Facebook Ads: Audiences and Targeting

We’ve discussed the first step in creating an advertisement on Facebook—objectives. Your next step is to know your audience, aka customers. This is a crucial step for a successful Facebook Ad campaign. 

Roughly 1.6 billion users visit Facebook daily. It is imperative that you only target the users that will be most interested in the product or service you provide. 

First, let’s start with locations. Facebook allows users to target people in specific locations, including:

• Country 

• State/Region 

• County 

• City

• Postal Code

• Specific Address Radius 

For example, if you’re a local business in Nashville, you can target “Nashville, TN +20 miles” or specific Nashville zip codes like “37214, 37013, 37076.” An added layer of targeting is that within those locations, you can target:

• Everyone in this location (default setting)

• People who live in this location

• People recently in this location

• People traveling in this location

After you have your location down, you can get more definitive with age and gender parameters. If you have a product that is commonly used by women ages 24-32, you can tell Facebook that that group is your ideal customer. 

However, you can get way more granular in the tab “detailed targeting”. Here you’ll find the options for:

• Demographics: Reach people based on education, employment, household, and lifestyle details. Some data is available for the US only.

• Interests: Reach specific audiences by looking at their interests, activities, the Facebook pages they have liked, and closely related topics.

• Behaviors: Reach people based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage, and more. Some behavior data is available for US audiences only. 

These are just some of the types of targeting that scratches the surface. There are also custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and audiences based on website traffic, app traffic, etc. If you feel like you need more guidance, Gradient Creative Agency is equipped with years of experience in digital advertising. 

BONUS TIP: 

While you’re creating your audience, on the right hand side on the page, you will see “Audience Size.” Potential Reach is an estimate of the size of the audience that's eligible to see your ad, not how many people will actually see it. Reach is the number of people estimated you'll reach in your audience each day. 

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We hope you find this helpful. Our next and final installment of the Facebook Ads blog series will cover the fun part—the actual creation of the post users will see on their feed.