How to Better Utilize Targeting in Facebook Ads
At some point in the past year or so, Facebook’s advertising department clearly had some breakthrough moment as the social platform has quickly become the go-to platform by which to achieve highly targeted ad campaigns. In this post, we break down how advertisers are using FB to achieve a wide range of goals.
First off, it’s important to acknowledge that there are quite the variety of ad types you can choose from when advertising on Facebook, whether your goal is to increase engagement with a particular post, garner more page likes or website clicks, site conversions, app installs or engagement, video views, or to promote offer engagement.
From there, Facebook provides you with a ridiculous amount of targeting opportunities that allow for a good amount of latitude in terms of reaching a very broad or extremely niche audience. In addition, Facebook allows you to create custom target audiences based on your existing email contacts. These custom audiences can help greatly in terms of nurturing leads, whether it be through uploading a current customer list to use as a negative list for another campaign or to target certain areas of your email list, like those who never open your emails.
Another unique Facebook targeting option is Lookalike Audiences, in which Facebook culls together a list of the same size and demographics as your existing criteria to help you reach a qualified audience you might have otherwise overlooked.
So what can targeting achieve on Facebook? It can lead to an increase in sales by running ads targeting the customers of competitors. Or if you are in search of greater PR exposure, than be sure to target all of the journalists, publications, and local media outlets you want to reach. And be sure to target influencers, writers, and journalists in your industry and area of expertise with especially excellent content with the goal of earning some quality links to your site content.
Of course, when it comes to creating an excellent FB ad, while aesthetic variables like having a killer image or old tricks like A/B testing are ways to constantly improve your ad performance, targeting is one method that can never receive enough scrutiny from your team.
