You may be someone who knows all the 13 audience targeting options and 100 ad formats available. But without knowing how to target the right audience, you cannot increase the effectiveness of your ads.
Targeting the right people can get you good results in metrics like higher conversion rate, engagement, reach, and so on. Improvement in metrics translated to a boost in ROAS, which is your Return On Ad Spend.
But for most marketers, freelancers, and small business owners, mastering the art of Facebook Ads is easier said than done.
With a dozen ad formats and thousands of ad-targeting parameters, Facebook ads can be overwhelming. But there are ways to navigate the world of Facebook ads without wasting a lot of money testing to find the right audience.
We have 10 powerful tips to improve targeting and help you accurately find your ideal audience in 2023.
Tip #1: Leveraging Custom Audiences.
Custom Audiences is a feature that enables you to find and target your existing customers, that is, people who already know of your business across Meta technologies – Facebook and Instagram.
The data source of your custom audience can be from
- Your CRM.
- Website and App traffic.
- Audiences who engage with your business across Meta technologies.
As you can target a specific group who already know you, you can effectively reinforce your brand and your products/services. In addition, Meta allows you to create up to 500 Custom Audiences per ad account.
There is also another way to use the Custom Audience feature. You can use this feature to target others, excluding those in your existing customer list. This is useful when you launch a campaign offering a discount or a free trial to attract new customers. In this case, there is no need to show the ads to your existing loyal customer base.
As you can see, Facebook ads can create an audience based on website visitors from Meta Pixel – which we will discuss further in this blog below. You can create a custom audience by uploading your customer list as a CSV or TXT file. The file should include identifiers that provide Meta with information about your existing customers, which are matched with profiles on Facebook. The “identifiers” such as email, phone number, and address help you find the audiences you want your ads to reach.
Using as many identifiers as possible is encouraged to get the best match rates. The data provided by you should also meet the formatting guidelines set by Meta. Once uploaded, you can easily target or exclude the whole list or drill down to a specific subset of customers by using other targeting parameters to hyper-target your ideal audience.
Tip #2: Expanding with Lookalike Audiences
Once you have figured out a good Custom Audience targeting strategy, the next step is to combine it with another powerful Facebook ad feature – Lookalike Audiences.
A lookalike audience allows you to reach new audiences even if you don’t have any ‘identifiers’ as seen in custom audiences. In fact, with a lookalike audience, you can target people who are likely to be interested in your business based on the similarities of your existing customers.
You can use any custom audience sources to create your lookalike audience, from Meta Pixel data, your website or business accounts across Meta Technologies or your CRM. You can also tweak other parameters, such as a specific country you would like to target and even choose the audience size you want to target.
You can increase the audience size, making the reach broader or smaller, specific and similar to the selected source. If you choose 1%, for example, then you will be able to target the people who are the closest in similarities to your existing customers, your lookalike source. As you increase the size, the less precise the match becomes.
This is great for discovering and reaching new potential customers efficiently. In addition, as the people who will be seeing your ads have similar interests to your actual customers, you gain better conversions and engagements when compared to a typical broad-reach ad.
Tip #3: Using Insights To Check Ad Performance, Trends and Reports
Insights is a feature in Meta Business Suite that helps you to understand the performance of your organic and boosted (paid) content on Facebook and Instagram. With Insights, you can discover key trends, access your contents’ performance and understand your audience better.
Insights has 3 separate tabs that show information on Trends, Content and Audience. You can quickly view the trends regarding the Reach of your Facebook page in the Trends tab. For example, you can see how your business’s page has grown over a period of time during which you experimented with a new campaign or tried a new strategy.
In the Content tab, you can easily identify which of your organic and paid strategies are working as intended. Find the top-performing posts, sort by Reach, Reactions and other engagement factors, and if you run ads, see the metrics such as results, costs per results and number of link clicks. With these insights, you can adapt your social media strategy to develop more posts that your audience loves or boost ads with high positive results.
The Audience tab allows you to understand more about your audiences, such as demographics and interests. You can also get a sense of the potential audience size that Facebook has found based on your current audience and other parameters. Powered by audience insights, you can tailor your marketing campaigns and messaging accordingly to improve your engagement with your customers and visitors.
You can also save the potential audience you have filtered and found from insights to be used in your ads. Facebook Audience Insights offers a ton of valuable data that can help you create heavily targeted Facebook ad campaigns.
Tip #4: Tapping into Recent Purchase Behaviors
The best way to pinpoint your target audience and maximize ROAS is to filter them based on purchasing behavior. The Purchase Behaviour under the Behaviour category lets you narrow your audience based on their latest purchases. Those who have recently purchased a product or service similar to yours are identified as the potential audience.
There are also various subcategories under the purchase behavior so that you can be specific with your targeting. Facebook also shows you the potential user base for each subcategory based on the aggregated data they have sourced. This type of targeting is a win-win situation for you and your audience, as you’re doing people a favor by putting the right product or service in front of them right when they need it.
Tip #5: Getting Creative By Targeting With Life Events
Similar to Purchase Behaviour, you can target using Life Events – for example, someone getting a new job or celebrating a birthday or anniversary. Facebook pretty much has every conceivable life event targeting option. It even lets you target people in a long-distant relationship.
Similar to Purchase Behaviour, you can target using Life Events – for example, someone getting a new job or celebrating a birthday or anniversary. Facebook pretty much has every conceivable life event targeting option. It even lets you target people in a long-distant relationship.
Facebook Targeting Life Events
Facebook Life Events
The Life Event parameter is unique as it lets you choose and target people at specific intervals after or before the event. Say a Jewelry company, for example, would like their ads to be seen by people who are celebrating an anniversary or people who are about to be wed or recently wed. The possible date ranges are 3, 6 months and 1 year ago.
Tip #6: Retargeting Using Meta Pixel
Metal Pixel, formerly known as Facebook Pixel, is a data-gathering tool that helps you target unknown visitors showing interest in your brand. One could say that it is the backbone of Facebook advertising.
It is a must-use tool, as it can help you to track and target audiences that engage with your business’s social media profiles and website.
It can be integrated and set up with your website and helps collect data to track conversions, optimize ads, retarget people, and discover new audiences. Pixel tracks various actions taken by people when on your website.
These actions are called ‘events’, and there are 17 standard events that Meta Pixel collects from people visiting your site.
Once Pixel is up and running on your website, you can create custom audiences based on the data that pixel collects. It is a highly effective tool to retarget people who have shown interest in your business.
Tip #7: Making The Most With Facebook Dynamic Ads/Creative
Dynamic ads, sometimes called dynamic creatives, are used for lead generation, letting you acquire customer intent and information. It takes multiple images and videos of your products or services from your catalog and mixes and matches them in new ways to improve your ad performance by creating personalized creative variations for each person who views your ad.
Dynamic ads automatically personalize the ad to an individual’s taste based on what they are more likely to respond to unless otherwise specified. The benefit of dynamic advertising is that it is an automated campaign that continuously optimizes and promotes your catalog items. It retargets your website visitors to remind them of the items or products they viewed but have yet to purchase. Reach out to new people interested in your business using a lookalike audience and broad targeting.
It is ideal for situations where you need clarification on which media or ad format is more likely to bring positive results.
Tip #8: Using Saved Audiences & Layered Targeting
Facebook ad manager lets you create as many audiences as you like, with whatever variation to parameters you want. You can save these audiences and then, later on, test your ads with them to find which works best.
The best way to use saved audiences is by going into the smaller details and targeting by applying multiple layers. On the ground level, Facebook lets you target based on demographics, interests and behaviors, but within these three categories lies multiple sub-parameters that will help you narrow down your audience to the granular level.
As said throughout this article, Facebook ad targeting is a game of who can successfully hyper-target their audience. Facebook has provided you with all the tools you need. All you have to do is just get creative with it.
Tip #9: Combining Two Unique Audiences Together
Sometimes even with layered targeting, you might feel that your audience may be broad. In this case, you can try combining different unique audiences.
Let’s say that you are targeting people who are interested in taking health supplements. You can target them by purchase behavior. But if you feel that this group is too broad, then you can combine them with people who are into fitness and go to the gym.
The logic – people who go to the gym almost always take additional supplements, be it vitamins, minerals, organic, or whatever. This type of layering will achieve an additional layer of behavior personalization and make it harder for your audience to ignore your ad.
Tip #10: Taking Advantage of AI & ML Tools To Boost ROAS And Other Metrics
Our last tip is to make the most use of the technology that is available at your disposal. The above tips cannot be mastered in a single day or month. You must spend a lot of time and money discovering the right audience and ad format to target them.
Advertising on any social media platform, be it Facebook, Google, or TikTok, is a continuous process. It can be a daunting and time-consuming task for marketers, but what if we told you that there’s a solution that can simplify this process and maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS)?
Introducing AdVize, a powerful AI and machine learning tool designed to revolutionize your Facebook ad targeting and optimization strategies. With AdVize, you can say goodbye to manual guesswork and time-consuming analysis.
Advize Facebook Ad Optimization_Tool
Alt text: Consolidated Dashboard of Advize, Facebook Ad Optimization tool
AdVize’s key features are all aimed at supercharging your ad campaigns and driving exceptional results. They include the following:
- Boost Now: Recognize ads with the potential to perform better. This feature lets you increase the ad budget based on the latest performance trends, ensuring you capitalize on successful campaigns and drive even better results.
Advize Facebook Ad Optimization Tool
- Modify Now: Refine underperforming ads. Based on AI insights and recommendations, this feature helps enhance ad performance by suggesting fundamental changes to stagnant ad sets.
- Stop Now: Quickly identify and terminate ad sets with declining performance. This feature saves you time and money by preventing further investment in ads not delivering the desired results.
- AI-Backed Recommendations: AdVize’s advanced AI algorithms scan through all your Facebook ad accounts and campaigns, providing you with personalized recommendations. These recommendations cover various aspects, including audience targeting, creative assets, and budget allocation, empowering you to optimize your ads and maximize ROAS.
- Consolidated Dashboard: AdVize provides a consolidated and intuitive dashboard seamlessly integrated with the Meta Ads Manager. This allows you to efficiently manage and optimize all your ad campaigns from multiple accounts in a single platform. With a unified view of your performance metrics, you can make informed decisions and take immediate action to improve your ad targeting.
AdVize empowers marketers to make smarter choices that drive results by harnessing the power of AI and machine learning. It streamlines the process of ad optimization, saving you precious time and money while maximizing your conversions and revenue.
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TL;DR – Hyper-Target Using These Tips To Win In Facebook Ads For 2023
Facebook ads is an excellent way to reach a large number of people and showcase your business and how you can help solve peoples’ problems. But that means positioning yourself in front of the right people who are interested in your business.
It is important to understand your customers and audience first. Then, create an ideal buyer persona for your product or service
- Who are they?
- Where do they live?
- What traits and characteristics might they have? And
- How do those align with the many targeting parameters listed above
You need to know how to target people with laser precision to increase your conversion rate, reduce cost per click, and boost ROAS.
The above 10 tips will give you a higher chance of understanding how to play the game. So avoid falling into analysis paralysis, and go for your next Facebook ad campaign!
