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.
Key Takeaways
✅ Facebook gives you three targeting layers: Core Audiences built from location, interests, behavior, demographics and connections, Custom Audiences built from people who already know your brand, and Lookalike Audiences built to find more people like them.
✅ Core Audiences come first because every later segment is measured against them. Get those five signals right and the rest of your targeting has a benchmark to work from.
✅ Custom Audiences can be assembled from five sources: Facebook and Instagram engagement, website visitors, your customer list, app users, and offline interactions such as a store visit.
✅ Facebook’s relevance diagnostics score quality, engagement and conversion separately, which tells you whether a weak ad is a creative problem or a targeting problem.
✅ Judge audiences on revenue per conversion and lifetime value rather than click volume. The segments with the highest lifetime value are the ones worth building Lookalike Audiences from.
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. Read the three relevance diagnostics together
In March 2019 Facebook replaced the single relevance score with three separate diagnostics, and those three are still what Ads Manager reports today. Read them together rather than one at a time, because each one points at a different fix.
- Quality: how the ad is judged against the other ads competing for the same audience.
- Engagement: whether people who see the ad interact with it.
- Conversion: whether people who interact go on to do the thing the campaign is optimized for.
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.
3. Use audience insights in Meta Business Suite
Meta retired the standalone Audience Insights tool. The research it used to do now sits inside Meta Business Suite, on the Audience tab of Insights, and the old marketing page for the tool still exists even though the tool behind it does not.
Open Business Suite, choose Insights in the left rail, then Audience. Three tabs appear. Demographics breaks the existing following down by age, gender, top cities and top countries. Trends shows how that following has moved across the period selected. Potential audience describes people who match a chosen targeting profile but do not follow the Page yet, and that tab is the one that does the job the old tool was used for.
Two things changed with the move, and both matter for targeting. The data is scoped to a Page and its potential audience rather than to everyone on Facebook, so it no longer supports open-ended research into other brands’ followers. And the flow no longer ends in a Create Ad button, so an audience discovered here has to be rebuilt in Ads Manager rather than saved and carried across. An Export control is available if the numbers are wanted outside the dashboard.
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 form of Facebook ads retargeting that lets you show a series of 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.
Make Your Marketing Finally Work Together
My latest book helps small businesses, entrepreneurs, and marketers bring search, email, and social together into one digital marketing strategy that actually compounds.
Drawing on my work as a Fractional CMO, Digital Threads turns complicated tactics into a clear, practical plan you can follow, whatever your budget or team size.
Grab your copy on Amazon and start weaving your own digital threads. Click the cover or the button below to get started.
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.
7. Facebook dynamic ads for optimization
Meta has renamed this twice. What used to be Dynamic Ads became Advantage+ catalog ads, and the catalog now works across sales campaigns generally rather than sitting in a product of its own. The mechanic is unchanged: a catalog plus a creative template, and Meta assembles the combination each viewer sees rather than an advertiser building every variation by hand.
Pair it with a two-phase campaign. Build awareness first, then run acquisition against the people that first phase reached. Catalog delivery works against Core, Custom and Lookalike audiences alike, which is what makes it worth setting up once and reusing.
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, because it is the clearest read you get on your Facebook ads ROI. 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.
Frequently Asked Questions About Facebook Ads Targeting
Facebook gives you Core Audiences, Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences. Core Audiences are built from targeting attributes you select, including location, interests, behavior, demographics and connections. Custom Audiences are built from people who have already engaged with your business, and Lookalike Audiences find new people who resemble them.
Core Audiences are assembled from Facebook’s own targeting attributes, so they reach people who match a profile you describe. Custom Audiences are assembled from your own data, including site visitors, customer lists, app users and offline interactions, so they reach people who already know your brand. Start with Core Audiences, then layer Custom Audiences on top once you can see who converts.
Install the Facebook pixel on your site, then open the Events Manager page and create a Custom Audience based on people who visited specific pages. Shoppers who left without buying and readers who spent time on a key post are two segments worth separating, because each one needs a different offer.
Targeting is only half the job. Run the ad through Facebook’s relevance diagnostics and read quality, engagement and conversion separately, then check whether the ad copy carries a clear call to action and whether the creative actually matches the segment you selected.
Look at revenue per conversion and lifetime value for each segment rather than raw clicks. Segments with high lifetime value are the ones to build Lookalike Audiences from, and the ones that justify digging deeper into targeting options.
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 what your Facebook ads cost per click 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.
This is a post contributed from one of my marketing partners.
