Audience targeting is one of the most important parts of Facebook advertisement. Among the majority of the people who run ads, they just select some target audience and choose an image or video as an ad creative, and they proceed to run ads with it.
But to get the most out of the advertisement, it is crucial to select the right set of audiences for the ads.
Facebook allows us to select the target audience based on these categories
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Detailed targetting
To select the audience properly, you should have a customer persona in mind. This includes what age gap the customer will be around. Does the brand sell gender-specific products? And what kind of other things that your customer might be interested in?
It is always better to know more about your target customer. That’s why taking surveys helps the brand in understanding its product or service and making it customized to the customer’s favor.
Location
Make a list of locations to target for running the ad. The location option in the Facebook ads manager is to show the ads to the people who most likely stayed in that location or showed interest in that location.
Do remember, if someone works at some place and stays somewhere else, that could cause an issue in location targeting. For example: If you are running an ad targeting people living at X location, but when you call the lead – they will mention that they live at location Y. This might be because the person might be working at location X but stays at location Y. Facebook doesn’t know these details, so it will just show those ads to the people at the current targeted location X. These leads might be asking for the service at the location Y, but the brand wouldn’t have started their service there yet.
While targeting the location, you will get two options
- Include the locations you want to target
- Exclude the locations you don’t want to target
Most people use the first option, as it’s easier to target the required location. The exclude option will be helpful when you want to target a whole state or country but want to exclude a few parts of them.
You can target the locations by searching the name of the location on its search bar or you can target the locations based on their Pin code as well.
Age
Select the right set of age groups to target your ads based on your customer persona
For one Ad set, you can only target one age group. If you have multiple age groups as your target audience, then create multiple ad sets. For example, if some of your audience is from the age of 22 to 28 and another set of audience is from 45 to 50. Then you should create multiple Ad sets to target each of these groups. Don’t make the mistake of targeting 22 to 50 in a single Ad set, this will show our ads to people who are not our target audience.
Gender
If your product or service can be used by all genders, select the option of targeting all genders. If you have a product or service that has to be sold only to a specific gender, select male or female to target.
Detailed Targeting
Even though all the above-mentioned targeting details are important, detailed targeting is the real game changer in Facebook ads.
The detailed targetting has three categories,
- Demographics
- Interests
- Behaviors
These categories are very simple to understand. Even if you get any doubt about these later, you can hover over the “I” section in the ads manager to get an explanation from Facebook itself.
Demographics
In the demographic targeting option, you can target people based on their education, employment, and household. Facebook has added many interesting sets of audiences over some time.
In demographics, you can select options like,
- Parents with or without children
- Adults who stay away from family or hometown or recently moved
- People whose birthday is upcoming
- People who have a new job
- People with a new relationship or long distance relationship or newly engaged
- People who work in large, medium, or small enterprise
- People to target based on their employment or based on the industry they belong to
These are examples of the available options to target based on demographics in a detailed targeting method. Check out the Facebook ads manager for more targeting available options
Interests
The interest section is very interesting to target while doing Facebook ads. Here you can select people to target based on what they like and what kind of pages they might be active with.
For example: If you are selling tech electronic products and you want to target the audience based on their interests, the possible way to reach them in front of them is by knowing where they hang out the most on the platform. If gamers are the kind of people who are most likely to buy tech electronics, then targeting the gaming-related pages in the interest section will work the most for you.
Some of the best examples of the options that are available in this target sections are,
- Target using the way your audience spends the entertainment(leisure) time
- The business and industry they are interested in
- Target based on their hobbies
- Target based on their likes in fitness, fashion, technology, and consumables
To know about more available options, look into the available targeting options inside the interests section.
Behaviors
Some of the most interesting options available in the sections are that you can target people,
- Based on the type of device they use
- Based on the OS they use
- Based on the Browser they use
- Based on the mobile brand they use
- Based on how old their mobile phones are
Some of the best available targetting options that are relevant to human behaviors are,
- Target based on engaged shopping behavior
- Target based on frequent traveling or return from traveling
- Target based on people who are interested in upcoming events
- Target people who are admins of specific kinds of pages
- Target people who prefer high-value or mid-value goods
To know about more available options, look into the available targeting options inside the Behaviour section.
Think about targeting beyond the available options
Most people when beginning with Facebook advertising think about the available options to target and think of reaching out to customers based on the platform’s limited availability.
But you should always think from the customer’s perspective and not from the advertising platform’s perspective. If you think the customers will be hanging out on one specific platform instead of both Facebook and Instagram. Then you can target only the required ad placements to make your campaign more effective.
Knowing the customers is the key to the great advertisement
Conclusion
Try and explore all the available target options. Create a customer persona and try to know as many interests as possible of the customer. Try to target the audience broadly at the beginning of the ad campaign. You can always see the estimated reach of the audience to determine the level of targeting you are doing to make the ad outreach the people.
