Deciding who your target audience is and deciding who to target on Facebook Ads might not always align how you would imagine. Sometimes, the audiences you’d be disinclined to test end up being your winning ad sets. By now, you’ve probably scoured the web looking for answers on who to target for your Facebook Ads campaigns, encountering a mixture of results from self-proclaimed advertising gurus who have made you feel even more unsure than before you started your search. So, I’m not going to ramble on in confusing advertising lingo that you’ve already read so much of. Instead, I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to know about Facebook’s audiences without all the fluff.
Audience Size
The size of your audience is actually more important than you might think. There was a time on Facebook Ads where making your audience as targeted as possible was a good thing and a measure you should always put in place. However, since the iOS 14 update in 2020, things have changed for audience targeting.
Broader, larger audiences are now more effective. As much as I, and many other advertisers, love having plenty of control over ad campaigns and who sees them, Facebook ads now work better when you let the algorithm have more control over who gets to see your ads. The algorithm will build up learnings from your audiences and ads, and from this, it will begin to learn who to target on the platform to give you the most for your money. Because of this, you need to make sure that your audience size is in the millions. This also means that it’s easier to scale your best-performing audiences without hitting ad fatigue (users seeing your ads too many times because the audience is too small).
Interest, Demographics, and Behaviour-based Audiences
When setting up a ‘manual campaign’ using the ‘original audience options,’ you’ll be able to choose from a large range of interests, demographics, and behaviours in the ‘Advantage detailed targeting’ section. This means that if you’re looking to target people with an interest in cooking, you can select this interest from the list.
When it comes to selecting your interest-based audiences, it's often best to be fairly open-minded in your selection whilst keeping in mind the size of your audience. As a rule of thumb, I recommend not excluding interests from your selected audience, as this will limit your audience size further. Instead, the only audience you should be looking to exclude are those bottom-of-the-funnel audiences that have already shown an interest in your business—these can be targeted separately in a dedicated campaign. With that being said, I would also suggest not mixing your interest-based audiences with your bottom-of-the-funnel audiences. But, we can go through this in more detail later on.
Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences allow you to create a pool of users who share similar demographics, interests, and behaviours with your existing audience. For example, you can create an audience similar to your past purchasers—this is always a great audience to test out! You can also create lookalike audiences from many other custom audiences, such as customer lists, app activity, offline activity, Instagram and Facebook pages, and many more, as long as you have data for them! This capability can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns by targeting users who are more likely to convert.
Location Targeting
As with every selection you make when setting up your audience, you need to ensure you're not limiting your campaigns by selecting a small location. That being said, you also need to avoid making your location selection too broad. This means targeting only one country per campaign. By doing this, you can create ads that are specific to that country—there’s no point using English ads to target a country like France, where English isn’t the primary language. Ads need to be created specifically for each country you target to ensure they resonate with the audience you are targeting and effectively convey your message.
Age Targeting
Many marketers see this section and instinctively want to adjust the age range to match their target audience, a habit formed from creating traditional campaigns. However, I wouldn’t recommend doing this. Condensing your audience size any further can limit your performance. Instead, I’ve consistently seen better performance by leaving this section set to 18-65+. This doesn't mean Facebook will distribute the same amount of spend across all age groups, in fact, as I mentioned earlier, as Facebook’s algorithm learns it will begin to gather data on which age group to favour more—sometimes it might surprise you which one is the winning audience! Once you have this data, instead of condensing your audience size to the winning age group, create images, videos, and carousel ads that target this winning age group.
Remarketing Audiences
Remarketing audiences, also known as bottom-of-the-funnel users (people who have previously shown interest in your business), used to be the secret sauce to making high converting Facebook Ad campaigns. Nowadays, these campaigns don’t seem to bring in the low costing results that they once did! This isn’t me saying that you should ditch setting up a remarketing campaign, however, they’re nowhere near as profitable as they used to be on the platform. In fact, normally you’ll see a much greater return from targeting those new top-of-funnel audiences (people who haven’t interacted with your business before). That being said, it’s always a good idea to put a small fraction of your budget towards remarketing.
When setting up your custom remarketing audiences, make sure to test different website actions, as well as different time frames. The best way to work out which remarketing audience works the best for your business is to create new ad sets for each test you set up, this way you’ll easily distinguish the winning audiences.
Partnership Ads
Finally, one of my favourite custom audiences is those created from partnerships with influencers. When you collaborate with an influencer and they grant you partnership access, you can access their Instagram or Facebook page audience data and retarget their page engagers with your ads. As long as their page is relevant to your business, this audience can be highly effective. It's a great audience to test alongside the content the influencer has created for your collaboration, ensuring your ads resonate well with an already engaged and relevant audience.
There is a lot to learn when it comes to audience creation and testing, and though I wouldn’t say this is one of the most important things to focus on in your Facebook Ads testing in 2024, it is still crucial to understand how to set up your audiences for the best results. There are many Facebook Ads experts who swear by using only broad audiences and ditching interest, lookalike, and remarketing audiences altogether. This approach can work if you have millions of pounds in budget to spend. However, when you’re a small business with a limited budget, audience targeting is still a must. Broad audiences can significantly increase your costs when you are more limited in your testing.
If audience testing is still leaving your head in a spin, please get in touch to find out how we can work together to ensure your business is targeting the best-performing audiences.
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