In the previous post (the one on research), we started talking about audience targeting.

Thing is, in order to figure out what to target, we need to know what targeting options FB offers first.

Because this is such a big topic, I decided to write separate posts on it (i.e. this one and the next). While exploring the following targeting options, feel free to do additional research on potentially suitable audiences for your product/service by googling or using some of the research methods in the previous post.

And of course, don’t forget to make notes in the “Audience Targeting” section of your research doc so when it comes time to set up the campaigns, you’ll know exactly what targeting options to choose.

Although I’ve tried to keep things simple, this post may contain too much information to take in for a beginner. Just do the best you can for now. After running a couple of campaigns, you’ll understand everything a lot better.



A Few Important Things

Before we actually go over FB’s targeting options, let’s go over a few important concepts I feel will help you to make better audience targeting decisions.


Basic FB Campaign Structure

First I want to very briefly look at the basic structure of a FB campaign, and how Audience Targeting fits in.

There are 3 levels to the FB campaign. Each campaign can contain one or more ad sets, with each ad set containing one or more ads. Here’s a sample structure:

Each level is associated with a number of options you can specify – as described below.

Campaign-level options: Marketing objective (e.g. are you trying to build awareness around your brand; are you trying to capture leads straight from FB; are you trying to get conversions), and other stuff we’ll be looking at later.

Adset-level options:Audience Targeting, ad placements, etc.

Ad-level options: The actual ads for a specific ad set.

(By the way, a word on limits: Inside each ad account, we can create a total of at least 5000 campaigns, at least 5000 ad sets and at least 5000 ads. Each ad set can contain a maximum of 50 ads. These limits should be more than enough to last you a while.) Important takeaway: Each Ad Set targets an audience you’ll be showing a set of ads to.

This means: You’ll need to decide the Audience Targeting for each Ad Set, in such a way that you can target that audience using the same set of ad(s) with the same advertising angle(s).

Ridiculously-general example: We shouldn’t target the countries US and Brazil in a single ad set, because we can’t create one set of ads to show both English and Portuguese text to visitors.

A less cut-and-dry example: Say your product/service can be used by both males and females of all ages. In this case you have a few choices. You could choose to target both genders 18-65+ in the same adset by showing them the same, general ads. Or, you could choose to target females in one ad set, showing ads that are customized for females (images/videos featuring females, ad text angle catering to females, etc.), and do the same for males in a separate ad set. You could even break things down further by age, for example have one ad set targeting women 18-24, a second ad set targeting women 25-34, a third ad set targeting women 35-44 etc. etc., and customizing the ads for the audience in each ad set.

OR, you could do both by doing a general test first, then refining. E.g. Set up a quick test by targeting both genders 18-65+ in the same adset, showing general ads. Then run the campaign to collect some conversions, then drill down into FB data to see a break-down of age and gender – for example:

Based on the results of this small test, it would be wise to set up ad sets for each of the age+gender combos in red, and customize the ads for each audience to see if conversion rates would increase. (Some of the other age+gender combos are also showing promise but insufficient data, so I could either continue to run this ad set longer to collect more data first, or just set up more ad sets with customized ads for those other promising audience segments as well. Anyways – you get the idea.)

Just something to keep in mind when you’re deciding on how many different audiences you want to test, and what those audiences are.


Get an Initial Idea on FB Reporting

I’ve just shown that we could target all ages and genders in a single ad set, and still be able to see stats on how well each age range and gender was performing.

However, FB does not do this type of stats break-down for a lot of other targeting options. For example, if you use the same ad set to target multiple interests (to be covered later) – e.g. people that are interested in SEO and people that are interested in affiliate marketing – FB’s stats won’t allow you to see how each interest performs.

In that case, a better arrangement may be to create separate ad sets, one for targeting people interested in SEO, the other for targeting people interested in affiliate marketing – just to see how (un)successful each one will be. And of course, by doing so, you’d be able to customize ads for each group if you choose.

(Sneak peek of optimizing tactic: If both interests happen to be profitable, you could combine them into one ad set to eliminate the audience overlap between the two groups, which may decrease costs. And the fact that the resulting audience is bigger can result in lower costs as well. More on that later.)

To get an idea on what types of breakdowns are available in FB report, please go to the Ads Manager. (Browse to https://business.facebook.com/. Click on the Business Manager you’re wanting to set up the campaign under > on the next page, click on the ad account you’re wanting to set up the campaign in > you should end up in the Ads Manager.)

Click on “Breakdown” > “By Delivery”:

Here are some of the more useful breakdown options:

Age – FB automatically breaks ages down into these ranges: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+

Gender – Female, Male, Uncategorized

Region – Geographical regions, e.g. States in the US, provinces in Canada – doesn’t break down more than that

Impression Device – Desktop, Android Smartphone, Android Tablet, iPhone, iPad,, iPod, Other

Placement – Ad placements (to be covered later), e.g. Facebook desktop news feed, Instagram mobile news feed

Time of Day – Can be useful for dayparting (to be covered later) Again: Knowing what can be ‘broken down’ in FB stats, gives you the option to target broader and still see a stats breakdown. Otherwise, it may be better to test difference audiences using separate ad sets – if you wish to see how each one performs and FB doesn’t offer the option to break down the stats.


Start Playing With Audience Targeting Options

In order for you to get an idea of what targeting options are available, let’s go to the audience tool:

-Browse to https://business.facebook.com/.

-Click on the Business Manager and then the ad account you’re wanting to set up the campaign under.

-Click on the hamburger menu in the upper left corner to access Business Manager options > click on “All Tools >” at the bottom > click on “Audiences”.

-Click on “Create a Saved Audience”.



Some Basic Targeting

Let’s walk through the simpler stuff first – which to me is everything OTHER than “Detailed Targeting” (which I’ll cover in the next section below).

(Let’s ignore the “Audience Name” and “Custom Audiences” fields for now.)


Locations

FB allows us to target locations by country, state / region, city, even neighborhoods.

For neighborhoods and cities, you can even specify an x mile radius to target (from 1 to 50 mi). You can also specify an exact address (e.g. if you have a physical address for your business) and a corresponding x mile radius to target.

You can also select areas to INCLUDE and subsets of those areas to EXCLUDE. For example, include the country of USA but excluding certain states. You can specify more than one areas to include/exclude. In fact, if you have a lot of locations to add, you can choose to add them in bulk.

Lastly, you can click on the dropdown at the start of the “Locations” section to add more context to the location(s) you’ve specified. Here are the options:

Below are FB’s explanations of these options, with my explanation in brackets.

People living in or recently in this location – People whose home or most recent location is within the selected areas. (People whose home is there but may or may not be there recently + people whose recently there whether they live there or not.)

People living in this location – People whose home is within the selected area. (People whose home is there, but may or may not be there recently.)

People recently in this location – People whose most recent location is within the selected area. (People whose recently there whether they live there or not.)

People traveling in this location – People whose most recent location is within the selected area but whose home is more than 125mi/200km away. (People whole recently there, but don’t live there.) One question I had was “exactly HOW recent is ‘recently’?”. Apparently, “recently” means the last-known location of a person – whether based on the IP the person last logged in from, or geo-tracking on their mobile device.

Basically choose whatever makes sense to you for the product/service you’re promoting. If you’re not sure, do more research, or just test different options to see which works better.

If you’re promoting an affiliate offer, then location targeting can be as straightforward as targeting the entire country that is allowed by the offer, and choosing “People living in or recently in this location”. But even then, refining these location targeting options can possibly get you better results. Let’s not worry too much about that for now though as we’re wanting to keep it simple.

However, if you’re promoting a local business, then spending more time to get skillful at location targeting can really pay off.

Also, here’s a well-known story of how someone was able to prank his room-mate with his geo-targeting skills – makes for an interesting read:

http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultima…-facebook-ads/

However, be mindful that limiting your location targeting can limit the number of people you can reach and drive up your ad cost, so only refine your location targeting if you have a good reason to. And even if you do, test broader targeting to see if you can get better results.


Age and Gender

As was mentioned in the last post, FB allows targeting by age (13-65+ years old or subsets thereof) and gender (men, women, or all).


Languages

When you set up your FB campaign, you’ll have the option of specifying a language to target. If your audience speaks a language that isn’t a commonly-spoken one in the location you’re targeting – e.g. German expats in Canada – then it may be a good idea to target Canada as the Location and German as the Language. (By the way, expats can also be targeted in FB’s behavior targeting – we’ll get to that in a bit.)


Connections

If you’re an admin of a Page, App or Event, then you can use that to your targeting advantage! (If not, you can ignore this section.)

FB lets us target people that are “connected” to our Page, App, and/or Event. “Connected” means when someone has engaged with our Page/App/Event or is a friend of someone that has.

You can include or exclude these people that are “connected”. You can also create what are called “Advanced Combinations” of:

-Include people who are connected to our Page/App/Event.

-Include friends of people who are connected to our Page/App/Event.

-Exclude people who are connected to our Page/App/Event.


(To Be Continued in Part 2…)




Amy