There are over 2 billion Facebook users worldwide, with 233 million of them residing in the US. But even as ambitious as you and your company may be, that’s simply too large of a Facebook Ads target audience.
Instead, you will rely on Facebook’s powerful targeting capabilities to create multiple target audiences, showing your ads only to people who will be the best fit to receive your advertisement.
With Facebook’s robust ad manager, you’re likely to be somewhat confused with all the targeting options available to you today.
We’ll give you an overview of Facebook’s different audience types, how they work, and suggestions for how to use them to deliver your ads to the right people.
Facebook Ads Targeting Options to Consider
When it comes to setting up targeted Facebook Ad campaigns, you have three options — core audiences, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.
Let’s examine the differences between these options and when each might be appropriate for your campaign’s goals.
Core Audiences:
When people think of setting up Facebook targeting, they most likely think of defining a core audience.
This tool lets marketers create rules and guidelines to determine where the ads will be shown online.
Location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections can all be adjusted to show your ad to a highly targeted set of people who will be more likely to click on your ad and convert to customers.
Custom Audiences:
When you want to create ads to be shown to only people who have interacted with your company or website before, there are custom audiences.
Custom audiences are even more highly targeted, allowing marketers to upload email lists from their CRMs or from collected leads to show Facebook ads to people who have already engaged with their company in some way.
Lookalike Audiences:
Sometimes you try your best to narrow down the perfect targeted audience but fall short in reaching all the right people.
Luckily, lookalike audiences let you reach new people who share similar interests and online behaviors of your previous customers, allowing you to cast a wider net to people who are more likely to click on your ads.
How to Define the Right Facebook Ads Target Audience
Your sales and marketing departments likely have a good idea of who the target audience is by creating buyer personas. Using these buyer personas will help you greatly when setting up different core audiences into Facebook Ads manager.
For example, if you’re a mortgage company, you might be looking for men and women aged 30-40, who have an income of $50,00-$100,000 a year. This is likely a good starting place, but by no means are you finished.
You can further tailor your core audience by adding interests, such as specific hobbies, demographics such as education, job title, and more.
If there are certain companies or pages that your Facebook Ads target audience follows, you can also customize that to show your ads to those people as well. This is particularly useful in showing ads to people who follow your competitors’ Facebook pages.
Lastly, you can also target your audience through their past consumer behaviors and through what type of device they’re viewing Facebook from (mobile or desktop).
And don’t worry about getting hyper-specific, as Facebook does not disclose personal information to the people you’re showing your ads to.
How to Define the Geographic Location
Facebook allows marketers to select cities, communities, zip codes, and countries within its ad manager to only show ads in those selected areas.
If you are a local company, such as a law firm or a home utilities company, it doesn’t make sense to advertise to people outside your immediate geographical location.
Facebook allows you to set up a minimum radius of 1 mile, for hyper-focused campaigns, or a maximum of a 50-mile radius.
Within this radius, you can then set even more specific demographic restrictions and interests to further narrow down your targeted audience.
By the time you’re done setting up your targeted geographical audience, your ads reach might be exceptionally small, but highly targeted.
Categorizing Further Demographic Attributes and Interests
As we mentioned, you can get extremely specific about adding further demographic attributes, interests, and behaviors to narrow down your ad reach to show to the perfect set of people.
Facebook allows for layered targeting to do just this. By layering your criteria, you can narrow down a very broad audience into a hyper-focused audience that will be the most receptive to your ad.
How to Make the Most Out of the Budget with the Right Audience
If you don’t have a lot of money for your Facebook Ads budget then you must find the right targeted audience so you’re not wasting money showing ads to uninterested people.
Facebook ads are like science experiments — they require time, money, and analysis to find the sweet spot in audience targeting to show your ad to enough people, but not too many people, who also have just the right interests and behaviors to be a good match for your ad.
Once you’ve done some testing, you will find that perfect audience and can spend your money judiciously.
The Power of Retargeting and Lookalike Audiences
Facebook’s lookalike audiences let you find new people who share similar behaviors and traits to people who are already loyal customers. To do this, you can create a source audience of people who have interacted or bought from you before, and Facebook runs its magic to show your ad to similar people.
Facebook also uses its Facebook pixel to place cookies in the browsers of people who have interacted with your website, so you can then show them retargeting ads displaying products they have previously looked at, but didn’t purchase yet.
This can be especially useful for promoting events when people interacted with your registration page but didn’t register yet. You can then show the event’s ad in their Facebook feed as a retargeting ad, and they’ll be more likely to click on it and register.
Hire Denver PPC for Facebook Ad White Label Management
Denver PPC is a Colorado-based PPC management company experienced in paid media advertisement.
Our team has over a decade worth of experience creating, handling, and managing a diverse set of advertising campaigns and platforms, including Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Bing Ads, and more.
We offer our clients outstanding PPC management, including white label PPC management, white label PPC outsourcing, and Facebook Ads management.
Have further questions about Facebook Ads? Call Troy or Tony at 303-975-2810 to begin optimizing your company’s Facebook marketing efforts.
