Detailed Targeting

This is where things get interesting: FB allows us to target by demographics, interests, and behaviors.

In the previous post we were playing with targeting options in the “Audiences” tool. See the field called “Detailed Targeting”? This is what we’re playing with next.

Click “Browse” and you’ll see 3 main categories, and each of these will open up to a ton of of further subcategories and options, which you can choose to include or exclude from your target audience.

The Strange Disappearance of Detailed Targeting Options

Now – there’s something about these options you need to know: Depending on HOW you access them, you may not be seeing the full list of options:

1)If you go to the “Detailed Targeting” field, click “Browse”, and click open all the options. This way, you’d only be seeing a fraction of the options. (If you want to see a list of these, I’ve posted screenshots at the bottom of this post. I’ll also give you a download link to an excel file with these categories.)

2)If you do a keyword search in the “Detailed Targeting” field, you’ll uncover options you couldn’t access with the previous ‘browsing’ method. Here’s an example:

The first result, “Meditation”, is the only one that can be found via browsing: Interests > Fitness and wellness > meditation. The rest – e.g. from Transcendental Meditation and down – are under “Interests > Additional Interests” which can’t be access via simple browsing.

Moreover, the maximum number of results you’ll see is 25, where there can actually be a lot more. For example, try typing in “Golf” and you’ll see 25 results – as you’ll see below, there are a lot more.

3)The rest of the options – which aren’t access by either of the methods above – can only be accessed via API. Put the following into your browser to do a search on “Golf” again and you’ll get more than 25 results:

https://graph.facebook.com/search?ty…LeEuLJqVOyUv9E
(Credit goes to https://interestexplorer.io – feel free to check out their automation tool while you’re there – can be useful if you run a lot of FB campaigns.)

You can replace “Golf” with anything you want to do a search on. You can do multiple-word searches as well – just replace each space with “%20”, e.g. “Golf%20Instructor”.

Once you’ve found more results you want to target using this method, simply enter them back into the “Detailed Targeting” field to find and click on them (that is, when you’re actually ready to set up the campaign; for now just jot them down in your research notes doc).


FB’s Audience Insights Tool

No discussion on audience targeting would be complete without mentioning this powerful tool.

To access it: Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights. Choose “Everyone on Facebook” (I’m assuming you don’t already have an FB page, with audience data collected, in the niche you’re promoting).

Basically what this tools does is, it will provide you with more information about a “seed audience” you define, to give you more ideas on how to target that audience.


Define a Seed Audience:

So let’s define a “seed audience” using the targeting options in the left menu. Let’s say we’re promoting a US life insurance offer, and based on our research we decide that married couples with kids are a good fit for this type of offers. Here’s what we can do:

-For “Location” put in “United States” and click to select it.

-For “Age” we can specify 35+ if that’s what our research shows is our best audience, but let’s leave it at 18-65+ for now and use the next specification to further refine the audience.

-For “Gender” leave at “All” because we’re looking for married couples.

-Click on “Advanced” to open the dropdown.

-Click on “Relationship Status” and select “Married”.

-Click on “Parents” to open the dropdown and select “All parents”. (Let’s say that in our research we have discovered that parents of younger children tend to need life insurance more. We could totally refine our selection here. For this example though let’s just choose “All parents”.)

We can be more specific or less specific when defining this seed audience. Just play with different options and combinations to see what pops out. Any and all information you can find on your audience can help you to make better targeting decisions.

Of course, when it comes time to set up our campaign, we could set up an ad set to target our seed audience, i.e. united states + all ages + both genders + all parents. But as we see below, additional information from this tool can help us to test other audiences.

Another consideration here is audience size. If we look at the top, we see that the size of our seed audience is huge:

We’ll talk a bit more about audience size later. For now, let’s just say that although targeting broad can work, it may be wise to also test narrower audiences – and information we can get from the audience insights tool can help in this regard.

Let us now look over to the right of the screen to see what information the tool has come up with.


Age and Gender:

We should be on the “Demographics” tab by default:

Here’s the “Age and Gender” section:

You may be wondering what the difference is between the grey bars vs. the blue bars. Just put your cursor on one of them and you’ll find the answer. For example, if you put the cursor on the bar for women 35-44:

Women 35-44 comprise 19.1% of all US female users, and 25.9% of US women that fit the definition of our seed audience are in this age group (i.e. of all US women that are married and have kids, 25.9% of them are 35-44 y/o).

So if we compare the gray and blue bars, we can tell that it’s a LOT more likely for 35-44 women to be married with kids than 18-24 women, for example.

As we can see, the age group that has the largest percentage of parents is 35-44 year olds. Around 27% of 35-44 y/o in the US are parents.

Armed with this information, we could test a broader audience than the original seed audience, by setting up an ad set of just united states + both genders + 35-44 y/o. Granted, only 1/4 of this audience fits what we want (parents), but targeting a broader audience can result in lower ad cost (more on that later in this post), and FB’s algorithm has gotten pretty good at showing our ads to people that will convert (this is important).

However, the seed audience may convert better because it’s more specific. So there are pros and cons. With FB we always need to be testing – almost nothing is definite until we have test results staring us in the face.


Relationship Status and Education Level:

Nothing terribly interesting here. 100% of our seed audience is married (surprise surprise!) Nothing about education levels jumps out at me neither – except almost 3/4 (73% to be exact) of our seed audience are college-educated or better, so our ad text should sound “intelligent” to appeal to this audience.

(Note: The percentages at the bottom are just the differences between the grey and blue bars.)


Job Title:

The first entry “Veterans (US)” jumps out at me. (By the way, you can sort the percentages by clicking on “Compare”.) I feel that there’s potential here to craft some effective advertising angles for this group.

First thing I do is plug “Veterans (US) into the seed audience on the left – in the “Job titles” field:

I scrolled to the top to see how many people are in this new seed audience:

Half a mil isn’t a lot, but should be good enough to target with an adset (we’ll talk about audience size in a bit).

Next I google phrases like “us veteran parents” and “us military parents” to find out more about this audience. Here’s some of what I found out from 5 minutes of reading:

-These families are always moving around.
-Parents are away a lot.
-Parents are sometimes sent to dangerous areas on dangerous missions.

So we have parents that are concerned about their own safety, that feel guilty they’re always moving their kids around. I bet that with some rudimentary knowledge in copywriting, you’d be able to create some compelling ads to encourage these parents to get some life insurance – after all, life is uncertain and unpredictable, and this is one of the few things they CAN do for their kids.

And you may be able to do the same for other job titles as well! See the power of this tool yet?


Top Categories:

Moving on…let’s proceed to the next tab, “Page Likes”.

(Note: We may want to remove “Veteran (US)” from the seed audience for now, to finish doing research on our original seed audience. We could always do the full research on veteran parents later – same goes for any other audience ideas you may come across.)

The first section is “Top Categories”:

These are categories and specific FB pages that our seed audience is interested in, that they’ve “liked”.

From the pages listed here, we can get new inspiration on additional interests we can target (in “Detailed Interests”). If you see anything interesting (no pun intended), write it into your notes.

Compared to this section, the next section, “Page Likes”, is a lot more useful.


Page Likes:

Again, here are the top pages that our seed audience has “liked”, but this chart provides more useful metrics – Relevance and Affinity.

Facebook defines Relevance as:

“The Pages that are the most likely to be relevant to your audiences based on affinity, Page size, and the number of people in your audience who already like that Page.”

…and Affinity as:

“How likely your audience is to like a given page compared to everyone on Facebook.”

Affinity is the more important metric. We need to check out pages that have the highest affinity. We should also check out the websites associated with these pages (which can be found in the “About” section of each FB page).

Here’s what we can do with this information:

1)We can check out these pages to get a better idea on what our seed audience likes, and work some of that into our advertising angles. Make a note of what kinds of posts are getting the most engagement, to see what types of images/videos and ad text are getting their attention.

2)We can do something similar to we did with “Veterans (US)” above, i.e. target the audience of that page. For example, the top page listed is “Ooh La Llama”. I don’t know whether this page would be a good fit for life insurance – it may be, because most of that audience would be mothers or young kids I’d imagine. Let’s say we want to target people that have liked this page, we could stick that into the “Interests” field in the left side bar to see whether it can be targeted, and if so, what the audience size is like:

So that page isn’t even coming up in the search results, which means we can’t target it when we set up our ad sets later. Let’s try the second page, Shutterfly:

So Shutterfly IS available for targeting! Just be careful though – because not every search result is suitable. When I choose both I see this:

So I’d need to delete the one under “DEMOGRAPHICS > WORK > EMPLOYERS” because we’re not looking to target people that work for shutterfly.

(Note: Here I’ve only shown that shutterfly can be targeted. Although whether or not their audience would be a good fit for our offer, we’d need to test to find out.)

There’s actually a tool that will tell you, at a glance, which pages ARE or AREN’T available for targeting. If you’re planning on running a lot of FB ads, it may be worth getting: https://interestexplorer.io/.

This tool includes a chrome extension you can installed, that would mark FB pages that CAN be targeted, with little bulls-eyes:

3)Another way to use these pages, is to use them to refine our demographic targeting. Let’s say after we include “Shutterfly” in our targeting, we click back to the “Demographics” tab:

This actually isn’t a very good example, as Shutterfly may or may not be a good audience for our life insurance offer. But let’s say for sake of demonstration that we feel Shutterfly was a great match for our offer – in this case, because 94% of Shutterfly’s audience that are married and have kids are women, we may want to test this audience first, especially if we don’t have a big advertising budget to test multiple / larger audiences. Note that the audience size is 1-1.5M people, which is a decent size (more on that later).

We could even refine that to target women 35-44, for the same reason mentioned further up this post. If we define our seed audience in the left side bar as US + 35-44 + Women + INTERESTS > ADDITIONAL INTERESTS > Shutterfly + Married + All parents, we’d get an audience size of 300-350k people, which is really on the small side but still worth testing.


Location:

Let’s again change our seed audience back to the original (US + 18-65+ + both genders + married + all parents).

Then click on the “Location” tab at the top.

There are 3 charts here: Top Cities, Top Countries, Top Languages.

“Top Cities” in this case isn’t very interesting, as our audience is basically spread out all over the country.

But let’s say we see that a lot of our audience are concentrated in one or a few cities, then we can try to target each city, or bundle up several cities in the same region, and cater to each audience with customized ad text and image.

“Top Countries” isn’t relevant here as we’re only targeting the US.

“Top Languages” shows that 94% of our seed audience speaks English, which isn’t surprising and also not useful. However, if you’re targeting countries that speak multiple languages for example, you can target each language in separate ad sets (and of course customize the ad text for the different languages). If your budget is limited, and you notice that a lot of your audience speaks a particular language, then just target that language first.

Frequency of Activities:

Next let’s click on the “Activity” tab at the top. First section is “Frequency of Activities”:

It shows us how active our seed audience is on FB over the last 30 days: The average number of comments made, posts liked, posts shared, promotions redeemed, and ads clicked.

Obviously, the higher the activity level, the better. So, let’s say you’ve found multiple interests you could target that are relevant to the product/service you’re promoting, but your advertising budget is very limited, so you’re having to decide which audience to target first. Well, one thing you can do to decide would be to check these stats to see which audience is more responsive.


Device Users:

Also note that by clicking on the dropdown in the top right corner of this chart, you can toggle between “All Devices Used” and “Primary Devices”.

This information can help us out in a number of ways:

1)We probably want to include in our targeting, the major devices used by our audience. As you will see later, when setting up a campaign, we’ll get to specify whether we want to target desktop/mobile/ios/android devices. We need to make sure to target the device(s) that are used by many/most of our audience.

2)Our ad images/videos will need to be optimized for the devices we target. Same goes for our landing pages / websites. For example if most users are mobile users, then we better make damn sure our website looks and functions great on mobile.



A Few Other Things

There are a few more things I want to cover before we wrap up the topic of Audience Targeting…


Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences

In addition to all the targeting options described above, FB also allows us to create and target two types of audiences:

1)Custom Audiences: Audiences that have engaged with our website/app or ads in some way. For a more detailed explanation please see here.

2)Lookalike Audiences: Audiences that bear similarities to our custom audiences. For example we can build a custom audience consisting of people that have purchased our product, then create a lookalike audience based on that. FB would then bring us more visitors that it “believes” would also be likely to purchase our product. For a more detailed explanation please see here.

Learning how to effectively build, target and convert these audiences can get you very effective results. However, because they’re more complicated to explain and use, I’ll defer them to later lessons.


Audience Size

I’ve mentioned audience size a few times in this post. You may be wondering “what’s a good audience size”? This isn’t an easy question to answer – if you ask 10 people you’ll get 10 different answers.

Having said that, based on a mix of personal experience and what other people have recommended, 200k-5 million would be a good guideline to follow.

How do you find the audience size? FB will tell you this information when you play around with the “Audiences” tool or the “Audience Insights” tool.

The number will change according to the targeting options you specify.

I would like to mention something really important here: FB’s algorithm has become quite good at narrowing down the audience to identify the ideal users to show our ads to in order to get the results we’re looking for. So try to be bold when testing broad audiences. The broadest I’ve targeted was one 10-year age range + one gender and it converted even better than the smaller audiences I tested. But you can only target broad if the product/service you’re promoting has broad appeal.

Also: If you’re promoting a physical brick-and-mortar business, then obviously you can’t target areas that are too far away.

Below I’ll list some pros and cons of targeting broad vs. narrow audiences. I would encourage you to test different-sized audiences to see which ones work best – keeping in mind that RELEVANCE of the audience is another big key as well.

For Bigger/Broader Audiences:

PROS:
-Lots of users for FB to cherry-pick the best ones to show our ads to.
-Audience saturation would be less of an issue.
-Ad fatigue will occur less quickly, which means you won’t need to test as many new ads as often than for smaller audiences.
-Ad cost may be lower when we target a broader audience.

CONS:
-Will take FB longer to sample different “pools” of users to identify the best pools. Therefore will require a bigger test budget from us.
-It’s harder to craft ads that can resonate with so many people.

For Smaller/Narrower Audiences:

PROS:
-It would take a smaller budget to test the audience – because there would be fewer “pools” of users for FB to sample in order to find the best ones.
-It’s easier to craft specific messages to targeted audiences – can potentially achieve higher conversion rates.

CONS:
-Fewer users for FB to choose from – so FB is “forced” to show ads to everyone instead of only to the best/ideal ones.
-Saturation will happen sooner – only so many people are in need of what you’re selling and sooner or later, everyone that would ever buy from you, will already have.
-Ad fatigue will occur more quickly.
-Ad cost may be higher when we target smaller audiences.


Audience Overlap

Audience overlap happens when you’re running multiple ad sets, with some of the audience being shown ads from more than one ad set.

Let’s say you’re running 2 ad sets with some audience overlap. In this case, you’d be showing ads to some of those people twice and paying double the money.

I’ll go into more detail on audience overlap in the optimization part of this tutorial. For now, just be aware that when deciding which audience to test in each ad set, it would be wise to avoid too much audience overlap.


Deliverable

Before moving onto the next lesson, decide on at LEAST 2 audiences to test, and make a note of them in the “Audience Targeting” section of your research doc.

If you can identify more audiences than 2 – even better! The more the better as long as you feel that they are RELEVANT to the product/service you’ll be promoting.


Further Reading

Audience targeting a BIG topic and there’s no way I can cover everything in a simple tutorial. I’ll add good articles on this topic below as I come across them.

11 Creative Strategies for Facebook Ad Targeting After the Changes


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Lists of Demographics, Interests and Behaviors

As promised, here’s a file with lists of targeting options on DEMOGRAPHICS and BEHAVIORS you can download:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/51ito01fea…ists.xlsx?dl=0

(The file also includes a list of Custom Audiences – just ignore that for now – we’ll cover that in a later post.)


I didn’t include a LIST OF INTERESTS because I’ve found this one online which seems to have been updated fairly recently:

https://interestexplorer.io/wp-conte…rests-list.pdf


For your quick reference, here are screenshots of the LIST OF DEMOGRAPHICS in the file, that you can target:

And here are screenshots of the LIST OF BEHAVIORS you can target:

Amy