For most marketers, Facebook is a viable ad network, enabling both eCommerce and lead generation businesses and assisting both B2B and B2C companies in owning their client experience. However, with rising demand from privacy compliance and upgrades requiring greater conversion modeling, the targeted possibilities available in the early days are no longer available. We can no longer rely only on native audiences, as we previously could. You might have a fantastic ad with a fantastic offer, but if you send it to the wrong people, you won’t go far. Facebook ad targeting strategies will assist you in increasing ad conversions while decreasing cost per conversion. So, in this post, we’ll guide you through all of Facebook’s targeting options.

The fundamentals of Facebook ad targeting

So, to access our Facebook Ads Manager, go to business.facebook.com/adsmanager. And, for the sake of this post, we’ll refer to the initial set of targeting settings as “the fundamentals.” When running a Facebook ad campaign, you can, at the very least, target by:

1. Location

Beginning with location, you can target by country, a 10-50 mile radius around a city, or zip codes. If you own a real place, such as a restaurant, this can help you target people who reside within a reasonable distance. Alternatively, if you manage an eCommerce site and have a list of places or countries to that you could ship, you can input locations in bulk by:

• countries, regions, or states
• DMAs, cities, and postal codes

Keep in mind that there are four ways to target locations:

• People who live in or have recently lived in this location
• People who live in this location
• People who have recently visited this location
• People who are visiting this location

As a result, you should choose the one that makes the most sense for your company.

2. Gender and age

You can target anyone between the ages of 13 and 65 and higher. You can also target both genders or just women or men. Consider your ideal customer and who your target audience is when it comes to age and gender. Then, select the age range and gender that, once again, makes the most sense for your company. So those are the fundamental Facebook ad targeting options that, if nothing else, you should be familiar with. However, this is not enough for most businesses to develop effective Facebook advertising. So let’s go on to the next level of targeting, Detailed Targeting.

Facebook ads targeting: detailed targeting

Facebook’s precise targeting now includes demographics, behaviors, and interests. Facebook provides a plethora of targeting choices based on demographics, behaviors, and interests.

Facebook ads targeting: placements

Placements can be found beneath the comprehensive targeting section. Depending on your ad campaign, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to run your ad on:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Audience Network
• Messenger

Please keep in mind that not all campaigns are suitable for all platforms. Then there are various placements inside those platforms. When you move your cursor over each placement option, Facebook shows you how it will appear in the feed. You should A/B split test these placements, which implies running identical advertisements on multiple platforms. This allows you to determine which platforms and placements are appropriate for your particular business. However, in our experience, Audience Network generates a large number of unqualified clicks with little ROI. On the other hand, Facebook and Instagram newsfeeds tend to do the best in attracting quality traffic that converts. So, let’s move on to the next set of targeting choices that you might not see while searching through your Facebook Ads Manager- Custom Audiences!

What are custom audiences?

According to Facebook, “A Custom Audience is an ad targeting tool that allows you to identify your existing audiences among Facebook users.”You can create Custom Audiences of people who already know your business by using sources such as customer lists, website or app traffic, or Facebook engagement.” We’ll only add that because Facebook owns Instagram, you can also access these audiences there.

How do you access custom audiences?

Custom Audiences must first be created in a separate section of the Ads Manager before they can be selected from the ad set level in your ad campaign. So you’ll want to go to the Business Tools menu and then select Audiences. You’ll want to click the blue Create Audience button. There are three options for creating a:

• Custom Audience,
• Lookalike Audience
• Special Ad Audience

Because the Special Ad Audience is now confined to credit, employment, and housing advertisements, we won’t spend much time on this one. However, the Custom Audience and Lookalike Audience choices can be valuable to any business owners, so let’s go through them. When you return to the ad set screen in the middle of creating a Facebook ad campaign, you can choose from the audiences you created.

Conclusion

So, now that we’ve covered all of the different types of Facebook ad targeting options let’s talk about how to use and think about them. In terms of your marketing funnel, you should consider all of your Facebook audiences. How warm or cold are they as an audience, i.e., how close to purchasing from you are they? The ads you deliver to your retargeting audience should be different from those you deliver to people who have never heard of you before, based simply on their interests. As a result, divide your audiences into separate ad sets. As a result, you can send different ads to different audiences based on where they are in your marketing funnel.