Audiences for Facebook advertising: everything you need to know

How to target the right users with different audience options for Facebook advertising

Among the key elements that are important to pay attention to if you want to achieve success are the different audiences for Facebook advertising. Even if you have an amazing product, great design and killer copy, if you don't present it to the right person, you can't expect good results.

What types of audiences are there on Meta's advertising platform? How are they created? What are they used for? The answers to these and other questions can be found below.

Audience types for Facebook advertising

👉 Audiences for Facebook advertising are selected at the ad set (ad group) level.

And are divided into two main types: specific and broad. What you choose for your advertising depends on the goal you are trying to achieve and what resources you have available.

With specific audiences, you have very specific parameters that limit the range of people who will see your ad.

With general audiences, it's the opposite. Each approach has its pros and cons. Read down to find out what they are.

🎯 Specific audiences

For specific audiences, the targeting options are many. You can choose your audience according to:

• the ads they clicked on;
• the pages to which they commit;
• their activity on Meta platforms;
• demographic information such as age, gender and location;
• the device they use.

⭐️ By demographics

Choose the age range, gender and location of your audience according to the profile of your perfect customer and also where your business operates.

Then, if you want to narrow or expand your audience, you have several options:

• Detailed interest targeting;
• CUSTOM AUDIENCE;
• lookalike audience;
• ADvantage+ audience.

⭐️ Detailed interest targeting

Here you can choose the audience that will see your ad to match certain criteria related to user interests and behaviors.

However, in order to see these options, you have to firmly opt Meta out of their ADvantage+ audience - an option automatically selected by the algorithm, which we'll talk about a bit more below.

Once you've set up the demographics of your leads, you can move on to selecting the options to flesh out your range of people.

Click the Browse button or start typing in the box and the options will appear. You can add up to 100 options. Some examples of what audiences you can target this way are:

• people who are interested in football;
• those who work in the IT field in managerial positions;
• people who will soon have a birthday;
• who have completed higher education;
• to whom a child has recently been born;
• and countless others.

What should you pay attention to when using this type of targeting?

• If you add three different interest options (football, beer and TV), the algorithm will find users in your chosen age group and location who match one of the three criteria. So in the audience you will have users who are interested in football and separately others who are interested in beer.

• If you want to narrow the circle further, select Narrow Audience. This will focus on audiences that meet the criteria selected above and the additional criteria you will enter in this field.

For example, in the top box you type 'football', in the bottom 'beer. This way you can find users who are interested in both football and beer.

• You can add and exclude users based on their interests and demographics to further refine your audience.

Look at this kind of targeting as setting conditions with "and" / "or". In the very first field, the audience responds to one or the other of the options you've chosen.

In the second Narrow audience field, you can now add "and" - this will give you access to people who meet either criteria.

• There is a third field "Narrow further", with which you can add another level of specificity and thus have an audience that meets all three of your criteria at the same time . This will further narrow the circle and make the audience more specific.

However, it's important not to overdo the specifics, because that can make your audience too small and your ad won't be effective.

⭐️ Custham Auditorium

This targeting option allows you to discover the audiences you already have among people who use Meta products.

You can create a Kustom audience from a variety of sources, including:

• traffic to your website;
• Meta pixels and the actions that users have performed on your website;
• customers who have purchased from you;
• customer/email subscriber lists/leads;
• users engaged with your ads and Facebook/Instagram accounts.

👉 What's important to know about shortlist audiences for Facebook advertising?

Customised audiences for Facebook advertising are primarily used for retargeting.

These are groups of people who have already had some interaction with your business. They've visited your website, viewed a product, added it to their cart, completed an order.

Others may have left their email address, followed your Facebook page or clicked on another ad.

👉 The important thing in this case is that these are users who already know your business to some extent, so they are not a new audience.

You can create separate Kustom audiences that are at different stages in your marketing funnel. With relevant advertising messages for each audience, you can gradually move them forward and turn them from leads into loyal customers.

In order to create shortcode audiences with people who have performed actions on your website, you need to have Meta Pixel installed to track them. To find out how to do this, read how to prepare your website for Facebook advertising.

⚙️ How do you create a shortom audience?

Meta Ads Manager -> Audiences -> Create Audience -> Custom Audience -> Select Source

When you're ready to work on growing your business and finding new customers, you can use shortlist audiences to create lookalike (or similar) audiences based on them.

⭐️ Lookalike (similar) audiences for Facebook advertising

👉 These are groups of people that the Meta algorithm says are similar to those in your Kustom audience and are likely to perform similar actions.

Through them, you can extend the reach of your ads and attract new consumers who are willing to show interest in your products or services.

For example, if you create a lookalike audience from users who have completed an order on your website, you can use that as a base from which to create a lookalike audience.

It will have users who the algorithm says are also likely to order.

To find new users who look like your current ones, the Meta algorithm uses information like demographics, interests, and behaviors.

When you create a lookalike audience, you can choose how much it resembles the original audience. This is expressed in percentages and affects its size.

⬇️ ⬆️ The smaller the percentage, the more similarity there will be between the new and original shortom audience, but the number of users will be smaller.

⬆️ ⬇️ A higher percentage means more users, but different from yours.

Meta recommends using a lookalike audience of between 1,000 and 5,000 people as the source from which to create a lookalike audience. Depending on your goal, the possibilities for experimentation are almost endless.

You can create an audience similar to:

• visitors to your website over a period of time;
• users who have added products to their cart;
• customers with a completed order;
• users who follow your Facebook page;
• users who have interacted with your Facebook/Instagram ad;
• and many other options :)

👉 What is important to know when creating a Lookalike audience?

• You have to choose a country. This way, the algorithm will include people who look like those in your Kustom audience and live in that location.
• Your original kustom audience must contain at least 100 people from the same country to be usable for the purpose.
• Users in the original audience are automatically excluded from your lookalike audience.

⚙️ How do you create a Lookalike audience?

Meta Ads Manager -> Audiences -> Create Audience -> Lookalike Audience -> Select shortlist audience source -> Select location -> Select audience size in percentage

⭐️ How to harness the power of AI in specific audiences for Facebook advertising?

As with detailed interest-based targeting, you can trust artificial intelligence to expand the range of people who will see your ad.

You'll find out if this is the right solution for your business by testing both strategies.

🎯Advanced or broad audiences

With this type of targeting , you rely on Meta's algorithm to find the right audience for your ad. This can happen without setting any criteria.

👉 Artificial intelligence learns what the best audience is for the target you've chosen based on data from your pixel and previous ad campaigns.

That's why this audience is called broad or extended - it provides almost limitless flexibility to the algorithm.

Of course, you can also participate in the process by adding specific information. It will act as a guide for the algorithm in finding the right audience for your ads.

You can also filter your audience by excluding certain ages or locations.

The audience targeting possibilities for Facebook advertising are almost endless. Depending on your goal, the size of your business, your advertising budget, and your previous experience with other ad campaigns, you can easily choose the most relevant users.

✨ Proper audience targeting is one of the foundations on which any successful ad on Facebook or any other platform is based.

If you prefer to trust the experience and expertise of professionals in the field, turn to our ADvantage team.