In order to master Facebook ad audiences, first, you need to understand the engine that runs the tech company. Facebook is a huge tech giant monopoly that collects an inconceivable amount of data on its users about all kinds of things. Facebook most definitely has the power of knowledge. And so, it uses this knowledge to enhance its powerful algorithm and audience targeting. You can use this to your advantage when you are creating your Facebook Audience to show your ads to.
Facebook Ad Audiences Options
Facebook offers you a few different targeting options. First, you have the saved audiences. These are the lowest quality of audiences available on Facebook. Unless you already have a large list of contacts built up, you will have to begin with saved audiences. Over time, you’ll be building lists of interested people and customers. Next, you’ll be able to utilize some of Facebook’s more advanced targeting capabilities, such as custom audiences and lookalike audiences.
Saved Audience
You can create a saved audience using the advanced Facebook targeting options. As a result, you’ll be able to target people based on a wide variety of different criteria, such as:
Job title, employer, interests, online activity, page likes and follows, income zip codes, demographics, language, geographic area, and more.
It is generally best marketing practice to determine and really narrow down your target audience based on your client avatar (so that you only target the people that would be interested in what you’ve got to offer). However, Facebook targeting is a bit of an exception to this rule.
Most advertisers agree that you shouldn’t limit Facebook’s powerful algorithm’s capability to find the right audience for your ads. This means that it isn’t recommended to make your saved audiences too specific and small. Rather, it is generally best that you use bigger Facebook ad audiences. Then, let the algorithm do its thing by finding the best segment for your ads. Generally, it is recommended your saved Facebook audience should be no less than 500,000 (bare minimum).
Often, you’ll want to try bigger audiences – in the millions. Most advertisers will tell you that as a rule of thumb, your saved audiences shouldn’t be larger than 5 million people. But, some advertisers elect to go for ridiculously large audiences of around 50 million and just let Facebook work its magic! This strategy could be worth testing. This is especially true if you’re advertising wide-ranging products/services that can apply to large portions of the population.
If you are a B2B company and targeting business owners, a good strategy would be to target people who are Facebook Page and Facebook Business Page admins. Try to be creative with your Facebook ad audiences. Often, targeting a group of people based on their interests can work well. You can target your audience based on different factors. These include the types of websites they visit, the types of magazines & journals they read, which celebrities and influencers they follow, and which pages they like.
These tactics will require some research on your end. However, it will likely be worth your time because only a few advertisers take the time to do this kind of research. This means that these groups of people likely have fewer advertisers targeting them, and there will be less competition. Less competition could lead to improved metrics, such as CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions).
Custom Audience
A custom audience lets you find and target people on Facebook who are already familiar with your business. They could be current clients/customers, newsletter subscribers, or people who use your app. Don’t forget about people who have engaged with your Facebook content or people who have visited your website. Such an audience is already warm to your brand and you will find that custom audiences will perform much better than saved audiences.
Facebook targeting allows you to use custom audiences for a variety of different campaigns. By using a custom audience, you can create a lookalike audience. Essentially, this means that you are giving Facebook a list of people and companies who have been receptive to your brand. Plus, you’re letting Facebook use all the data and information it has to find similar users on their platform.
People who are similar to your existing customers will be much more likely to become new customers for your business. In order to create a lookalike audience, you will need a custom audience of at least 100 people. However, the larger your custom audience is, the better quality your lookalike audience will be. This is because the larger your custom audience, the more information you will be giving Facebook to create a high-performing lookalike audience.
You can also use custom audiences to run remarketing campaigns. These campaigns allow you to retarget people who have interacted with your business in any type of way. For example, you can retarget people who have visited any specified page on your website. Or, you can retarget people who were checking out your products but didn’t end up making a purchase. There are many different options for remarketing campaigns on Facebook. It’s good to have many options because they allow you to have multiple touchpoints with people. Nowadays, it takes way more touchpoints to get people to make a purchase with you because they have to gain trust for your brand over time.
Facebook Ad Audiences Strategy
You’ve probably heard this a million times, but it’s all about testing. All the theories in the world are just that- theories. They are great rules of thumb, however, every business is different, and what might work for one business may not be the best for yours. You should use all of these rules of thumb and best practices as a starting point, but test multiple different Facebook ad audiences and always follow the data.
Most marketers will tell you that your audience size should be between 1 and 5 million large. But, you should still probably create a smaller and larger audience as well. Then, run with the one that is the best-performing. Remember, in order to accurately assess the performance of an audience, you’ll have to test identical ads and creatives across different audiences. This way, you will be able to attribute better or worse performance directly to the Facebook audience, and not to the different ads or images that you’re using. If you want to become a pro at Facebook ads, take a look at our Facebook ads guide.
Be Customer-Oriented
Before diving into Facebook ad audiences, I would highly recommend that you spend some time and create a detailed client avatar. Clearly, this can save you loads of cash going forward. Not only because you’ll build better audiences, but because it will also help you in every other part of the process.
To be able to effectively communicate with your audience, you will have to really know your audience. What do they consider valuable? What type of problems (pain points) are they experiencing? What type of objections do they have. What are their interests, goals, desires, hobbies, demographics, incomes, etc? Knowing your audience like you know yourself is the very first step to building a high-performing audience and Facebook Ads campaign at large.
That concludes our tutorial on Facebook targeting. Did you like this article? Check out our guide on increasing your Facebook following. Good luck and I hope that you make lots of money with it!
