The Four Facebook Targeting Methods You Must Know

If you’re running Facebook Ads, you need to know these 4 Facebook audience targeting methods.
Hitting the right audience can be the difference between success and failure in any Facebook marketing campaign.

Timestamps:
[0:44] AdWords versus Facebook
[1:57] Method 1: Profile Settings
[2:25] Method 2: Interest-based Targeting
[3:03] Method 3: Behavior-based Targeting
[3:40] Method 4: Friends of People that Like my Page
[4:32] Demo: Facebook audience generation
[6:59] Demo: Detailed Targeting
[10:50] Advanced Audience Methods Overview

I’m going let you in on a little secret here at ParaCore. It’s what we think about every time we create a video or piece of marketing collateral, and it’s ParaCore’s persona or our ideal audience.

Does that surprise you? Well, it probably should because it’s not accurate at all. However, if it was, we could use Facebook to target that exact individual.

Facebook Audience targeting is incredibly powerful and quite a bit different than Google AdWords.

Today we’re going to talk about Facebook’s basic Audience targeting, touch on some of the advanced features and give you a little bit of insight into how Facebook works.

My name is Adam Arkfeld, I’m owner of ParaCore, a pay-per-click lead generation agency.

[0:44] AdWords versus Facebook
First, we’re going to talk about how Facebook is different than Google AdWords.

In Google AdWords, someone has a problem, they go to Google, they type in what they’re looking for, ad appears, they go to your landing page, and boom, the consumer is connected with the advertiser, and the problem solved.

In Facebook advertising, it’s a little bit different. A Facebook consumer is on Facebook, they’re scrolling through their feed and an advertiser has pushed advertisements in front of them based on their Audience targeting.

Audience targeting is generated through a Facebook user’s settings, their behaviors and their actions.

So think about it, when you signed up for Facebook, you put in a bunch of information when you first set up your account. You put in your birthday which in turn generated your age. You put in your gender, where you live, where you work, your job title, your relationship status, all of those factors are part of your profile.

Then you started interacting with your friends and you started liking Pages, commenting on Pages, clicking on ads knowingly or unknowingly.

All of these behaviors create your profile that Facebook advertisers then use to target ads directly to you.

Today we’re going to talk about the four basic types of advertising that advertisers use when they’re targeting you.

Those are your Profile Settings, your Interests, Behaviors and then Friends of people that like your Page.

[1:57] Method 1: Profile Settings
So Profile Settings are what I just mentioned. Someone creates a new account on Facebook, they put in all their personal information and it’s extremely concrete and its 100% accurate, and advertisers can use that information when they’re targeting you.

So if they want a male in the city of Los Angeles that is between 35 and 37 and works at a large company, an advertiser can put those exact details into their Audience targeting and hit that exact person at any given time.

[2:25] Method 2: Interest-based Targeting
The second type of targeting is Interest-Based targeting.

So once you’ve put in your settings, now you’re interacting with all sorts of people and content on Facebook.

You might like a certain Page, you’ll start commenting, you’ll start interacting with your friends, if you happen to like political pages and you’re liking a lot of political Pages and you’re reading a lot of political articles, you’re going to be tagged as a political junkie by Facebook and they’ll even segment you as far as Republican or Democratic leaning.

So as an advertiser you can then say, “I want to target my ad to this demographic, Republicans, in this location, that are males, between 34 and 37,” and the advertisements will go directly to you.

[3:03] Method 3: Behavior-based Targeting
The third type of targeting is Behavior targeting, and this is behaviors for online and offline activity.

Facebook has partnered with a number of data providers to pull in their third party data and associate it with its Facebook users.

The data comes from loyalty cards, warranties, behavior patterns that consumer product companies have used for decades.

Now that data is being pulled into Facebook associated with your email account and advertisers are using that to target more ads to you.

So they know what you do outside of Facebook in order to make their advertising more relevant. It’s incredibly powerful.

[3:40] Method 4: Friends of People that Like my Page
The final method of targeting is Friends of people that like your Page.

As an advertiser, you have to manage a Page. So theoretically, if you’re targeting friends of people that already like your Page they are similar to the people that like your Page, and they are a fairly decent Audience to target.

When advertisers are creating their ad they say, “Okay, I’m advertising for this business, I want to make sure that all the friends of the people that like my business see my ad.” It’s not my immediate fans but it’s the people that are friends of the fan.

When they see the ad, they will actually see their friend’s name next to the ad saying that they liked the Page as well. There’s an element of social credibility that comes into play.

Okay. Next, I’m going to go through creating the Audience profile of the person I mentioned at the top of the video and I’m going to walk you through it so that when you see how I’m building it out it’ll give you an idea of what options are available and how the Audience targeting actually works.

[4:32] Demo: Facebook audience generation
I wanted to do a walk-through of the AdWords interface earlier because I find that it’s easier to sometimes see how things are built out rather than talking about it conceptually.

This is where we create Basic Audiences. On the right-hand side you’ll see the potential reach, it’s 196 million people in the United States aged 18 to 65 plus, and if you go to other countries, that’ll obviously get bigger because Facebook has a lot more users, but this is the default.

Based on the top of the video we are going to call this, “Late ’90s Marching Band Kids.”

This next section here is Custom Audiences, this allows you to filter even more based on let’s say visitors to your website or Lookalike Audience for an uploaded list, we’re not going to go into a lot of detail about that today, but those are other options to get even more advanced in your Audience targeting.

The location allows you to choose everyone in the location; people who live in the location, recently in the location or traveling in a location.

That means they’re currently in a certain market, however, their profile says that they actually live in New York but they’re in Arizona and their phones’ GPS is telling them that.

You can show them very specific travel related ads because they’re visiting, only because they don’t actually live here but they’re visiting here.

We’re just going to do people who live in this location, and we’re going to choose Phoenix, it’s notifying us that I’ve removed United States automatically, we’re going to adjust this to 35 miles just for fun, you can do between 10 and 50 miles, and you can also get a little bit more advanced with this.

You can drop a pin, let’s say that Gold Canyon is a market that works really well for us we’re going to say 5 miles around Gold Canyon, then we’re also going to exclude the 85022 zip code.

When you zoom out, you can see that there are a lot of combinations you can run for Audience targeting. You can add/remove locations, get very specific around radiuses if you’re a retail store or a dentist or location specific business.

We’re going to remove the Gold Canyon option because it tends to mess with Audience size a little bit, and the next few options are pretty self-explanatory.

You’ve got age, so late ’90s marching band kids are, you know, 35 to 40 or so, and we’re also going to do men and women, keep it to both.

When you scroll back up to the top here we see the potential reach is 310,000 now, we see our options starting to fill out; location options, age, gender would be in here if we decided to choose a specific gender.

[6:59]Demo: Detailed Targeting
The detailed targeting is what we primarily have been talking about. There are four different types just remind you. So they’re Profile Settings, so one example of Profile Settings is an upcoming birthday.

There are 39 million people that have an upcoming birthday within one week, so if we were to select that, that would then select people that only have an upcoming birthday within one week based on their birthday that they put in their Profile Settings.

So this is incredibly accurate targeting because it’s based on facts, based on what people put in their settings.

You can also use the Browse option back here and browse by demographics, in this case it would be life events, and down here at the bottom it’s upcoming birthday.

But you can also see recently moved, newlywed, when people are saying that they just got married or they just got engaged or they just got a relationship on Facebook, all that information is trapped and you can then start advertising to them based on those life events.

If someone just got married or just got in a relationship, you can start advertising flowers to them or gifts or something along those lines that’s relevant to them at that particular time in their life.

That’s the first method of targeting which is Settings. Next we have Interest-based targeting. I’m going to show you Home Office here for a second just to illustrate that. On the right hand side here you have employers, demographics, behaviors and interests, these are different types of targeting, all with the same keyword. If you are interested in Home Office related websites, articles people that are commenting on things that will be an interest.

Demographics is people who work in a home office, this is pulled from a third party source called Epsilon which you can see here on the right-hand side, people who have listed home office as their employers, that’s also shown here on the right hand side, this is a short description of these which is often very helpful, sometimes it’s not very helpful, and then behaviors so people in households that buy electronics for the home office, software, printers, scanners, and other gadgets. And that’s purchase activity by Acxiom.

These are the third party data providers that were number three before the behaviors. This data is imported based on user behavior and activity, it’s then associated with user accounts in Facebook and we then use that for targeting.

Here, Acxiom’s data is being used, and in this case, Epsilon’s data is being used. And they’re all the same keyword; however, the data is being pulled in differently.

That’s really good to know. Again, based on our profile at the top of the video, we’re going to do marching bands, anyone that’s interested in marching band, boom, there are 3.5 million people and we want someone that spends a lot of money.

Instead of just adding here, these are “or’s”, so it’s do you have an upcoming birthday OR do you like marching band, we’re actually going to kill this, now we’re going to narrow it to people that are high spenders.

We’re going to hit browse which is an easy way to filter through these things, we are going to go to behavior, we’re going to hit financial, and then we’re going to do spending methods.

You can target people that have multiple lines of credit or just one line of credit, people that have bank cards, credit card, high spenders, debit cards, gas, department and retail store cards, we’re going to say credit cards high spenders.

People that spend a lot of money on their credit cards also like marching band., and we’ll go back up here and we see the Audience has decreased a lot.

It’s down to 30 people. So this is starting to get very, very specific, maybe a little too specific for a real marketing campaign, but it just shows you how detailed they can get.

The fourth targeting method that we talked about was adding a connection type. Facebook Pages, People who like your Page, Friends of people who like your Page, so we’re going to click Friends of people who like our Page and then ParaCore.

Now we’re down to 20 people and 20 people is basically the minimum, they’re not going to show you less than 20 people, but it does show you how specific you can get and how really refined you can get with the targeting methods.

[10:50] Advanced Audience Methods Overview
So there you have it. That’s how you create Custom Audiences within Facebook’s Audience settings.

I’m now going to talk a little bit about some of the more advanced Audiences, we’re not going to go into a lot of depth, but I just want to mention them just so that you know they exist.

The first one is Customer List. If you have a CRM or a large customer list, you can export that information out of your CRM, upload it to Facebook, they will then match the emails to all Facebook users, and you can advertise directly to your existing customers.

If you have a lot of past customers or existing customers or just a large database of people that you want to market to, you can upload that list on Facebook and send your message directly to them. It’s great for upsells, reminders, all sorts of advertising efforts.

Once you’ve uploaded that list, you can actually then create a Lookalike Audience. A Lookalike Audience tells Facebook, “Hey, these are our customers, we want to use their attributes but we want to create an Audience that’s similar to them, not exactly them, because the similar Audience will be likely similar to other consumers that we want to target.

Take our current customers, create an Audience that’s similar and we’re going to market to them. Lookalike Audiences are also incredibly powerful.

The next Audience type is Website Traffic. Website Traffic uses the Facebook pixel and it tracks all of your activity across the website.

You can use the pixel to then retarget to consumers that are hitting your website. So, that’s that creepy, “I visited a website now they’re following me on Facebook,” sort of experience that consumers see.

You can also show advertisements based on very specific pages that someone visits. If they visit a signup page but don’t sign up, you can show them a specific ad or content or just the website in general. Facebook pixels are really powerful.

The final targeting method I’m just going to mention quickly is what they call Engagement, which is a little bit goofy because everything on Facebook is engagement. But the Engagement targeting method applies to Lead Ads, Canvas Ads and Video Ads, and it’s based on how engaged people are with those ads.

Someone sees a Lead Ad and they open it and they don’t complete the form, you can target those individuals. If they open the form and they complete it and they then submit it you can also target those individuals.

You can basically target people based on how far through the funnel of that lead form they got. The same with videos, you can target within 25, 50 or 75 percent, and then on the Canvas Ads, you can target those individuals if they interact with the Canvas Ad format which is pretty complex. So just for them it’s basically if you interacted with it, you’re in good shape.

Thanks for watching today. Those are the basic Facebook Audience targeting and touching on the advanced Audience targeting methods.

If you’re interested in talking more about Facebook please reach out, my contact information is in the description below.

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel, we’re going to be releasing a lot more videos just like this one, related to everything pay-per-click just for advertisers.

Thanks again.