Mastering Facebook targeting is a critical piece of a successful advertising campaign. With an ever-expanding list of targeting methods, options, and strategies it can sometimes be challenging to know how to best reach your audience.
Here are 5 of the most effective methods for Facebook targeting to consider for your next campaign.
Demographic targeting can be extremely effective for a product or service that appeals to specific demographic. Facebook has expanded its demographic targeting options significantly in the past couple years. Advertisers can now target audiences based on education levels, job titles, whether or not they’re parents, and lots more.
For your next campaign, it’s definitely worth taking a thorough look through demographic targeting options to see which attributes best align to your audience.
Interest and competitor targeting can be incredibly effective, but should be used carefully to ensure you’re not targeting too broad of an audience. Oftentimes while plugging keywords into the targeting tool it can be easy to stumble on an interest category with several million people. At first glance we get excited because we think we’ve found a large pool of users to target, but many times the larger the audience is, the less targeted it actually is. This can ultimately lower the campaign’s performance.
My favorite process for finding pages and interests to target is to use Facebook’s native search feature.
Let’s say we want to target competitive runners. A quick search of “competitive runners” in Facebook’s search bar yields a long list of pages and related interest ideas than contain smaller, but more focused audiences than simply targeting a broad topic like “running.”
Facebook organic reach has declined over the past several years, and due to an increasing amount of content being published it’s not expected to rebound anytime soon. In 2016 it’s not uncommon to see organic posts reach between 5% – 15% of your audience. This means up to 95% of your followers might never see the piece of content you worked so hard on unless ads are used to increase its reach.
Targeting followers of your page can be one of the best targeting methods for new advertising campaigns. Because they’ve already shown an interest in your page or business, it can be much easier to get users to engage with a piece of content compared to an audience who might not be aware of who you are and what you do.
We’ve all scrolled through our news feed and stopped to take notice when we see a piece of content that a trusted friend has engaged with. This is the power of social proof, and it can be used to increase engagement on an ad campaign.
Facebook allows us to target friends of the people who follow our page.
When we target friends of followers, Facebook displays above the ad a list of the user’s connections who have already liked our page or post. This might just be enough to get them to stop scrolling and pay attention.
Pixel-based remarketing is similar to how remarketing works in other channels by placing a pixel on your website and remarketing to users who’ve visited your site and left without converting.
Facebook also allows advertisers to create custom audiences based on a provided list of emails. Let’s say you have a list of 35,000 subscribers to your weekly email newsletter. Facebook allows you to upload this list of email addresses, and it’ll match your list to Facebook users who are using the same email in their Facebook profile.
With the growth of Facebook, and the expansion of targeting capabilities it’s important to make sure you’re reaching your audience when, and where it matters most. Make sure to test out a few of the audiences listed above, and as always be sure to test, tweak, and optimize your campaigns!
Remarketing has been a tried and true tactic for years now, and Facebook has a few different methods for finding & re-engaging website visitors. Two of the most effective remarketing tactics are traditional pixel based remarketing, and custom audience by email list.
Pixel-based remarketing is similar to how remarketing works in other channels by placing a pixel on your website, and remarketing to users who’ve visited your site and left without converting.
Facebook also allows advertisers to create custom audiences based on a provided list of emails. Let’s say you have a list of 35,000 subscribers to your weekly email newsletter. Facebook allows you to upload this list of email addresses, and it’ll match your list to Facebook users who are using the same email in their Facebook profile.
With the growth of Facebook, and the expansion of targeting capabilities it’s important to make sure you’re reaching your audience when, and where it matters most. Make sure to test out a few of the audiences listed above, and as always be sure to test, tweak, and optimize your campaigns!