Let’s talk Facebook targeting.
Being able to target the right audiences on Facebook can be the difference between your campaigns working or not.
In this article, I’ll walk you through three of my favourite Facebook targeting hacks to ensure you’re targeting the right people with every single campaign.
I’m going to be focusing on cold audiences – people that don’t already know who you are.
Facebook targeting – Reaching the RIGHT people
Facebook targeting is what makes Facebook ads so powerful.
We’ve got the ability to pinpoint a message and serve an ad to a very, very specific group of people with the targeting options that we have available to us. We can target people based on demographics… where they live, how old they are, for example. We can target based on interests and online behaviours too. For example, are they keen shoppers? Are they shopping a lot?
Facebook has so much data about its users which, from a consumer point of view may be a little bit concerning, but from a business point of view it gives us a huge potential because regardless of the industry you’re in, we have the ability to pinpoint an ad to our perfect customer.
Often people say to me, “Gav, I’m not sure if my audience is on Facebook.” There are three billion monthly active users on Facebook at the time of writing this, so the answer is they are, you just have to be smart in finding out how to target them with an ad they’re actually interested in.
If we target the wrong people, fundamentally, our campaign will never work. We might have the best ad, the best creative, the best copy and the most beautiful landing page with the best offer in the world, but if we’re sending that to the wrong people, our campaigns will never ever work. So it’s vital that every single time we build a campaign, we’re targeting the people that are most likely to convert.
So, here are three ways to find people that are most likely to convert.
Use Amazon Best Sellers
Amazon is one of my favourite ways to find really unique niches and interests to use in my Facebook targeting.
I’m going to use the example of business and finance here but this still relates to any industry you’re operating in.
One of the things I always try and do when it comes to targeting on Facebook is ensure that I’m targeting an audience that my perfect customers would be interested in but no one else would be interested in. One of the best ways to do that is to target the likes of authors, thought leaders and big public speakers in a particular industry.
Go onto Amazon Best Sellers and look at the best-selling books in the industry you’re trying to target and find some names and book titles that might be relevant and of interest on Facebook.
Not all of the authors and book titles listed are necessarily going to be of interest on Facebook, but have a look at the review ratings… typically if someone has 16 or 33 reviews say, they’re not going to be popular enough for Facebook to deem them an interest, so it’s best to look for those with hundreds or thousands of reviews.
When I looked in the business and finance section on Amazon, I took a look at Simon Sinek, he’s a big author in my space. He’s got 393 reviews. Now, I thought there would maybe be more but when I typed in my detail targeting ‘Simon Sinek’, he came up as an interest!
Then I tried Leading From The Front, to see if that was an interest, it wasn’t. The author’s name, Ant Middleton, wasn’t an interest either… Facebook doesn’t deem him or his book big enough to be an interest.
Next, Elon Musk, he’s obviously going to be classed as an ‘interest’ in this space.
Amazon is essentially doing the research for us because you might think yes, it’s obvious, Elon Musk is a business person but what Amazon is doing – and remember they get thousands and thousands of purchases on their books every single day – is researching which books are performing the best.
So, if you have a business or finance product then you know that your customers are reading this book and so it makes sense to target the author of that book because chances are, people that aren’t interested or involved in this industry aren’t going to be reading it as much as our potential audience.
Once you’ve decided which authors and books you want to use in your targeting, let’s look at the next Facebook targeting hack.
Go Super Broad
Back in the day (when this article was initially written), it was important to find as many individual interests as possible and then split them into lots of different ad sets to test which interests performed the best.
Now – as Facebook has become a lot smarter – we go broader.
Instead of being specific, we want to go as broad as we possibly can.
In order to do this, we still do all the research that we used to, but instead of splitting up all the interests, we now group them together. This gives Facebook a larger audience to work with.
Often times we’ll create what we call a “super broad” audience which is simply just an audience without any targeting (except the basic age and demographic information).
Using Lookalike Audiences
Now I head over to Asset Library, go to Ads Manager, and on the Hamburger menu, select All Tools and then Audiences under assets.
A Lookalike Audience is essentially where we create a Custom Audience which you can read more about here. Custom Audiences are audiences of people that already know who you are, they’ve visited your website, watched your video, subscribed to your email list, for example.
A Lookalike Audience is where we ask Facebook to go and find more people like the people who are already in our Custom Audience.
Let’s say I want to create a Lookalike Audience from a Custom Audience I already have. For example, I have one created from people on my email list.
I would select, ’email list from the 11th of March’ and go to United Kingdom.
What Facebook is going to do there is take my email list and find more people that match the demographics, interests behaviours of the people on that list.
When you’re creating a Lookalike Audience there’s a slider which is based on the percentage of the population of the audience location that you enter. If I select 1% on the slider, Facebook will try find 1% of the population of the UK, based on my email list. If I went to 10% it would try find 4.2 million people.
In theory, the closer you are to 1%, the more specific and better targeted the audience is going to be. The higher the percentage, the broader it’s going to be – that might be useful when you’re scaling your campaigns but I would tend to stick to 1% when you first start.
So, there we have it, the three ways that I try and find audiences that are most likely to convert. Find out more about reaching the right audiences in this blog: Facebook Ad Targeting | 3 Audiences You Need to Know About.
Let’s recap…
We used Amazon to try and find books and authors and thought leaders in the space, we then used Audience Insights to dive into our audiences to find out which ones are actually worth targeting or not and then thirdly, we used Lookalike audiences to get Facebook to go and find cold audiences for us to target.
They’re all great ways to find cold audiences, people that don’t already know who you are and use them to bring people into your business, into the top of your funnel so you can provide them with content, a lead magnet or whatever you feel will be of value to them.
Want more? Check out Why Your Facebook Ads Aren’t Working (And What To Do About It!).
Or, if you’re looking for support with your Facebook ads, get in touch today.
