Facebook Ad Targeting

Let's start by stating that there is no faster way to get traffic than paid ads.

You can run your paid ads on thousands of websites. However, it will be a great idea if you will not ignore search engines and social media websites.

From all social media networks, Facebook deserves to be on your paid ad strategy list because:

1. Facebook has a record number of users.
2. Advertisers get powerful targetting granularity on Facebook.

Let's list the Facebook Ad targeting options.

1. Facebook Pixel

Facebook pixel is a way to retarget people who visited your website. Why is it called a pixel? Simply because you can install a Javascript code plus an invisible 1-pixel image that, when loaded, registers website visits and, if allowed, connects this data with the Facebook account.

I am sure you have noticed this several times. When you visit a website, then right after your visit, you see the company's ad on Facebook. This is a sign that The website uses Facebook pixel, and the company is running ads with pixel targeting.

Facebook pixel targeting is one of the best targeting options.

It should have priority one on the targeting strategy list.

First of all, you can use Facebook pixel targeting to suggest people follow you on Facebook. Here's how.

If you have organic traffic to your website pages you need to suggest your visitors become your followers. The first option you should seriously consider is offering them to sign up for your email newsletter. You can use the Facebook Pixel to target them on Facebook and ask them to follow your page for the new content. People who wouldn't sign up for your newsletter may follow your Facebook page.

By the way, you can target people who have signed up for your email newsletter separately or you can invite them to follow your page by telling them about your Facebook page in the broadcast email/s.

If you don't do this, the chances are high that people who visited some of your pages will not visit your website anymore.

With Facebook Pixel, you can target them whenever you want (within the next 180 days)

Installation and setup of the Facebook pixel is a big topic covered extensively on the internet. You need to check the guide adapted for your web platform.

If you have a custom website with 100% flexibility on design choices or use the modern blogging platform that allows full customization and supports Google Tag Manager, I suggest installing Facebook Pixel with the Google Tag Manager.

Why? Because the Google Tag Manager is a solution where you can add as many analytics extensions as you want. Moreover, you install Google Tag Manager once on your website, and then you can make any changes, add and remove plugins, update them, and anything else without touching your website.

So when looking for installation instructions, please check if you can install analytics plugins with Google Tag Manager.

2. Lookalike audiences

If you have a Facebook pixel, you can also target people who have similar interests as your website visitors. You will use lookalike audiences for this.

You can construct lookalike audiences in relation to your page followers, website visitors (Facebook pixel), and customer lists (email list or another list of customers who gave you consent to contact them).

Facebook pixel would not be efficient if you have captured less than a couple of hundred visits. If you start working on a brand new website, you need to consider other target options until you have enough visitors to create an ad with Facebook pixel targeting.

If your page following is small, you don't have many visitors, or your list of customers is small, lookalike audiences would not work efficiently.

Targeting options that we discussed up until now are great. Let's now continue to the next option.

3. Facebook Groups

If we can target Facebook groups where our target customers hang out, that would be awesome.

I think that you can find people who have a deep interest in the subject with group targeting.

First of all, there are many organic ways to target group members, and you should give them a try before jumping to paid strategy.

With the organic way, you can post helpful content and interact with the group members to get new clients.

However, you need to be careful with promoting your company there. Most groups will state in their policies that promotional material is not allowed. Even if they don't, they or people in the group would not be happy with your posts if you post promotional staff.

You can read this awesome post about targeting people from the Facebook groups. The article uses the Phantombuster for scrapping Facebook users from the group.

Here is how to use Phantombuster to extract contacts from a Facebook group.

If you install the Chrome extension, the session information will be filled in for you.

Now you can hit the Save button.

Afterward, you need to enter the desired Group URL. Here is where to find it. If you go to the group's main page, you will see the group's URL on the address bar. The URL should be something like this: https://www.facebook.com/groups/333990721720303. By the way, this is the URL of the Modern blogging Facebook Group. If you are interested in blogging, you can join the group.

Paste the target group URL and proceed to the next step.

In the next step, the software will suggest you a reasonable limit for the amount of scrapped profiles. This is important because your account might be blocked otherwise. So please follow the instructions here.

For the next step, set the "Mode" value to "Manual" and the "Notifications" value to "In case of Errors" and proceed to the final step.

Click Launch and wait for the results!

Please have patience because this is a heavy operation. Normally, it takes several minutes.

Please note that you are not allowed to use this list in Facebook's Customer List targeting. If you read the terms of the Customer List targeting, you'll see that you can only use lists for them you have consent.

So how would you leverage this list?

Here is how. You can check the additionalData column values. This will give info about the people on the list. This field will mainly show the workplace or the occupation of people. I think that this column shows the same information that is visible when we hover the mouse on the person's profile.

Using this information, you can send a Friend Request to the people whose profiles look interesting to you, direct message them, follow them and start conversations with them.

If you direct message them and they would be interested in your offering, you have a lead. If they accept your friend request and you share anything about your products and services, they might see the posts and become interested.

Note that the scrapping tool didn't give information otherwise unavailable to you. However, it saves a lot of time for you.

But the most scalable thing that you can do with the scrapped list is to come up with the interest that people have in the list and target them with the interest targeting.

3. Interests

Now let us talk about interests in Facebook ad targeting.

Let's get started by targeting followers of popular people and influencers, and businesses. Some famous people, businesses become "interest"s on Facebook.

For example, you can target people who are interested in Neil Patel page and related pages by picking "Neil Patel" in the Interests box.

You can target many companies here. Just go to the ads console and type some of the company names in your niche and see if their name is available as an interest.

You can find abstract notions there. For example, you can target people interested in website builders, online banking, web design, etc.

3. Behaviours

Here are some interesting options for filtering the audience by behavior. For example, you can target Facebook Page admins. They are business owners or ad agency workers.

For B2C physical products, you might target engaged shoppers. These are the people who clicked Shop now button in the past week. Note that only some ads have the "Shop Now" call to action text.

Many times companies use "Learn more" even for B2C shop ads. Check this excellent guide about Facebook ads call-to-action statistics.

4. Demographics

You can also filter your audience by demographics if you want to.

Great options are available here.

For example, if you advertise in the United States of America, you can target the top 5%, 10%, 25% household income earners.

You can target people by professions as is shown below:

Conclusion

We talked a little bit about targeting options on Facebook. You can read the official documentation here. I hope that this guide helped you discover new ways to target potential customers on Facebook.