column dropdown, choose which column to use for customer value and click Next.
  • Click Upload and Create.

Now, you can use this list to create a value-based Lookalike audience to target your highest value potential customers:

  • Go to Audiences within your Ads Manager.
  • From the Create Audience dropdown choose Lookalike Audience.
  • Choose the value-based custom audience you created above as your source.
  • Select the regions to target.
  • Select your audience size. Smaller numbers more precisely match your source audience characteristics.
  • Click Create Audience.

Find more details in our guide to Facebook Lookalike Audiences.

4. Improve targeting with Facebook ad relevance diagnostics

Facebook helps you understand how relevant your ad is to your selected audience based on three ad relevance diagnostics:

  • Quality ranking
  • Engagement rate ranking
  • Conversion rate ranking

All measures are based on your ad’s performance compared to other ads targeting the same audience.

As Facebook says, “People prefer to see ads that are relevant to them. And when businesses show their ads to relevant audiences, they see better business outcomes. That’s why we consider how relevant each ad is to a person before delivering an ad to that person.”

The whole point of Facebook ad targeting is to get your ad in front of the specific audience that’s most likely to take action based on that exact ad. This is the very definition of relevance.

Here are some simple ways to help improve your ranking scores for Facebook’s ad relevance diagnostics:

  • Focus on quality, including great visuals and short copy.
  • Choose the right ad format.
  • Aim for low ad frequency.
  • Time ads strategically.
  • Optimize your ads with A/B testing.
  • Keep an eye on your competitors’ ads.

If your ads aren’t performing as well as you like, you can use the ad relevance diagnostics to look for opportunities to improve targeting:

  • Low-quality ranking: Try changing the target audience to one that’s more likely to appreciate the specific creative in the ad.
  • Low engagement rate ranking: Refine your targeting to reach people who are more likely to engage. Audience Insights can be a great help here.
  • Low conversion rate ranking: Target a higher-intent audience. This could be as simple as selecting “engaged shoppers” under purchase behavior (see Tip #5). But it could also mean targeting people who have an upcoming anniversary, or who have another behavior or life event that makes your product or service particularly relevant to them right at this moment.

Remember, relevance is all about matching the right ad to the right audience. No one ad will be relevant to everyone. Effective targeting is the only way to achieve a consistently high relevance ranking. Test regularly and aim for a regular Facebook targeting update to make sure you’re continuing to target the right people with the right content.

5. Target people who have recently shopped from Facebook ads

An oft-overlooked option within the detailed targeting options for Facebook ads is the ability to target people who have already expressed interest in making a purchase from Facebook ads.

Selecting the purchase behavior Engaged Shoppers limits your ad audience to people who have clicked the Shop Now button on a Facebook ad within the last week.

While some Facebook users might scroll past ads, this option ensures you reach people who have already (and very recently) shown that they are willing to shop from ad content.

To access the Engaged Shoppers targeting option:

  • Create a new ad set, or open an existing ad set, and scroll down to the Audience section
  • Under Detailed Targeting, type Engaged Shoppers in the search bar.
  • Click Engaged Shoppers.

6. Find your unicorn content

This tip is a little bit different. It’s about targeting your ad’s content, rather than choosing the right Facebook target audience.

This concept was coined by MobileMonkey CEO and Inc. columnist Larry Kim. He suggests that

only 2% of your content will perform well both on social and in search engine rankings, while also achieving high conversion rates. He argues that content marketing is a volume game, and you simply have to create lots of “donkey” content (you can guess what that means) to get to the unicorns.

So what’s your unicorn content? It’s that blog post that absolutely blows up on your social channels, climbs to the top of the Google rankings, and drives a ton of traffic to your landing pages.

You can’t predict what will “go unicorn” based on factors traditionally used to define great content (like great writing, keywords, and readability). Instead, you’ve got to keep a close eye on your social media analytics and performance.

When you spot overachieving content, repurpose it as a Facebook ad. Make it into an infographic and a video. Test this content in various formats for your key audiences to make it work even harder.

Most importantly, use the rest of our Facebook ad targeting tips to make sure you match your unicorn content to the audience that’s most likely to engage with it.

7. Get ultra-precise with layered targeting

Facebook offers tons of targeting options. On the surface, the options are divided into three main categories: demographics, interests, and behaviors. But within each of these categories, things get pretty granular.

For example, under demographics, you can choose to target parents. Or, more specifically, you could target parents with toddlers.

Then, you can click Narrow Audience to add additional layers of targeting. For example, under demographics, you can choose to limit your Facebook target audience based on relationship status and job industry.

Think about how these layers of targeting combine to create a hyper-focused audience. You could choose to target divorced parents of toddlers who work in management. And that’s just looking at demographics.

Under Interests>Travel, you could then limit your target audience to people who are interested in beach vacations. Then, under behaviors, you can even further narrow your audience to target frequent international travelers.

Do you see where this is going? If you run a high-end beach resort that offers a childcare program and no single supplement, you could create a promotion that specifically targets single parents in management-level jobs who love beach vacations and travel frequently.

If you market products or services tied to life events, even tangentially, you can target people who have recently moved, started a new job, gotten engaged or married. You can target people in their birthday month, or leading up to their anniversary. You can even target people whose friends have an upcoming birthday.

As you build your audience, you’ll see on the right side of the page how small your audience has become, as well as your potential reach. If you get too specific, Facebook will let you know.

This strategy works best for specific promotions designed to target a precise audience, rather than ads to promote your business in general. Combine this layered Facebook ad targeting with a landing page that speaks directly to the exact audience for best results.

Note: Each time you want to add another level of targeting, be sure to click Narrow Audience or Narrow Further. Each item should say Must also match about the selected criteria.

8. Combine two unique audiences together

Of course, not every product or promotion is naturally suited to the kind of precise Facebook targeting explained in the tip above.

Maybe you don’t know exactly which demographic or behavior categories you want to target with a specific ad. You only have a broad sense of a category you’d like to target. So, what do you do if that Facebook target audience is just too large?

Try combining it with a second audience, even if that second audience seems completely unrelated.

For example, let’s think about creating an ad audience for this GoPro video featuring LEGO boats:

GoPro: LEGO Ship Survives Wave Onslaught

#GoProAwards recipient Canvas 23 Studios sent his creations into the high seas with #GoProHERO10 Black as cargo 🚢 Show us your unique GoPro videos at GoPro. com/awards for the opportunity to take home $500 + a social feature, like Evan.

Posted by GoPro on Thursday, July 21, 2022

To start, we could build an audience of people who are interested in GoPro, videography, or video cameras. Even limiting the audience to people aged 22 to 55 in the United States, that creates a potential audience of 31.5 million people.

Now, in this case, the video features LEGO boats. So, what’s the obvious audience to add in here?

Yep, LEGO fans.

That cuts the potential audience size down to 6.2 million. And it would likely result in a much higher engagement rate, since people would be specifically interested in the video content, not just the product featured in the video.

In this case, we worked backwards from an existing video. But you could also decide on two unrelated audiences to combine, then create a targeted piece of content to speak directly to that group.

9. Use broad targeting to find your target audience

What if you’re just getting started and you don’t know yet who your target audience is? We’ve got a whole blog post on how you can start to figure this out through audience research.

But you can also learn a lot by starting with a broad Facebook ad targeting strategy. This works best for brand awareness campaigns rather than conversion-oriented ads, but the information you learn can help refine your conversion targeting strategy over time.

Create a new brand awareness campaign with some very basic targeting, such as a broad age range within a large geographic area. Facebook will then use its algorithms to determine the best people to show your ads to.

Once your ad has been running for a little while, you can check Audience Insights or Ads Manager to see which kinds of people Facebook chose for your ads, and how they responded. This can help you understand how to create your own target audiences for future campaigns.

Use Hootsuite Social Advertising to easily schedule organic posts and ads, build custom audiences, and get a complete view of your social ROI.

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How to Master Facebook Ad Targeting & Zero-In on Your Audience

With over 2 billion active users daily and an average use time of 35 minutes per user, it’s a top spot for B2C and B2B advertising. There’s never been a  better time to be familiar with Facebook Ad targeting.

Facebook has hundreds of targeting and ad demographic options. To get the most out of your advertising dollars, you’ll need to zero-in on your audience.

In this article, we’ll explore how to get the most out of that money spent on mastering Facebook Ad targeting and zeroing-in on your target.

What is a Facebook Audience?

The “target” or “market” that you’re going to advertise to is called, “audience” on Facebook. You can target super specifically, like by the amount of education or income. Also targeting options include age, location, gender, job title and much more. The options are almost limitless. For real.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

For this GoPro ad, we might target photographers or people that love to hike or ski. Or we could use Pixel (more on Pixel below) to target users who have visited the GoPro purchase page but didn’t complete the purchase.

Or for this ad, Soylent might target vegans, people that like working out or moms that have recently liked their Facebook page or Instagram post.

The above examples are just a couple of the many hundreds of ways to target Facebook users. Let’s take a look at Facebook’s primary targeting methods:

Targeting on Facebook

Like we mentioned, there are literally hundreds of ways to target people. Keep in mind that you can use any combination of the targeting methods listed below.

    • Location: You can target users by state, locality, zip code, country, etc. You can get more specific too, like targeting them where they work vs. where they live.
    • Demographics: Demographics means data relating to a population, like age, sex, income, marital status, etc. Facebook offers a ton of demographic options.
    • Interests: Interests are really helpful in defining a target market. Let’s say you’ve got an eCommerce store that sells R&B records, you could target users who have liked vintage record player pages, music pages, R&B artists, jazz pages, etc.
    • Behaviors: Behaviors use the Facebook Pixel (discussed below) to target users. Pixel is a piece of code that tracks user behavior so that you can display ads to people that behave in certain ways. This is one of the most profitable ways to target, as for example, you might show ads to people who recently visited your website’s pricing page or subscribed to your blog.
    • Engagement: Engagement is when someone comments, likes or follows you or your pages on social media. If someone has recently liked one of your Facebook or Instagram posts, you can have Facebook show them your ads.
    • Partner Connections: This method of advertising shows ads based on behaviors users take off of Facebook. For example, if you’re a car dealership, you might target users who have recently applied for a new car loan.
    • Automatic Optimization: Use the many demographic and target options above to zero-in on an audience that works for your company. Facebook will automatically optimize your audience for you.

Let’s say you set up an ad to target new parents that recently joined a gym in Richmond, VA.

Facebook might optimize that ad to reach more new moms vs. new dads because new moms tend to click-through more often. Once you’ve settled on a target that works well, you can use that target to build a successful Facebook Audience (a.k.a. target market). Just remember to save your audience to make future audience building easier.

Increase Conversions Dramatically With Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a unique code that you plug into the backend of your website. The code tracks user behavior on your site so you target web visitors based on their behaviors.

The goal of using the Pixel is to optimize your Facebook Ads and audiences based on user behavior and the data collected. Pixel allows you to do things like; Retargeting users who have abandoned a cart, who have recently viewed your pricing page or subscribed to a webinar.

Installing Pixel

First, you’ll need to create a Pixel for your site. Navigate to the Ads Manager, click All Tools > Pixels.

You’ll be prompted to set up your Pixel, agree to terms and name the Pixel. Then, you’ll install it on your site.

Select manually install Pixel.

To install the code, you simply copy and paste it into the header of your website.

Find the <head> code in your website. Install the Pixel inside the header. It’ll look something like this when it’s in the right place:

Make sure you save your website data with that code snippet in place!

Next, you’ll set up specific events you’d like to track. The behaviors that you will track are called Events. You tell Facebook what each of these Events is for your website.

For example, to track Lead Generation, you’d toggle the Lead Generation button, and copy/paste the code snippet into the <script> portion of the page on which you track leads (see screenshot below).

For example, you might track the confirmation or thank-you page for signing up for a webinar that you’re hosting, since those people are likely qualified leads.

Once you toggle Generate Lead to on, you can copy the code snippet and paste it into the <script> of the webinar confirmation page you want to track.

The <script> section where you want to paste this snippet looks like this:

How To Set Up Event Tracking For an Existing Pixel

If you’re already using Pixel and want to start tracking new Events, navigate to the Events Manager page > Pixels.

Next, click Details.

Then, click Set Up.

This will bring you back to the options for manually installing the code snippet. Click manually install and follow the steps above for installing the code.

How Do You Build a Successful Facebook Audience?

Building a Facebook audience takes some time since, for the best results, you want the audience to be specific, but not too specific.

The first step in creating a highly-specific audience is to get familiar with your customer persona. You can build out a customer avatar to help you set up successful Facebook Audiences.

Here is an example of a good customer avatar. Notice how specific it is.

Additionally, there are three types of Facebook audiences. Each type has its advantages, so let’s take a look:

1. Facebook Saved Audiences

A Facebook saved audience is what it sounds like;  an audience you can create, save and use again in later campaigns. If you know your target market demographics well, you can use that info to create an audience to reuse in many of your campaigns.

To set up a saved audience, navigate to the Audiences page. Then, click Create a Saved Audience. If this is your first time using Facebook Ads, it’ll look like this:

If you’ve used Facebook Ads before, navigate to the same Audiences page, then click Create Audience > Saved Audience.

Next, you’ll see the Facebook Ads Manager audience creation page. This is where you can plug in those useful demographics you discovered during the process of mapping out your customer persona.

When you’re all set with your demographics, location, interests, etc., click Create Audience.

This saved audience will now appear on your Audiences page.

When you want to use this saved audience in future campaigns, navigate to the Audience tab on the left side. Then, click on Use a Saved Audience and select the audience you’d like to use.

2. Facebook Custom Audiences

Custom audiences are some of the highest converting. Upload a list of emails or phone numbers of the prospects you want to show ads to. You can also have Facebook exclude emails or numbers on that list, let’s say if you know those folks aren’t interested in your product or service.

Custom audiences also work with the Pixel, to help you show ads to folks that have visited your website, or taken another action online, such as viewing your pricing page.

Let’s say you sell a SaaS product for lawyers. And you want to create a Custom Audience and use a list of emails you’ve collected of local attorneys.

To create a custom audience, navigate to the Audience page, then click Create Audience > Create Custom Audience:

Next, you’ll see this page with Custom Audience options. To use a list of emails or numbers, you’ll want to choose Customer File.

Afterward, you’ll have the option of uploading data from a file of your own or from MailChimp.

If you are going to use your own file, make sure it’s a .CSV file or .TXT file. Check out Facebook’s best practices for uploading files.

After you upload the data, you’ll need to agree to Facebook’s terms and then name the audience. Click Next.

You’ll see a preview of how Facebook has classified your data. Make sure that Email matches up with your email addresses. Phone with phone numbers, etc. If the data don’t match the names automatically given by Facebook, just click the name to change it.

This Custom Audience will now appear in your Audience list. It’ll say “Updating Audience,” in the Availability column while all the data is uploaded. Once it’s ready to use, you’ll get a notification from Facebook.

Just like all Facebook audiences, the more specific (without being too specific) your Custom Audience is, the better your results will be.

3. Facebook Lookalike Audiences

After you’ve created a few valuable Custom Audiences, you can start using the Lookalike Audience option to target users that are similar to the target you’ve defined in your Custom Audience.

Let’s say you wanted to continue targeting attorneys to sell your Lawyer SaaS tool. You could use Lookalike Audiences to target more attorneys in another state. Or even attorneys that weren’t in your email list that Facebook’s algorithms will find based on other criteria.

Navigate to the Audiences page. The, select Create Audience > Lookalike Audience

Next, you’ll have the option to choose which Custom or Saved Audience you want to base your new lookalike audience on.

Once you’ve selected the audience on which to base your new Lookalike Audience, adjust the settings for Location and Size, then click Create Audience at the bottom right.

Facebook Ad Targeting Best Practices

Custom Audiences gives advertisers tons of options for enhancing ad results as there’s so much that can be done targeting Website Traffic and Events. Custom Audiences is a great way to retarget people that have already visited your site, making your ad dollars go further.

The average click-through rate of a normal display ad is about .07%, while a retargeted ad averages a click-through rate of .7%. So, users are about 164% more likely to click your retargeted ad than a non-retargeted one.

This section explores a few of our favorite ways to retarget website visitors and people familiar with your online presence.

Target Visitors Who Didn’t Complete a Purchase

To show your ads to people who visited a product page on your website, but did not complete a purchase, you can use Pixel’s website traffic events.

The way it works is that you create an event attached to the product page URL. Then, you’d exclude any other URLs, like the Thank You or Completed Purchase page.

First, click Create a Custom Audience from the Events Manager page.

Then, select People who visited specific webpage from the drop-down.

Decide how recent the viewers should be for your ad, then enter that number into the days box. Next, enter your product page URL.

If you click on Further refine by, right beneath the URL box, refine users by device and frequency as well.

The following setup would advertise to people who have visited www.yourwebsiteproduct.com, at least two times in the last 30 days from their iPhone or iPad.

When you’ve got your product page URL set and have refined it, you’re ready to set up the URLs you’d like to exclude.

This step is important because it tells Facebook that anyone who has gone on and completed a purchase (or any other event you want to exclude) will be excluded from this campaign. To do this, we simply want to exclude people who have seen the purchase confirmation page.

Note* If you have an eCommerce store, then you will have the option to simply exclude “Purchases.”

Change the button next to URL to Equals. This is because we want to exclude this exact URL.

Then name your audience and click Create Audience.

Note* If you want to exclude only people that have purchased certain products, then you’d only include that specific product page and therefore, you would enter that product’s specific confirmation page into the excluded text box (No. 2 above).

To get the most out of a product retargeting ad, you want the ad copy to be brief, maybe you’ll even apply a discount to the product ad. Like this one:

Retargeting Visitors That Read Your Blog

As blog readers are much more familiar with your brand than someone that’s never heard of your company, you can bet that targeting your blog readers gets you more bang for your Facebook Ad buck.

This is great for low-touch SaaS companies or any company that sees decent conversion rates from their blog. You can show a product in your ad or even advertise another blog post or an eBook.

First, get to navigate back to the Pixel page > Create Custom Audience (see above).

Next, make sure that you set the URL to contains. We want to make sure that any URL with the word blog in the address is added to the group that we advertise to. So enter blog as a keyword in the space.

This setting will show your ad to anyone that views a page with the word blog in the URL. Example: yourwebsite.com/blog/article123 or blog.yourwebsite.com.

When you’re finished, click Create Audience and Facebook will save the audience to your audience list.

You can use these two different tactics for a number of scenarios:

  • Target anyone that’s visited your website.
  • To target people who have visited 2 or 3 specific pages on your site, like several products.
  • Target people who viewed a landing page, but didn’t opt-in to the list or offering.

Optimize your Facebook ad reach

Now that you know the essentials of Facebook ad targeting, make sure your content and strategy are also up to par. Check out these resources for your next steps in designing a great Facebook ad campaign from start to finish:

  • How to foolproof your Facebook advertising strategy
  • Facebook advertising cost: Everything you need to optimize your ROI
  • Facebook Lookalike Audiences: How to optimize ads to reach new customers
  • A step-by-step guide on how to use Facebook Business Manager
  • 5 brilliant Facebook campaigns (& why they worked)
  • 12 Facebook Ad Examples You Wish You Made

How to set up an audience for Facebook ads*

Tips

4 valuable audiences and how to quickly set them up

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I'll tell you how to collect audiences that I use myself. If you are interested in a specific audience, just click on it and you will be taken to the desired section of the article.

Clients who have not completed the target action

Clients who have registered

Similar audiences

Clients who have already completed the target action (search by email)

Clients who have not completed the target action

Why do we need an audience. We will be able to find on Facebook* all visitors to the site who did not complete the target action: did not buy, did not register, did not download the price list.

Which ads can be shown. Those that close for a target action: an offer to register, get a discount or leave contacts for the event.

How to create such an audience:

1. Go to Ads Manager.

2. Select "Create an audience" - "Custom audience". nine0003

3. Here we see all the options for creating audiences on Facebook*. Select Site Traffic.

4. Select all site visitors and exclude those who have registered. I talked about how to create an audience of registered users in an article about Facebook* conversions.

5. Name the audience and save it.

6. The audience does not appear immediately - Facebook * needs time to find all site visitors on the social network.

7. Now we can use this audience to serve targeted ads. nine0003

Combine Facebook* ads with emails

Transfer contacts directly from Facebook* Lead Ads to UniSender. Send automated emails to customers immediately.

Try it

Visitors who have registered on the site

The second audience that I recommend creating is all registered visitors.

Why do we need an audience. Using the Facebook* pixel, we find active customers on the social network and show them targeted ads. nine0003

Which ads can be shown . Links to related products, announcements of new products, invitations to events and webinars.

Go back to Ads Manager, select "Create Audience" - "Custom Audience" - "Site Traffic". In the settings, select only those people who have registered on the site:

Similar audience

Why do we need an audience. Look-alike audiences are a Facebook* tool that allows you to find users who are similar to your customers within the social network itself. Facebook* analyzes gender, age, interests, location and other parameters to match your potential customers. nine0003

Which ads can be shown. The same as any potential customer: product benefits, an invitation to register on the site or attend an event.

How to create a lookalike audience:

1. Go to "Audience" - "Create an audience" - "Similar audience". Select an audience of registered users.

2. Select the location and size of the audience. The 1% Lookalike Audience consists of people who are most similar to the audience source. The higher the percentage, the wider the audience becomes. nine0003

Customers who completed the target action

Another important audience that I recommend to collect is the audience of people who have already bought or registered on the site. For this audience, we do not need conversions from the site - we will use the email of existing customers.

Why do we need an audience. Helps you find additional customers on Facebook* by email only.

Which ads will be shown. Depends on which emails to feed Facebook*: potential customers or active users of the product. nine0003

1. Go to Ads Manager, select "Create Audience" - "Custom Audience" - "Customer Data File".

2. If you have data about LTV (Life Time Value) of customers and you are ready to share it with Facebook*, then choose the first option. If there is no LTV, click on the second line.

3. Upload a file with clients in CSV, TXT format or just copy the addresses from the list. Each email in the file must start on a new line. An example of such a file:

4. Specify where we have collected contacts, paste the file and name the audience. After that, click on "Continue" and "Download and create." nine0003

5. Facebook* will find the users you added within the social network. Now we can show them targeted ads or create Lookalike Audiences based on them.

Other audiences can be configured on Facebook*:

  • Who watched the video.
  • Who filled out the lead form.
  • Who viewed your Instagram profile* and more.

Updated on June 12, 2020

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nine0000 How to set up targeted advertising on Facebook: a step-by-step guide

1. 49 billion users visit Facebook every day, so businesses actively use this platform for promotion. Today we will talk about what is targeted advertising on this social network, and give step-by-step instructions on how to set it up. Yuliya Davidenko, specialist in targeted advertising and lecturer at Marketing School LVL80 narrates.

Reading time 15 minutes
You can immediately go to the section of interest:

  1. What is targeted advertising
  2. Overview of Facebook Targeted Advertising Settings
    • Targeting settings
    • Advertising campaign objectives
  3. How to set up targeted Facebook ads
    • Detailed targeting
    • Placements
    • Optimization and display
    • Advertisement setting
  4. Terminals

What is targeted advertising

Although targeted advertising is popular, some still do not quite understand what it is and confuse it with other types of promotion. Therefore, to begin with, we will clarify this issue.

Targeted advertising does not include:

  • pay-per-click or 100-impression ads based on keywords, as in the case of Google context;
  • creating and publishing content;
  • work with opinion leaders; nine0128
  • “cheat” of subscribers and likes by bots.

Therefore, it makes no sense to contact a specialist in targeted advertising in the hope of getting the full range of services for promotion in social networks. He will not lead your brand page or “catch up” with subscribers there. 

  Learn about targeted advertising in our detailed article "What is targeted   advertising:   types, examples, features.

Ringostat for a marketer

  • Prove to management that the advertising you set up is effective — show call tracking and end-to-end analytics reports.
  • Learn how to make campaigns even more effective - analyze what potential customers are asking and what to add to your ads.
  • Control how the sales team processes the leads you bring in - listen to audio recordings of calls and see reports of missed calls;
  • Get more value for the same budget - find out which campaigns are not working and disable or optimize them, and invest the freed money in the most successful activities. nine0128

Find out more

How to advertise on Facebook: an overview of the settings cabinet

The advertising cabinet is very similar in structure to the similar Google Ads cabinet. Advertising on Facebook and Instagram will be configured from one Facebook advertising account. This happens according to the same algorithms with identical rules and features of work. Therefore, everything that we will talk about advertising on Facebook applies equally to Instagram. 

  Read more about promotion on Instagram in the article “How to use Instagram   for business.
An example of an advertising account for targeted Facebook advertising

Here, settings are exactly the same at three levels:

  • campaigns;
  • ad groups;
  • announcements.

At campaign level , only the objectives of the advertising campaign are selected, if necessary, the budget, campaign duration and cost limit are set.

At the ad group level , all targeting settings occur:

  • audience parameters;
  • placements - places where ads will be shown;
  • optimization methods;
  • advertising schedule;
  • budget;
  • Expiry date - If not set at the campaign level.

At the ad level , creatives are added - photo or video, text. As well as a link to the landing page, if we are talking about advertising in order to get traffic to the site.

Facebook targeting settings

Here, the settings of targeted advertising are radically different from contextual advertising. The first thing you need to specify is the place of residence. You can select one country or several, individual cities or even a radius around a specific place. Next, age, gender and language are set.

At the stage of setting detailed targeting, you can already set many parameters:

  • marital status;
  • life events;
  • field of activity;
    • nine0127 hobbies and interests; preferences;
  • lifestyle;
  • operating system or phone model and more.
An example of setting up an audience in the Facebook advertising account

Audiences can be narrowed down using additional parameters or some targeting parameters can be excluded from it. If you're advertising a steak restaurant, you can easily exclude vegans from your targeting.

In addition to the so-called "cold targeting", you can use custom audiences. They are generated based on site visitors, customer lists, people who interacted with your page, etc.

Ad campaign goals

The most popular goal in targeted advertising on Facebook is traffic. But besides it, there are others that are no less effective for various tasks.

  1. Awareness (brand awareness and reach) . Allows you to show ads to as many people or a specific group of people as many times as possible.
  2. Involvement . Used to promote an existing publication in order to get maximum coverage and engagement: likes, comments, reposts. nine0128
  3. Application settings . The name says it all – this ad target is aimed at advertising the app.
  4. Video views . Allows you to get the maximum number of video views. Well suited for the first phase of a new product launch. First, you talk about a product or service in a video. Then you collect an audience of people who watched your video - after all, they have already become acquainted with your product. And in the second stage, you launch direct advertising to this audience. nine0128
  5. Lead Generation . If you do not have a website, but need to test the demand for a product, this goal is suitable for you. Similarly, if you have a landing page, you need to compare the effectiveness of different advertising methods. After clicking on the ad, the user sees a short information and a data entry form. Through it, the advertiser collects contacts of potential customers and then works directly with them.
  6. Messages . This goal allows you to engage users directly in a Messenger conversation and also doesn't require a website. Further, you can communicate with the user directly or connect a flow-bot. nine0128
  7. Conversions . For the user, this is no different from advertising with the goal "Traffic", because he also gets to the site. The only difference is optimization. In a traffic campaign, algorithms target the people who visit your site and serve ads to those who are more likely to visit your site. And when advertising for the purpose of "conversion", the system analyzes users who have completed the necessary target action. Based on this data, Facebook selects the audience for the subsequent display of ads. nine0128
  8. Sales of items from catalog . Most often, this goal is used by online stores with a large number of products. It allows you to create ads based on catalog cards. Also used for dynamic remarketing.
  9. Point visits. Used to advertise offline businesses - beauty salons, restaurants. 
  Learn more about the posting guidelines in the article Why Google and Facebook Advertisers Can Get Banned. nine0136

How to set up targeted advertising on Facebook

Let's take an example of how to create an advertising campaign on Facebook with the most common goal - traffic.

Go to Ads Manager, press the button Create campaign and select the goal Traffic .

Give the name of the campaign, the first ad group, ad and save the draft.

If necessary, set the budget and duration of the campaign. But usually this is done at the level of the ad group, to the settings of which we go. nine0003

Budget selection. Here we have two options: daily or for the entire period of validity. From myself, I can say that I prefer to manage the daily budget - increasing or decreasing it, depending on the situation.

Launch date is set automatically on the day the group was created, but ads won't start until you enable the campaign. If you want the show to start on a specific day, set the desired date. Same situation with end date . You can schedule it in advance, or you can not specify this date. nine0003

Next, go to setting up audiences . And the first thing that is offered is to choose an individualized or saved audience.

If you don't plan to use them, skip this step and proceed to setting up cold audiences.

The first thing to set up is the socio-demographic indicators.

Places. First, choose who in the area you want to reach: all people, locals, travelers, or recent visitors. Next, specify the region itself — it can be a country, a city, or a certain radius around a given point on the map (from 1 km). Regions can be added, and certain areas can be excluded from the already selected ones. nine0003

With age and gender , I think no one will have problems.

As for the language , I advise you to always specify the language in which the ad is written and the landing page itself.

How to set up targeting: detailed settings

Here you set the criteria that your audience should meet. Interests can be selected from the drop-down list by pressing the button View, or by entering them manually.

Here you can set marital status, education level, life events, hobbies and hobbies, field of activity, different preferences, mobile device model or PC operating system, behavior, etc. Interests can also be excluded or narrowed down. nine0003

Communications . Using this option, you can set up ads to be shown only to page subscribers, friends of subscribers, or completely exclude them from targeting. You can also set up links to an event or application.

After you create an audience, you can save it for later use.

Placements

In this field you specify the places in which the advertisement will be shown. When choosing automatic placements, the system will choose where to show ads. But you can also set them yourself. We will not dwell on individual placements - when you hover over the desired item, you will see a description and a good example. nine0003

Optimization and delivery

The last thing you need to do in the group settings is to set the parameters that the system will rely on when selecting an audience for displaying ads. In this case, you can set optimization for clicks, landing page views, impressions, and reach. Optionally, you can set a bid limit per click. But at the initial stage, it is better to stick to the minimum price strategy.

Advertisement setup

This is the last step. Here you set what the user will see: image, text, title, description of the link and the link to the landing page itself. nine0003

This completes the ad creation process. Then you can add new groups and ads to the targeting campaign, launch and optimize them.

Frequently asked questions

Why is targeted advertising effective?

Because it is shown not to everyone, like a TV commercial, but to an audience that is potentially interested in buying. This increases the likelihood that the person who viewed the ad will make an order from you. nine0003

Why is targeted advertising expensive?

Not always. If you choose the right audience to which advertising will be shown, then it will pay off doubly. To do this, you need to research who your typical buyer is and take this into account when setting up campaigns.

Who is targeted advertising for?

Almost all companies that understand who their target audience is. Targeted advertising is not suitable only for those companies that, in principle, do not promote online. nine0003

Conclusions

  1. Targeted advertising, like contextual advertising, suits almost everyone. But the features of promotion with their help are fundamentally different. In the case of context, we work with formed demand - we show our offer to people who are already looking for a specific product or service. In targeted advertising, we form an audience based on socio-demographic data and range of interests.

    Learn more