Your Facebook ad targeting strategy can be better.
This is not what most digital marketers want to hear, but in all likelihood, it is true. Facebook offers us a plethora of audience choices, which is great, but to use these audiences effectively and not counterproductively, some thought, knowledge, and skill are required.
A basic approach is to utilize core audiences, which allows you to categorize users based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
You must:
Understand all the audience choices
Understand the uses in each funnel
Understand the right balance between them
Find the right audience interested in your product
Know how to optimize them to get more results for less cost
If you're just starting out, all these things might seem overwhelming. Heck, they can be incredibly challenging even for experienced individuals.
Facebook is a complex organism, and assuming that building and launching on Facebook is quicker than on Google Ads is actually the origin of many Facebook issues.
In this article, we will detail the three basic Facebook ad targeting options that every professional advertiser should fully utilize in their Facebook ad campaigns to help you avoid Facebook ad targeting issues. We will also help you solve existing Facebook ad targeting problems with six ad targeting optimization tips.
By the time you finish reading this article, you will find that the vague ads in Facebook PPC advertising have disappeared, turning into compact, streamlined, cost-effective conversion gold mines.
Understanding Facebook Ad Targeting
Facebook ad targeting is a powerful tool that helps businesses precisely reach their target audience. With over 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook offers a massive pool of potential customers. However, with such a large number of users, reaching the target audience is not easy. Facebook ad targeting is designed for this purpose. By using Facebook's targeting options, businesses can ensure their ads are seen by users most likely to be interested in their products or services.
Facebook ad targeting narrows down the audience using various criteria. These criteria can include demographic information such as age, location, and interests, as well as behaviors and connections. By targeting the right audience, businesses can improve ad effectiveness and generate more conversions. Facebook offers a range of targeting options, from broad demographic targeting to highly precise custom audiences, allowing businesses to tailor their ad campaigns to meet their unique goals.
What's the difference between Google Ads and Facebook Ads?
The core difference lies in how audiences are targeted:
Google Ads targets audiences who are actively searching for your products or services using specific keywords. Since these audience groups are constantly having new users join and leave, ad fatigue is not a major issue.
Facebook Ads targets static audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. These audiences do not change much, so as engagement drops, ad fatigue and audience churn can occur more quickly.
So, which platform is better? It depends:
If your product thrives on a visually-driven, engagement-heavy platform, use Facebook Ads.
If you need a higher-intent platform to drive quick conversions, use Google Ads.
The best results usually come from incorporating both platforms into your strategy.
On Facebook, you must regularly adjust your targeting strategy to prevent ad fatigue and audience loss. Facebook's ad manager can be used to create and manage targeted ad campaigns, including building custom audience groups and leveraging lookalike audiences. Running multiple ads with different targeting approaches can create a dynamic funnel that allows users to move efficiently through your marketing channels.
As Facebook thought leader Mari Smith says:
"The best Facebook ads look and feel as relevant and timely in your news feed as the posts you see from friends."
By maintaining the relevance, timeliness, and precise targeting of your Facebook marketing ads, you will be able to stand out and ensure your campaigns resonate with your target audience. Facebook's powerful targeting tools—whether targeting broad audience groups, niche interests, or custom audiences—are designed to help you achieve this goal. Just make sure you fully understand the "any/all" targeting rules (or "or/and" targeting) to effectively use these tools.
Facebook Ad Targeting "Any" and "All" ("Or" and "And") Rules
Facebook's targeting rules specify how to apply multiple criteria within an audience group, and understanding these rules is crucial for effective targeting: Facebook targeting involves complex ad strategies to effectively cover specific audience groups.
Any target (or target)
How it works: Your audience group expands because users only need to meet one of the selected criteria.
For example: If your target customers are "women who like football or volleyball," Facebook will include anyone who likes football or volleyball
This approach is great for top-of-the-funnel activities when you're exploring and want to expand your scope.
All targeting (AND targeting)
How it works: Your audience range narrows because users must meet all selected conditions.
For example: If your target customers are "women who like football and volleyball," then Facebook will only include women who like both football and volleyball.
This is ideal for bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns because it helps optimize the audience to target people with higher intent.
Excluding audiences
The exclusion feature allows you to remove specific groups from your targeting criteria. This can avoid inefficient situations, such as showing ads to users who have already converted or are no longer relevant.
For example: Include women who like football and volleyball, but exclude women who like basketball
The exclusion feature is particularly useful for managing audience overlap and reducing ad fatigue. For example, if a user is part of your remarketing audience, you need to exclude them from your potential customer audience to avoid showing them cold offers. Businesses can create custom audience groups based on user interactions (such as users who added items to their cart but did not complete a purchase) to improve ad efficiency and conversion rates.
6 Facebook Ad Targeting Success Tips
1. Detailed target audience
Fine targeting is a top-of-the-funnel strategy designed to connect with a broader, colder target audience. This feature allows advertisers to segment audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. Combining various targeting strategies and demographic characteristics is crucial for effectively reaching specific niche groups. Demographic characteristics include attributes such as education level, marital status, and fertility status, while interests cover hobbies and activities such as fitness, entertainment, and business. Behavioral targeting focuses on behaviors such as travel habits or device usage.
For example, if you sell vintage video games and want to promote a buy-one-get-one-free birthday offer, target users whose birthdays are coming up and who are interested in video games. Combining these targeting layers ensures your audience is more precise and relevant. To further optimize your targeting, you can use the Meta Pixel to track website visitors and segment them for follow-up campaigns. Offering low-barrier options, such as free trials or downloadable resources, is an effective way to attract these audiences.
Demographic and interest targeting
Demographic targeting allows businesses to target ads based on demographic information such as age, location, and interests. This is very useful for businesses that want to cover specific age groups or regions. For example, a business selling teenage clothing might want to target 18-24-year-olds living in urban areas. By precisely targeting these specific demographics, businesses can ensure their ads are relevant and appealing to their target audience.
Currently available demographic audience subcategories include
Education (education level)
Finance (income percentile)
Life events (such as birthdays and anniversaries)
Parents (parental status)
Relationships (relationship status)
Work (employer, industry, or position)
Demographic subcategories
In addition to detailed targeting, you can also consider using broader audience group targeting options. These options include
Location (where someone is)
Age range (someone's age)
Gender (the gender they identify with)
Language (what language their browser is set to)
There are also other demographic targeting options available
Technically, they are not part of fine targeting, but they are still an important part of demographic customization. At a minimum, you should narrow your targeting to specific countries, states, or cities. (No one really benefits from targeting the entire world, and no one has the budget to target the entire world.)
On the other hand, interest targeting allows businesses to place ads based on users' interests. This is very useful for businesses that want to cover users interested in specific hobbies or activities. For example, a business selling outdoor gear might want to target users interested in hiking or camping. By aligning ads with the interests of the target audience, businesses can create a more personalized and appealing ad experience.
Just to give you a taste (we'll let you explore the rest of the content yourself), some subcategories under "Interests" are
Business and industry
Entertainment
Family and interpersonal relationships
Fitness and health
Diet
Hobbies and activities
There are many more, and all of these have their own subcategory lists.
I want to target lovers of Italian spicy sausage pizza, not Italian spicy sausage pizza schools
2. Custom audiences
Custom audience group targeting is for users who have already interacted with your brand, making them very effective in remarketing and lower-end funnel promotion campaigns. You can use data from outside Facebook (such as website activity, app engagement, or uploaded customer lists) as well as data from within Facebook (such as video views, lead forms, and Instagram interactions) to create these audience groups.
With custom audiences, you can upload and/or connect your own data to identify your potential customers on Facebook and Facebook's audience network. This is where our strategic gold mine—retargeting audiences—was born.
Custom audience targeting options
For example, if someone visited your pricing page but did not complete a purchase, you can use ads showing limited-time discounts to retarget them. Another example is targeting users who watched 75% or more of a product demonstration video, indicating a strong interest in your product/service. It has been proven that these audience groups can bring a higher return on ad spend (ROAS) because they already have purchasing intentions. Feeling Swell is a great success story; by focusing on retargeting custom audience groups, their purchase volume increased by 521%, and ROAS increased by 108%.
3. Similar audiences
Lookalike audience groups can significantly boost the scale of your ad campaigns. They allow you to reach new users who have similarities with your existing customers or active audience groups. For example, you can create lookalike audiences based on previous converters or website visitors. Facebook uses its algorithm to identify users with similar behaviors, interests, and demographic data.
Lookalike audience settings
Facebook custom audiences allow marketers to retarget website visitors, leverage customer data, and optimize audiences based on various demographic factors to enhance engagement and increase sales.
A great example is building a lookalike audience of lead form submitters, which usually significantly reduces the cost per acquisition (CPA) and increases the conversion rate compared to interested audience groups. For example, a client achieved a 49% reduction in CPA and a 66.67% increase in conversion rate by creating a lookalike audience of lead form submitters. You can also create super lookalike audiences, such as combining the 0%-1% and 1%-5% ranges, to test broader but still relevant market segments. GATA's client tested this strategy and found a significant increase in conversion rates by 3,339%.
Understanding your audience
Understanding your audience groups is crucial for creating impactful ad campaigns. The updated "Insights" tool in the ad management tool provides data on the demographics, locations, and behaviors of existing and potential audience groups. This tool can help you identify high-performing audience segments and accordingly optimize your targeting strategy.
For example, you might find that the audience group with the highest conversion rate tends to be 25-34-year-old women living in urban areas who frequently engage in fitness-related content. Such insights can guide your creative direction and inform you of which targeting options to prioritize. Additionally, if your ad campaign is not performing as expected, revisit these insights to identify mismatches between audience attributes and ad display locations. While data is valuable, be sure to test and validate survey findings with actual campaign results to ensure relevance.
4. Segmenting audience channels based on activities
Keeping potential customer development, re-engagement, and remarketing audiences in separate ad campaigns is crucial for maintaining control and preventing self-competition. Mixing these audiences in the same campaign often leads to content overlap, high cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and messy performance data. Keeping them separate ensures your strategy is clear and precise, and allows for more accurate budget allocation.
Using Facebook Audience Insights for precise ad targeting is essential. Tools like Google Analytics and Meta Business Suite Insights help collect demographic and interest data, assisting marketers in optimizing Facebook audience groups, thereby enhancing ad precision and strategically targeting competitors' customers.
For example, potential customer mining campaigns focus on precise targeting and similar users, while re-engagement campaigns target video viewers or Instagram users. Meanwhile, remarketing campaigns offer customized offers to past website visitors or lead form fillers. This distinction simplifies the optimization process and ensures that each audience receives the right information at the correct stage of the funnel. Additionally, using Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) at the campaign level ensures your budget is effectively allocated across these funnels.
5. Separating similar ads from detailed targeting at the campaign level
Lookalike audience groups and precisely targeted audience groups should each have their own campaigns to maximize effectiveness. Lookalike audience groups are usually larger and require more budget; while precisely targeted audience groups are more niche and need a dedicated budget to test their potential. Combining the two in one campaign often results in lookalike audience groups dominating the budget, while precisely targeted audience groups are marginalized.
For example, if you are running an ad campaign for football fans, you can use one campaign to target similar users based on previous converters and another campaign to test detailed interest targeting, such as users interested in a specific football team. This approach helps you accurately measure the effectiveness of each targeting method. Allocating separate budgets ensures you optimize effectively without causing audience cannibalization. Additionally, users can manage their ad experience through specific settings within their platform, adjusting ad preferences and settings to control the data used for displaying personalized ads.
6. Increasing the budget for potential customer development
Many advertisers tend to allocate their budget to remarketing campaigns because these campaigns bring the most conversions. However, without a continuous flow of potential traffic to replenish the remarketing lists, these audience groups will gradually deplete, leading to ad fatigue and diminishing returns. A reasonable budget allocation typically involves using 60-70% of the budget for potential traffic and 15-25% for remarketing.
For example, a client adjusted their budget to focus more on potential customer traffic, and within just seven days, the number of conversions increased by 400%, and the cost per acquisition (CPA) decreased by 54.69%. Dynamic creative ads are also an excellent tool for potential customer development because they test various creative elements (such as images, headlines, and calls to action) to find the elements that resonate most with new audiences. By keeping potential customers fresh and active, you lay the foundation for sustainable remarketing results. Other companies' cookies will display ads to you based on your activities on different platforms, allowing users to control and personalize their ad settings.
Your Facebook ad targeting is the foundation of your strategy, and without a solid awareness of ad targeting, it's easy to fail on Facebook.
Now that you have a clear understanding of the choices involved in selecting an audience and what options are available, you can better formulate a killer Facebook strategy and make your Facebook ad campaigns successful.
With your mind full of knowledge about ad targeting, now is a good time to learn about another part of audience targeting strategy: the display locations of your ads on Facebook.
