What Is Facebook Targeting and Audience -The Simple Guide
The Simple Guide To Facebook Audience and Targeting
With over 2 billion active daily users and an average use time of 35 minutes per user it is a top spot for B2C and B2B advertising.
There has never been a better time to be familiar with Facebook Ad targeting.
Facebook has hundreds of targeting and ad demographic options. To get the most out of your advertising dollars or pounds you will need to target your audience.
In this article we will explore how to get the most out of that money spent on mastering Facebook Ad targeting and homing-in on your target audience.
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What Is A Facebook Audience?
The target or market that you are going to advertise to is called audience on Facebook.
You can target your audience specifically like by the amount of education or income, age, location, gender, job title and much more. The options are almost limitless.
What Is Target Audience?
A target audience is a group of people identified as likely customers of a business.
People in a target audience share demographic similarities such as age, location or socioeconomic status.
Defining a target audience helps create more efficient marketing messages.
Who Are Your Customers?
Getting to know who your customers are is a crucial step for a successful Facebook Ads campaign and therefore it is absolutely critical that you target only those who are potentially interested in your product.
Any audiences that are not likely to convert is going to waste your advertising pound or dollar.
Fortunately Facebook offers a wide range of targeting options that will help you find the right niche.
Below you will find out:
- How to create Facebook Audiences
- What are all the different types of Facebook Audience
- How to set up Re-marketing audiences
- How to work with Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences
- What are the best Facebook targeting options to use
Remember that advertising is about getting customers and not about cheap clicks. Your cost per click – CPC could be $0.03 but if the conversion rate is zero you are wasting your effort and your money.
Choose the audience who will see your ads and keep testing different targeting options to find your sweet spot.
What is Facebook Business Manager?
Facebook Business Manager is a tool to help you create, publish, monitor and report on various business-related assets, including your business’s Facebook Pages or your Facebook advertisements.
Business Manager allows you to grant partial or full access to different employees and assign them different roles within the platform.
How to Create Facebook Audiences
To create and manage your Facebook target audiences you will have to use the Audience Manager tool.
You can find this tool in the Business Manager section – by clicking on the top-right menu and selecting Audiences.
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On the Audiences page you can see all your saved Facebook audiences as well as create new ones.
To understand the wide range of targeting options that come with Facebook ads – let us start from the basics.
Facebook has three different types of primary audience:
- Custom Audiences
- Lookalike Audiences
- Saved Audiences
Each of these audience types gives you plenty of additional options for creating the perfect target audience for your Facebook campaigns.
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Facebook Custom Audiences
Facebook Custom Audiences are probably your most high value target audiences as they allow you to retarget past website traffic visitors and people who have engaged with your content or app.
There are multiple ways to create a Custom Audience and we are going to cover each of them briefly.
Creating Custom Audiences from Customer Files
This first type of Facebook Custom Audience is based on your existing customer files – the lists of email accounts, phone numbers or apple IDs.
The Customer File audience is a great way to target your newsletter subscribers or app users.
To create a Facebook Custom Audience just follow these steps below:
- Create a Facebook Custom Audience
- Select the Customer File option
- Select whether you wish to add a customer file or import contacts from MailChimp.
- Import your customer data to create a new Custom Audience
- Select the identifiers
- Upload a customer file
- Give your Custom Audience a name
Your customer files can include 15 different identifiers and the most popular ones being:
- Phone number
- Mobile advertiser ID
If you need to clean up the data inside your customer files before the import, this Facebook’s guide can help you out.
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Website traffic-based Facebook audiences allow you to create remarketing campaigns for people who have engaged with your website.
These are high-value audiences as the users seeing your ads have already shown some interest in it and are important.
To create audiences based on your website traffic – you first need to install Facebook Pixel. See the Pixel setup instructions by Facebook.
If you have built your website on WordPress then you can also create this type of Custom Audiences with the Pixel Caffeine plugin.
Once you have installed the Facebook Pixel then you can simply go to the Audience Manager and create a Custom Audience based on past website traffic.
You can choose between multiple options:
- Target everyone who visited your website
- Target people who visited specific web pages
- Target people who visited specific web pages but not others
- Target people who have not visited your website for a certain amount of time
- Other custom combinations
Creating Custom Audiences Based on App Activity
If you want to reach the people who have engaged with your iOS or Android app, you can set up a Facebook target audience to do that.
To target people based on the app activity – you first need to register your app and set up app events.
To create a Facebook Custom Audience based on app activity – target consumers who have taken specific actions or events in your app.
You can also select the timeframe for targeted events.
For example you could select a purchase event and specify In the Last 90 days to reach people who have completed an in-app purchase event in the past 90 days.
Here is the official guide by Facebook to help you create Custom Audiences based on app activity.
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Did you know that you can also target the users that have engaged with your content on Facebook e.g. viewed your videos or liked a Page post.
The latest addition to Custom Audiences is the possibility to target people who have done one of the following:
- Visited your Facebook Page
- Engaged with your Facebook Page posts or ads
- Clicked on any call-to-action buttons
- Sent a message to your Page
- Saved your Page or posts
This gives you the perfect opportunity to reach high-potential audiences that are interested in learning more about your brand or product.
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Facebook Lookalike Audiences
Facebook Lookalike Audiences let you reach the people who are similar to your existing customer database – making them highly likely to convert as well.
To create a Lookalike Audience – you first need to create a Custom Audience to tell Facebook what type of users you want to reach.
Next select the Lookalike Audience from the audience creation menu and select a target country and a percentage between 1% and 10% of the targeted country’s Facebook users.
The percentage signifies the people most similar to your selected Custom Audience.
Lookalike Audiences help you to extend your ad campaign’s reach so that you only target people who are likely to be interested in your offer.
How To Narrow Down Your Audiences
Sometimes Facebook audience can include millions of users. Unless you have a huge advertising budgets lying around waiting to be used you should keep your target audiences smaller and more precise.
Ideally it would be the largest audience of people that are the most likely to convert.
When creating Saved Audiences, you can narrow your audience with the AND/OR targeting options.
The OR targeting means that when you add new targeting options under the same category of targeting your audience will grow larger.
The AND targeting means that a person who is in your target audience must fall into multiple categories.
This will help to decrease your audience size and create niche audiences.
You may have also noticed from the image above that you could also EXCLUDE people who match specific interests or demographics.
You can also EXCLUDE specific Custom Audiences from the general target audience.
For example you could exclude past converters to avoid your ads reaching people who are already customers.
If some Lookalike Audience or Custom Audiences are too large – maybe like hundreds of thousands of people then you can narrow them down with interest-based targeting by creating a Saved Audience.
Here is how it works:
- Create a Facebook Saved Audience
- Select a Custom Audience or Lookalike Audience
- Add interest- or demographics-based targeting options
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Facebook Saved Audiences
Saved Audiences are the audiences that you can define by choosing consumer’s interest location, age, gender, used devices, income level, etc.
You can create Saved Audiences in the campaign setup phase or in the Audience Manager.
Creating a Saved Audience in Ads Manager.
Location-based targeting.
Facebook allows you to target people in specific locations, including:
- Country
- State/Region
- Counties
- Designated Market Area – DMA
- City
- Postal Code
- Specific Address Radius
Simply type in the regions you wish to target.
You also have another layer of location targeting, allowing you to be even more specific:
- Everyone in this location (the default targeting option) – The last updated location of an actual Facebook user
- People who live in this location – Location is set by the location on a user’s Facebook profile and confirmed by their IP address.
- People recently in this location – Tracked by mobile device usage in the geographic area you intend to target.
- People traveling to this location – Users who had this geographic area as a recent location that’s at least 100 miles away from their home location.
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As you click on the Demographics tab, you will get plenty of targeting topics to refine your audience based on many options.
The basic 3 are:
Age – If you are targeting an audience with a specified age range, you can easily reach them by telling Facebook who your ideal customers are.
Gender – You can also select to target a particular gender.
Language – If you are advertising in a particular language then you might want to only target the people who can understand your ads.
And you can get way more detailed information. As an example, you will be able to target people by their political views, life events, job titles, ethnicity and so on.
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Interests are one of the best and easiest Facebook ads targeting options as they allow you to target people specifically interested in a subject related to your product.
For example, you could target people interested in your competitors or your broader market segment or magazines and blogs covering your market.
To target based on interests, you can either browse the menu with hundreds of interests or simply type in one interest so that Facebook will suggest to you other related topics.
The interests are based on Facebook users’ likes and interests, apps they use, Pages they have liked and more.
Adding more than one interest will target people with at least one of them so you can make your reach broader.
Unlike precise Interests, Behaviours allow you to target people by purchase history, events they like, personal anniversaries, etc.
This data is gathered by Facebook analysing so many factors and also using external data sets.
They are not always useful but when they are they work really well.
As an example you can target people currently traveling or planning their next trip … priceless if you are in the tourism, hotel or event booking market.
Conclusion
Check them out and see if they can work for your business.
Do you want help with your Facebook Audience Targeting to convert? Contact us today to see how we can help you to achieve your desired results.
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