How does Facebook ad targeting work?

With 2.93 billion monthly active users, Facebook is huge. Facebook ads allow businesses to spend money to put their ads in front of their target audience rather than relying on organic reach. 

Targeting is what helps you define the audience that will view your ads. Creating highly specific and relevant audiences can massively increase the effectiveness of your Facebook ads campaign. 

For a more general overview of Facebook ads and how to use them, check out this article, ‘How to advertise on Facebook’. 

There are three different types of audiences used for Facebook ads. 

• Core audiences: demographics, behaviours, and location.
• Custom audiences: people who have previously interacted with your business.
• Lookalike audiences: people who are similar to your current customers 

Read on for our top Facebook ad-targeting strategies you should be using in your campaigns. 

1. Target your competitors’ audiences with Audience Insights 

The Audience tab in Meta Business Suite Insights has a huge wealth of information you can use to understand your Facebook followers. 

However, our top Facebook ads targeting strategy is to use this information to learn who you're competing with on Facebook and then target your competitors' followers. 

Here’s a rundown of everything you need to know:

1. Open your Audience Insights dashboard and choose Potential Audience.
2. Use the filter button to build a Facebook audience that fits your target audience.
3. Look at the Top Pages section to see which pages your target audience is connected with. Copy and paste this lift into a document. 
4. Clear your existing filters and instead put the name of one of your competitors’ Facebook pages in Interests.
5. Analyse the demographic information for additional insights. 
6. Use these insights to build a new audience based on your competitors’ followers. 

2. Use value-based Lookalike Audiences

Facebook Lookalike Audiences are made up of users who are similar to users who already buy your products or services. Using Value-based Lookalike Audiences, you can target potential customers who share characteristics with your best and most valuable customers. 

The first step is creating a Customer Value Custom Audience:

1. Under Audiences, create a new Custom Audience.
2. Choose Customer List as the source.
3. Select your customer list and choose which column to use for customer value.
4. Click Upload and Create.

You can now use this value-based Lookalike audience to target only your most valuable potential customers. Here’s how:

1. Choose Lookalike Audience.
2. Select the value-based Custom Audience you created above as your source.
3. Choose the regions to target.
4. Pick the size of your audience (a smaller audience size will match your source audience more precisely than a large one). 
5. Click Create Audience.

3. Remarket using Custom Audiences 

Remarketing is one of the most powerful Facebook ad-targeting strategies. This is where you connect with potential customers who’ve already shown an interest in your services or products. 

You can use Custom Audiences to show your ads to people who have:

• Looked at a sales page
• Viewed specific products 
• Visited your website 

With Custom Audiences, you can even exclude people who have purchased a product recently, which is useful if you think they’ll be unlikely to buy again. 

Before using Facebook Custom Audiences based on website visits, you must install the Meta (Facebook) Pixel. Then you’re ready to create your custom audience for remarketing.

Here’s how:

1. Select Create Audience and choose Custom Audience.
2. Click Website under Sources.
3. Choose your pixel.
4. Under Events, select which visitor types you want to target.
5. Name your audience and create your new remarketing audience. 

4. Get to grips with layered targeting 

Facebook ad targeting consists of three main categories: demographics, interests, and behaviours. However, these categories have loads of scope for laser-focused and super-specific targeting. You can click Narrow Audiences to further filter your audience based on a particular customer segment. 

For example, under demographics, you can target parents or narrow that down to parents with young children. You can narrow this down to target only single parents or parents working in a specific industry. 

Even within just the demographics section, you can create a super-focused audience. You might choose to target married parents with young children. 

By selecting Interests, you can further narrow your target audience. You might choose people who are interested in summer holidays abroad. You can even narrow your audience based on purchase behaviours, such as those who have recently booked flights or accommodation. 

This audience now includes married parents with young children interested in summer holidays and have recently booked flights. You could now create a targeted campaign that speaks directly to this target audience. For example, if you sell travel insurance, you could create a promotion for family travel insurance reminding busy parents what travel insurance covers. 

Just be careful that you don’t make your audience too specific. As you build your audience, you’ll see your audience's size and potential reach. 

5. Consider important life events

If your business sells products or services linked to life events, you can target an audience based on these life events. You can target people who have started a new job, got married, or recently moved house. It’s even possible to target users who have a birthday or whose friends have a birthday. 

This ad targeting strategy works best for timely promotions or campaigns targeting a highly specific customer segment. For example, if you sell holidays, you might market romantic getaway packages to couples with an important anniversary approaching. 

6. Target interested users 

This simple strategy is often overlooked, but it shouldn’t be. Facebook ads make it easy to target users who have shown a previous interest in purchasing Facebook ads.

Some Facebook users might always ignore ads, but others might click on them frequently and even regularly purchase advertised products. 

By selecting Engaged Shoppers under Detailed Targeting, your ad audience will only consist of people who’ve clicked on Facebook ads in the last week. This ensures that your ads are only shown to people who are likely to engage with your ads rather than simply scroll past them. 

Need help with your Facebook ad targeting?

Creating specific, relevant, high-performing audiences for your Facebook ads is essential to your marketing strategy. However, this doesn’t mean that it's easy. 

If you’re struggling to know where to start with Facebook ads or your ads aren’t performing as well as they should be, getting some outside help could massively boost your ad performance.

At Logica Digital, we have over 15 years of experience running successful paid social campaigns, including Facebook ads. We’re experts in creating highly specific audiences to get your ads in front of the right people. 

Our free initial audit is the best way to see how we can help you improve your Facebook ads strategy. Paid social experts will look at the current performance of your ads to assess the best way to boost your results. We’ll also take a look at your SEO, content, paid search, and website performance to give you the big picture of how you’re doing. 

Contact the team today to learn more about what we do, or take advantage of our 100% free digital marketing audit for a breakdown of your current social media ad performance and how to make the most out of Facebook ads. 

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