Facebook Ads Targeting: The 3 Options You Have And 8 Tips To Maximize Them

Social advertising is the new instrument of choice for marketers. Starting as a communication medium, global platforms like Facebook have evolved into a profitable marketplace. Hence, modern businesses are trying to utilize Facebook to create a sales channel for their e-commerce business.

Ad targeting on Facebook can be a game changer for you if you know how to target the correct audience, leading to more conversions. Typically, Facebook’s ad targeting has helped businesses achieve higher conversion rates, which is evident from their ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

But how do you achieve the results without losing a lot of money in testing ads? Targeting the wrong consumers can lead to a loss of money you invested. Although it is challenging to hyper-target the right audience, it is not impossible. For this reason, identifying the right people is crucial for the success of your business. This guide offers eight actionable tips to help you discover the three types of target audiences and increase your ROAS effortlessly.

The 3 Main Facebook Marketing Options for Ad Targeting

Ad targeting on Facebook can provide you with multiple options. One of the primary benefits of targeting is to achieve super-specific results with your campaigns.

On Facebook, you can perform three types of ad targeting. You can target Core Audiences, Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences. In this section, we will discuss what you can do in terms of marketing to benefit from all three choices.

#1. For Core Audiences

As the name suggests, Core Audiences should be your primary focus for Facebook ad targeting. Establishing your Core Audiences is essential as they set up the benchmarks for future customer segments. These primary audiences will help you build a foundation based on which you can target more customers. In order to gain more information about your Core Audiences, you need to monitor these five sources for valuable insight.

• Location: Facebook’s location-based targeting can help you to know where your audiences live. Thus, targeting a specific geographic area such as a small town can help you set a central point of your ad targeting endeavors.
• Interests: Collecting data about users’ interests can help you identify critical information regarding their products of choice. Keep a tab on various interests, such as events, sports, books, movies, personalities, athletes, celebrities, songs, etc.
• Behavior: Consumer behavior analysis is a powerful ad targeting technique you can leverage using Facebook’s roles and activity information. Some additional points you should pay close attention to are the recent purchases made, device usage, and time spent on Facebook.
• Demographics: Demographical analysis can provide you with basic descriptors of the audience, including occupation, education level, family, race, annual income, marital status, ethnicity, etc. These can be great information on which to base your ad-targeting effort.
• Connections: Facebook enables you to benefit from any direct or indirect relationship between two users, apps, events, or pages. As a result, you can get the target, multiple people, if you research one person properly. It saves time and resources.

#2. Custom Audiences – How to target

When you are perfectly aware of your core audiences, you should start researching custom audiences. These people already know about your brand or have engaged with your product pages in the past. There are three primary sources for your Custom Audiences hunt.

• Facebook sources: Customers who engage with your business on Facebook or Instagram fall under this category. They perform activities like watching a video or browsing the catalog.
• Website visitors: This segment includes people who have already visited a specific page on the company website in the past. You can follow their on-site behavior, such as time on site, which page they bounced from, etc.
• Customer list: This list contains names, emails, and contact details of individuals collected from multiple sources.
• App users: You can frame Custom Audiences around users who perform specific activities on your brand’s mobile application.
• Offline: This audience has interacted with the business in person, such as by visiting the physical store.

#3. Lookalike Audiences – Boost your brand reach

Lookalike audiences include people who share comparable characteristics with your existing audiences. They are great for ad targeting because they have the potential to expand your brand’s name. Nevertheless, you need further optimization of your tactics to get the most out of your Lookalike audiences.

• To save resources, use your existing creative ad and try to grab the attention of Lookalike Audiences.
• Periodically analyze your ad performance using metrics like ROAS regarding the Lookalike Audiences.
• Finally, optimize your repurposed ads for each audience to provide relevance by adding a unique spin to the ads.

8 Tips to Power Up Your Facebook Marketing and Advertising Strategy

These 8 Facebook-specific ad targeting techniques can set you up for success and boost conversions. Following these can help decrease the cost per conversion and measure the importance of your ad in terms of ROAS.

1. Discover your winning content

Content is king. If you have a blog or a Youtube channel, you may have noticed that only a few articles or videos get the most traffic volume. Find these high-performing articles and videos to use for your Facebook ad campaigns. Look for pillar pages, Ultimate guides, or “How to” guides and repurpose them to produce a profitable and engaging ad.

Try your luck with Infographics, e-books, free video courses, etc. Maintaining a large audience will help you test your ad ideas and repurpose high-performing content effortlessly. The bottom line is that don’t limit yourself to a particular content structure and experiment with all possible formats.

2. Leverage Facebook relevance metrics

Facebook’s relevance metrics measure how much relevant an ad is to a consumer before delivery. Following these metrics closely will help you succeed with your ad campaigns. Here is a short guide on how to diagnose the performance of ads. These three metrics are essential for a relevant advertisement.

• Quality: Tells whether your images and videos have professional quality and are high-resolution.
• Engagement: This metric measures how audiences keep interacting with the ads.
• Conversion: This metric shows how much your ad is converting.

Facebook will help you identify the underperforming ads so that you can improve your strategy to get the best results.

Here are some pointers you can follow to make the most out of your ad relevance data.

• Only use high-quality images, videos, and written content in every ad to create a top-notch experience for your audience.
• Make sure your ads are properly targeted towards the right niches and attract the right kind of audiences who are more likely to engage with them.
• Thoroughly review your ad copy and assess its actionability. Include a clear and precise call to action, which will encourage the users to click on links leading to products or service pages on your website.

Further Reading: 4 Steps for How to Measure Facebook Ads Metrics Effectiveness

3. Use Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook’s Audience Insights is a potent tool for acquiring a massive amount of valuable data, including demographics, interests, and location of the Core Audiences. Harvesting this information will help you formulate the proper ad targeting strategies.

Go to the Audience Insights dashboard to select a type of audience. It can be your current followers or everyone’s Facebook. Next, choose demographics that match your target customer profile to learn more about their interests, job titles, income, race, preferences, location, etc.

Uncover what type of content your target audience consumes on Facebook and what pages they follow. Use the control panel on the left side of the web app to tweak the options and bound your audience research until you are satisfied with a profitable niche. Finally, you can save your audience and click the “Create Ad” button on the top right corner of the screen to enter the ad creator page. This page will help you create personalized ads with all the targeting info already filled up.

4. Follow the recent purchasing behaviors of your audience

Purchasing behavior can unravel all you need to know about hyper-targeting a particular segment of audiences and help increase conversion by manifolds.

On Facebook Ads Manager, go to the behavior category and use filters to narrow down your search. Focus on their last purchase to identify which consumers have purchased a product from a similar company. This approach will help you present the right product in front of the right people who are more likely to buy them.

5. Sequential re-targeting tactic

Sequential retargeting is a method that lets you show a series of Facebook ads to your audience based on their behavior on the site. This type of ad is effective as it understands what phase of buying journey people are going through. If somebody has already visited the products page and checked the prices of individual products, he is more likely to invest than the one who has just reached your home page.

Additionally, sequential re-targeting will help you regain the visitors who bounced from the home page in the past three days as every ad presents some new and exciting facet of the company to these customers.

6. Re-target using Facebook pixel

Facebook pixel is an innovative way to create custom audiences from your existing website visitors. This tool can help you design winning re-targeting campaigns where the ads target the people who have already interacted with your brand. You can even sift through your re-targeting a bit more as the people who regularly visit your website can belong to different audience groups.

• Firstly, use pixel to re-target those who didn’t complete a purchase after visiting one of your significant pages. This approach will help you convince the people who are already sales funnel’s consideration stage.
• Secondly, set up a Facebook pixel on your website. Head to the Events Manager page and create a custom audience based on people who have visited specific web pages.
• You can also use this tool to re-target your readers. Those who have read a couple of blogs can also engage with your products which can lead to conversion. Offer value items combined with a low-cost product or a freebie such as an e-book or a video course. Massive discounts can also be effective in capturing their attention.

Further Reading: How to Retarget on Facebook: A Comprehensive Guide

7. Facebook dynamic ads for optimization

Following this tactic, you can target connections of users who have also engaged with your ads in the past. However, now you can embrace a more personalized approach. Facebook’s automated dynamic ads will help you retain the creative ad but add something more to it. A new attractive copy, imagery, and video can optimize your existing ads for better performance. Follow a two-phase Facebook ad campaign to get the best results. In the first phase, increase brand awareness and then go for active customer acquisition in the next stage. This approach can arguably benefit you by increasing ROAS by multiple times. The best part is that it works for all types of audiences, Core, Custom, and Lookalike.

Further Reading: The Top 16 Facebook Ads Tools You Didn’t Even Know Existed

8. Monitor average revenue per conversion and lifetime value of each audience

Take a look at your Revenue per Conversion to know how your ads are performing. This initiative of assessing the ads will also help you uncover the lifetime value of each audience. Remember, with a large number of high-value audiences, you should be focusing on creating Lookalike Audiences. Furthermore, you will be able to dig deeper into complex targeting options to tweak your campaigns and optimize their outcomes for these segments of consumers.

Further Reading: 9 Ways to Enhance Your Facebook Ads ROI

Final thoughts

Using ad targeting features for Facebook marketing can increase your ROAS substantially. However, you must patiently focus on the right people and target them with the most granular strategy that reduces your CPC and boosts conversion rates. Follow the best tips and tricks to get started. However, these aren’t the only things you should be doing. Do not shy away from doing your own research, and get creative in the process. You can also consult Facebook marketing experts for achieving precise results.

Further Reading: Facebook Ads Strategy: 15 Powerful & Effective Strategies

This is a post contributed from one of my marketing partners.

Hero photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash