Facebook/Instagram knows so much about its users. Unlike Google, on social media people share all the nitty-gritty details about their life. This provides an amazing opportunity for us advertisers to target the audience to a very granular level. Having so much data about your users means that targeting options are plenty. In this post, we are going to cover all the targeting options available to buy inventory on FB/Instagram.
When you are setting up your targeting for your next campaign, you will be using a combination of the multiple targeting options available on Facebook to narrow down your potential customer. This post only illustrates the multiple options available for building a custom audience list.
Let’s get started
To illustrate the power of FB targeting options, let us first consider an example before we dive into each and every targeting type. Login to your Facebook account and click on the audience insights link here.
Check out the snapshot of targeting people of New York, who are interested in Running with additional interests as running shoes, running clubs, and Adidas.
Here are the demographics indicating the audience match of 1.5-2 Million people providing all the relevant info as follows:
And the categories and pages the audience segment has liked so far. As you can see Facebook also provides metrics like audience match, relevance, and affinity to help you assess the quality of the audience and potential match to your business.
It does not stop here, you can even get an overview of your audience segment interaction rate so far.
Detailed/Demographic Targeting
This is where it gets interesting. Facebook has a crazy amount of demographic info about users. Users voluntarily share their age, job changes, job titles, relationship status, etc. This is a bliss to the advertisers who can pinpoint their users and be sure about getting the best possible ROAS.
As an advertiser, you have to cherry-pick the important pieces of info that are relevant to your business. Here are the basic demographic level targeting available on FB/Instagram.
Age and Gender
You can target all the users from 18-65+ and as indicated above men, women/ all genders.
Language
You can target users based on the language they speak. For example, you have written an e-book in Spanish that you would like to promote. Then you can target only the Spanish users on Facebook.
Relationship Status
Imagine you are a costume designer who specializes in wedding dresses. Your local customers are impressed by your designs and now you would like to expand nationwide. What would you do? Here is your answer 😉
Education Level
You can target users based on their education level. This is not only beneficial for universities who are trying to advertise their degree programs or courses, but also premium advertisers who use personas to identify their users.
Job Titles
If you are into IT B2B space and you would like to target your potential customers, you can use Job titles to target people who are working in a specific industry.
Life Events
Life Events targeting helps the advertiser’s target users based on a particular instance that occurred in their life like getting a new job or moved from hometown etc. You recently acquired a client who sells rental services. Furnirent.com rents furniture on a short term and long term basis. As an ad campaign manager, you would target people who have recently moved to a new place.
Parents
Now that you have been doing amazing work with FB ads, the word has spread, and now you have managed to acquire a baby formula client. Babynutri.com sells baby formula and baby food. What targeting would you use?
Market Segments
Let’s say you are an FMCG company and you have created a very authentic tangy Mexican chips and you know that it resembles an acquired taste of a popular Mexican dish. You can use the multicultural affinity/market segment targeting option on Facebook.
US Politics
There is no need for an introduction here. Facebook has been used for a lot of political election campaigns based on the data available on Facebook. Here is an overview of the options.
Location Targeting
Facebook allows you to target a particular country, city, or region. If your business has a retail store, then you can target people who are in and around that particular region.
Interest-Based Targeting
We bet that you use Facebook/Instagram on a day to day basis unless you are on social media/digital detox. What do you don when you are on social media?
You like a bunch of pages, comment on different posts, may even share a few posts. So, Facebook groups you under different interest segments based on all the above interactions. Voila, here comes interest targeting…
Here is a snapshot of the basic categories available. As you can see, if you select people interested in shopping, it further narrows down to a bunch of categories like Beauty, Clothing, Accessories, etc. And it can get even more granular as you type in.
Connections/Page Targeting
You can target only your followers or people connected to your page. The other option would be to target people who are potentially interested in liking your page so that you can reach them organically later.
We hope that this post has helped you understand all the available targeting strategies on Facebook. If you would like to learn about the different formats that Facebook provides for advertisers, please read the ultimate guide to Facebook formats in 2020 here.
