3 Simple but Powerful Strategies to do Facebook Ad Targeting
By: Nikolay Dikarev
Tags: Advertising

Sources suggest that Facebook has over 2.01 billion active monthly users. That’s a huge user base, and people spend an average of 40 minutes browsing the site during each visit. It’s a large and engaged audience.

But the ways in which we can reach new audiences are so many and beyond followers that, more than an article, a book would be necessary to cover them all. However, we want to help you focusing on how Facebook Ads help you expand your reach. You can target audiences on Facebook with a dozen different ad formats and thousands of possible ad targeting parameters.

Here are a few simple ways to do Facebook ad targeting strategies, there are so simple that you will find them ridiculous.

Use behavior and life-events targeting

Facebook knows more about us than we think, that’s a good reason to use it in a less obvious way to target a custom audience. Facebook can help you target people who buy something you have to offer based on their personal spending history.

Purchasing behavior subcategories include Buyer Profiles, Clothing, Food & Drink, Health & Beauty and a lot more. Within each broad subcategory, you can drill down into types of behavior; for example, choosing Buyer Profiles will then let you target DIYers, Fashionistas, Foodies, etc.

Facebook shows how many user profiles you can target in each subcategory, based on their aggregated, multi-sourced offline transaction-based data (or in simpler terms, the number of Facebook users in that category they’ve matched to offline purchasing data).

The options here are limitless. Get in there and explore more about Ads Keyword and Interests Suggestions.

But, according to the type of businesses or campaigns you manage, selling to audiences experiencing certain major life events it ́s a Facebook ad targeting option to consider. Moving services, for example, want to get in front of you if you’ve just purchased a new house or apartment. Wedding photographers target people who are engaged. Facebook has pretty much every conceivable life event targeting option, since we tend to post these to our timelines.

The Life Events parameter is unique in that you can choose to target people at specific intervals of time after the change. For example, a jewelry company would obviously be interested in getting in front of people celebrating their one-year anniversary, so they could target audience members who were newlyweds one year ago. The date ranges possible are 3 months, 6 months and one year.

Click here to know more about Types of Facebook Audiences With Extremely High ROI.

Target to lookalike audiences

No matter how much you have already connected with an audience with which you are satisfied, you want to grow, you want to multiply your audience in order to reach those with who you probably have things in common. Lookalike Audiences are a logical next step once you have a good custom audiences strategy in place. Facebook makes possible this ad targeting regardless of the scale of your business or account.

Client lookalikes: Find people with the same characteristics as their current clients.

Lead lookalikes: create a custom audience from your leads to place your ad in front of people more likely to click through.

Fan lookalikes: If fans like your business, people like your fans may like it as well. It’s that simple.

Once you’ve decided which audience you want to replicate and expand on, you can make the audience larger (more broad) or smaller (more specific and similar to your original audience). At the most similar level, Facebook is going to find you the top 1 percent of users with similar traits, in your target country. At the opposite level, optimizing for reach, Facebook will display your ads to the 10 percent of users in your target country who are most like your target audience.

Find out more about Scaling Campaigns with Lookalike Audiences.