How Ad Targeting Works In Social Media Advertising
Finding and targeting the right audience channel is one of the most important aspects of a successful ad campaign.
Sure, your product or service may be unique. The price is competitive. The creative is eye-popping and the ad copy is clever.
If you’re targeting the wrong audience, all of these features don't mean a thing.
There are four primary ways to build an ad audience.
Interests
Lookalikes
Retargeting
Location-Based Targeting
Broad Targeting
Using the right mix of these audience types is really where targeting can make or break your campaign.
Let’s break down these features:
1. Interest Targeting
Interest targeting is just what it sounds like: targeting users who have displayed a variety of interests and/or behaviors.
If you’re selling fishing poles, it’s only logical to include fishermen (or women). Targeting should be based on audience interest/occupation. Testing similar interests such as “boating”, “hunting”, “camping”, etc, should also be considered.
Additionally, if your budget is large enough, it’s not a bad idea to test some interests that may not directly correlate with your product such as “hockey” or “travel.” While these may not seem like a natural fit at first, testing allows us to see if interest is generated in different audiences.
2. Lookalike Audiences
Lookalikes are a bit more complicated. Meta takes users who’ve taken a certain action, such as visiting your website or engaging with your profile, and creates an audience of similar people.
Lookalike audiences share similar characteristics to users who have taken the chosen action. For example, you can create a lookalike audience based on people who have engaged with your ad or made a purchase on your website.
Lookalike audiences can range from a 1% lookalike (the most similar) to a 10% lookalike (the broadest). As of 2022, with increased privacy on the internet, we are finding that a wider audience is outperforming smaller audiences.
Using a wider percentage between 5% - 10% is recommended.
3. Retargeting Audiences
Retargeting audiences are created by either code placed on your website (like a pixel) or platform data (like users who interact with your profile).
Website-based retargeting audiences give you the option to target people who have made purchases or initiated a checkout. This type of targeting is slowly becoming less reliable due to increased privacy on the web.
While website-based retargeting is still extremely valuable, we recommend tapping into your platform-based retargeting audiences to make sure you’re reminding interested consumers about your product.
Platform-based retargeting can range from a user watching one of your videos, liking your posts, or following your page. Platform-based retargeting will not track actions that happen outside of the social media platform.
Depending on the intended action, retargeting audiences can be used at any stage of the funnel. If the consumer viewed a video, it’s recommended that you serve traffic ads to generate attention to your website. If the consumer simply adds to the cart, a conversion ad will push toward purchase.
4. Location Based Targeting
Location targeting allows you to target your audience in a specific geographic location. Specifically, this type of targeting aims at an entire country, city, state, or as close as a 5-mile radius around a specific address.
Location targeting is a great strategy for local businesses or those who only operate in a specific geographic area. If you are only targeting a single city or radius around a specific area, you may want to consider removing interest targeting. This is especially true for Facebook; the platform encourages the use of broad audiences.
If you’re targeting a larger area, we would recommend layering your location targets with an interest, lookalike, or retargeting audience.
5- Broad Targeting
Broad targeting is a modern phenomenon relevant to Facebook. This is a targeting strategy born out of privacy settings that allow users to have more control over how they are being tracked by marketers.
For example, if someone has chosen to opt-out of tracking on Facebook, Facebook may not be able to add a person to an interest-targeting list. This person also may have opt-ed out of cookie tracking on your website which would also make them difficult to capture in retargeting audiences as well.
Board Targeting is Facebook’s current solution to this problem. Like location targeting, the only targeting criteria you would add is the location and age. Then allow facebook’s learning algorithm to do the rest.
In the agency, we have seen lots of success with this targeting strategy, but it does require a larger budget to be successful.
There are many different aspects of a successful Ad campaign including having great copy, creative, and strategic approach. If you’re interested in starting your own social media ad campaigns, get in touch with us today and we can schedule some time to talk about your campaign’s goals.