Targeting the right audience is the most important factor while running Facebook Ads. Many beginners make the mistake of not targeting the right audience, which results in a waste of time, money, and energy. You have a business, you run ads on Facebook but not everyone will be the right audience for your business who sees your ad and make a purchase. Facebook is an advertising company and if you pay for an ad, then Facebook will spend your money showing your ads to everyone who might not even be interested in your business.
Every advertiser wants to show their ad in front of the right audience and this is the most important thing we should look after before running any ad. Here, I want to show you the types of targeting that we can do on Facebook which will help you get detailed information about targeting.
3 Ways to Target on Facebook
Core Targeting
The first way to target the audience on Facebook is by core targeting (Cold Audience). Core targeting means we can target the people by their location, demographics, interest, behavior, and connection. For example, if you have an e-commerce platform in Nepal, then you can target the people who live in Nepal only, who have an interest in online shopping, who owns an apple mobile phone, etc. This is the easiest way to target people while running ads.
Facebook has our data. We give our personal data to Facebook unknowingly while opening a Facebook account or while using it on a daily basis. Facebook knows everything about us and they use this data to help advertisers reach the right audience. Most of the advertisers use core targeting which is an easy and quick way while running ads.
Custom Audience
Custom Audience is the type of audience who already has been connected with our business or profile. It helps us to reach the audience who knows about our business, who has been seeing our ads, and who already has a relationship with our business. The custom audience can be used for retargeting as well where we can show ads to the people who have visited our website or app or have done some sort of activity with our business.
There is a lot of custom audiences that we can use for retargeting or remarketing that you can look after. But I am going to talk about a few of them to help you understand even better about the custom audience magic.
Website Custom Audience: We can use the website custom audience, where we can integrate a Facebook pixel code (generated by Facebook) on our website. Facebook will track the visitors who have visited our website or a specific page and help us make an audience of the visitors.
Customer List: Customer List will help us make an audience of the people who have submitted their email or phone number. Facebook will use the email or phone and see how many have used those emails or phones to create their Facebook account and make an audience.
Video Custom Audience: We can run a video ad and Facebook will help us gather the number of people who have watched at least 25%, 50%, or 75% of the video. We can then make an audience and retarget them with another ad.
Lead Form: You can run a lead generation ad and collect leads from the people who are interested in your business. Then you can make a custom audience of the people who have submitted the lead form and use that audience for retargeting or remarketing.
These are some of the examples of the custom audience but I recommend you to go to your ads manager account and look at yourself and try them one by one. Go to Ads Manager – All Tools – Audiences – Custom Audience.
Lookalike Audience
Lookalike Audience is the type of audience who looks like our current customers, website visitors, or Facebook Fans. For example, If we have a 10,000 custom audience of people who have visited our website, then we can ask Facebook to collect the data of people who look similar to the custom audience of the website visitor. Facebook will look after the interest, behavior, demographic, etc of the custom audience that we have right now and help us make a lookalike audience who looks similar to the custom audience.
We can use the source audience (custom audience) of any audience i.e. website visitors, customer list, video views, lead form, etc to make a lookalike audience. We can also choose the location and audience size of our lookalike audience. Audience size means how similar we want to make our lookalike audience to be according to the custom audience. The less % of lookalike audience is more similar and the more % of lookalike audience is less similar.
Targeting right audience on Facebook from scratch
You can use the core targeting first to run an ad. This will help Facebook to collect some data of your audience who could be your future customer. Run different ads like traffic, video, lead generation, etc to help Facebook identify the right audience for your business.
After running a core targeting ad for some time, make a custom audience of website visitors, video views, etc, and start retargeting and remarketing ads. This will help you to reach the audience who have already seen or interacted with your ad before.
In the end, make a lookalike audience of the source audience (custom audience), and reach more people.
Targeting the right audience is the key to successful Facebook Ads. I hope, this article gave you an insight into targeting the right audience on Facebook.
Do leave a comment, if you have queries!
Thank you for sharing this amazing information. I will now focus on custom and lookalike audience for retargeting my audience.
Hi Saurav. You should definitely go for custom & lookalike audience.
Hi Saugat,
Audiences always have a need for relatability.
And I’ve always felt that instead of making a topic-expertise your reference, it’s much better when you make your reader(target audience) the reference point.
Then you’ll find yourself writing for the individual, who will actually read your content. But that’s only possible when you define a target audience.
However, I like your idea about lookalike audiences and how Facebook helps us obtain similar audiences based on demography and interests.
Very informative post.
Thanks
Hi Archie,
Would definitely talk about targeting the right audience for any business in the coming days. But in this article, I just wanted to clarify how Facebook ads work while targeting with core, custom & lookalike audiences.
its really amazing ! Thank you Saugat sir for this information.
Hi ramesh. Most welcome.
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