Techniques to build relevant Audiences for Facebook Advertising

Part of Pearmill’s Facebook Advertising Playbook

In order to understand why we use certain strategies for Facebook Advertising — we think it’s important for a brief lesson on how the Facebook marketing engine works.

Because of these two dynamics, it then follows that the more you spend (and the larger the size of the people who you’d like to reach), the more expensive any campaign gets as you’ll be competing with more advertisers (#1) and you’ll slowly run out of the cheapest users within your audience (#2).

As a marketer, your job is to go to battle against all the other marketers in the ecosystem to win against those market dynamics. Through a rigorous process and approach (at least as of 2018), this is still possible.

In general, you should attempt to have a diverse audience strategy. This means you should:

Why? Because when you have diversity of audience — you’re doing as much as you can to take advantage of Facebook’s discounted pacing, and finding more specific ways of targeting your audience (usually) helps with conversion rates since you can provide more optimized creative for each segment.

With that said, there are a few methods to use when it comes to coming up with targeting options:

This is the most broad to target audiences. You should attempt to target your audiences based on interests they might have, behaviors they share, and/or their demographics. (e.g. age, location, etc.)

Broad targeting solves for the fact that you’ll just have more people in the bucket, which means there are potentially lots of cheap users for Facebook to target for you.

However, it also means that unless you’re selling Pepsi — there will likely be a lot of false positives. You’ll want to use “selective” creative (which we’ll describe more in future series) to filter folks out and other audience targeting options (described below) to help with this problem.

With all that said, consider the following when you’re creating audiences:

If you already have an existing set of potential users and customers (i.e. if you’ve had a newsletter) then you can use them on Facebook to create an audience.

Facebook attempts to match emails, phone numbers, names, and addresses to their dataset and lets you target those who were matched.

If you have such a list, this is likely the easiest way to get started and get easy wins. The main issue with this approach is that if you don’t have a substantially big list (the minimum is 100 on Facebook, but anything below 500 is rarely useful) then the upside is rather small.

If you do have a large list, then we even recommend segmenting the list with any internal data you may have (or enrich it using tools like FullContact) and targeting each segment separately with relevant content. For example, you may want to segment your list based on activity, recency, or any other factor you think is relevant.

Note that you can use custom audiences in Lookalike audiences described below as well.

Facebook gives marketers the ability to create audiences that look like other audiences (i.e. in their behaviors, interests, etc.) — which can be a great tool.

You can create Lookalike audiences based off:

Consider the following when creating lookalikes:

You can retarget users who have engaged with your ads in some way, have been on your website and/or app, or are existing customers of your’s.

You should retarget in scenarios where you’d like the user to take a specific action (usually the next step in your funnel, or a repeat purchase of some kind).

Sometimes it makes more sense to think about your advertising strategy in multiple steps:

For simple products or low-priced products, you can actually merge #2 and #3 when it comes to retargeting. But for complex products (like high-priced SAAS products), it may be worth using a more comprehensive strategy.

For the first step of this multi-step funnel approach, you can use all the audience ideas above. However, for the second two steps you can target people based on:

It’s important to keep track of audiences that have worked, ones you’ve already saturated (which we’ll explain in more detail later on), and ones that you’d like to test out. So we recommend the following:

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