Facebook Ad Targeting can be one of the most crucial campaign elements to help you get high ROI from your ads campaigns.

Untargeted ads can result in lower click rates and lower returns on investment

Don’t waste your money!

Instead, reach out to people who see your ad and say “THIS IS THE BEST THAN EVERYTHING I NEED NOW!” “

Instead of waiting for sales to come in, you’re actively participating.

Marketers have the advantage that Facebook and Google collect tons of data about their users. This data includes (perhaps unrelated, but still valuable for targeting ):

• Messenger includes all messages and data (including stickers) that you’ve ever sent.

• Information about the interests of your friends (because there’s a high chance that you’ll like it too!

• You can access your microphone and webcam, as well as where you are and which applications you have installed. Access to your contact information, email, calendar, call history and messages can be accessed.

This is the end of it.

This sounds scary. This is why Facebook advertising targeting is so powerful.

You’ll find a lot of cat food ads when you search for “cat food”.      

How do you improve the targeting of your Facebook ads

These three pillars are essential.

1. All targeting options
2. Avoid common Facebook targeting mistakes
3. Targeting is based on your specific use case

This article has three main topics. Learn something new today.      

Are you ready for your Facebook campaigns to be a success? Your results will increase by 50-200 %.

Let’s go!

These links will lead you to the most relevant topic or the entire guide.

Part 1: An overview of Facebook’s advertising targeting options for 2019. 

Part 2 – Top 5 Facebook Ad-Targeting Mistakes You Can Avoid

Part 3 – Facebook Ad Targeting Best Practices For the TOP 3 Business Types

Part 1: An overview of Facebook’s advertising targeting options for 2019.      

Media and advertisers believe that the average person sees 5000+ ads per day.

To see all 5k ads targeted at us daily, we would have to spend 100 hours more per day 

We don’t see 99 percent of the ads we see. We only see what is most important to us.

It’s as if a Snickers advertisement appeared suddenly when you were hungry…

What if it was there all along? Image source

It’s simple:

1. People see too many ads.
2. They see only the ads that are relevant to their needs

You must target people most likely to be interested in your product as a digital marketer. 

Facebook offers these options to target ads:

1. Reserved Audiences
2. Custom Audiences
3. Lookalike Audiences

If you’re new to Facebook advertising, try several Saved Audiences. After you feel comfortable with the basics of Facebook advertising you can move to Custom or Lookalike Audiences.

Facebook Saved Audiences – All You Need To Know

Target any Facebook user anywhere in the world using saved audiences that are based on their demographics and location.

This is a complete list of all Facebook Saved Audience Targeting features:

1. Localization
2. Age
3. Gender
4. Language
5. Targeting details
6. Connectivity

Soon, you’ll be able to choose which of these targeting methods to use.

Localization

Target people based on their location by setting up a campaign using FB ads Manager

• Types of countries (ex. France)
• Regions or States
• Cities (ex. Type in New York ).
• Postal codes
• Addresses
• Sort by country or city (ex. Type in New York, France span>
• Worldwide (type Worldwide
• Ex: Type Europe by country group or geographic region
• By free trade zone (ex. Type in GCC, Gulf Cooperation Council span>
• Within a country by sub-regions
• Additional features (ex. Type in iTunes app store country, Emerging markets span>

The Ads manager lets you choose Browse to open a dropdown with countries and regions.

If you are looking for a specific address, you can set a pin to point to it on the map.

Use a pin to target specific areas

Don’t target specific locations. Facebook lets you exclude certain areas.

Targeting exclusions:

You can choose from local people, who have been there recently or are traveling to the area.

Use the default option “People who reside here”

Age & Gender

These features are simple – You can use these features to make your Facebook ads more relevant to your target audience’s age and gender.

Targets based on gender and age

Language

Language targeting is an excellent tool for advertising in multiple languages such as in Europe.

You can create multiple ad campaigns using different languages and target specific audiences with your ad set.

If you’re targeting non-English-speaking markets with your ads in English, it is best to leave the language targeting up to Facebook’s algorithms.

Select the language that you want to target

Targeting details

Advertisers have the opportunity to target specific individuals based on additional demographic information, interests, and behavior.

• People click on ads
• They interact with pages
• Facebook users engage in activities related to travel preferences and device use
• Demographics like age, gender, location
• Their internet speed and their mobile device 

You have many options when it comes to detailed targeting

Demographics will help you reach people based on education, income, and lifestyle. 

Education:

• Education Level
• Study Areas
• Schools
• Year for Undergrad

Life Events

• Anniversaries
• Anniversaries Within 30 Days
• A birthday within 31-60 days
• Escape from your family
• Not in your town
• Relationships with long-distance partners
• New job
• A new partnership
• First-time Engagement (1 year) 
• First-time engagement (3 months)
• Newly engaged (6 months)
• The first anniversary of the wedding
• Three years after the wedding
• Six Months after the wedding

Birthday:

• Birthday Month
• Coming birthday

Parents:

• Parents (All)
• New parents (0-12 Months)
• Parents with adult kids (18-26 years)
• Parents with school-age children (06-08 years)
• Preschoolers (03-05 Years)
• Preteen parents (08-12 Years)
• Teenager Parents (13-18 Years)
• Parents with toddlers (01 – 02 Years)

Relationship status:

• Complex
• Divorced
• Domestic Partnership
• Engaged
• In a relation
• Married
• Open Relationship
• Separate
• Single
• Unspecified
• Widowed

Work:

• Employers
• Industries
• Job Title

Interests:

(All categories listed below have specific options.

• Industry and business
• Entertainment
• Relationships and families
• Fitness and wellness
• Food & drinks
• Hobbies, and other activities
• Fashion and Shopping
• Outdoors and Sports
• Technology

Behaviors:

(All categories listed below have specific options.

• Anniversaries
• Consumer Classification
• Digital activities
• Expats
• Mobile Device User
• Mobile Device User/Device Use Time
• More categories
• Multicultural Affinity
• Politics (US).
• Buy behavior
• Soccer
• Travel

Connectivity

This audience section lets you target people who are interested in your apps, pages, events, and/or apps.

Facebook defines “connected” as someone who engages with an app, page, or event or is a friend of someone who has.

Connect-based Targeting is a great way for your page to reach its fans

This is a list listing all targeting options that are connected.

Facebook Pages

• People who like your Page 
• Friends of people that like your Page
• People who like the Page should be excluded

Apps

• People who downloaded your app
• Friends of those who have used your app
• Users who have downloaded your app should be expelled

Events

• Respondents for your event
• You can remove people who have already replied to your invitation

New information overload – Image source

If all the options above are too confusing for you and you’d like to stop using Facebook ads forever, then keep reading.

You don’t need to be specific in your ad targeting. 

You can set up a Facebook campaign to perform well by tweaking your location targeting, adding interest-based targeting layers, and setting up some targeting options.

We are now at

These are the best practices to advertise to Facebook’s Saved Audiences

1. Your audience should not exceed 10k people. This is the minimum Saved Audience size Facebook recommends to help you find your top customers.
2. Your audience doesn’t necessarily need to be known. You don’t need to know all about Detailed Targeting. Instead, you can only specify the gender and location of your target audience.
3. Use the AND+OR feature to narrow your target audience.       

Use the AND/OR feature to reach people interested in A, B, and C.

People who love cookies and milk are an example.

The whole population is still there, but

+ = All people on the planet

Make sure you have your Facebook ads up for at least 48 hours before making any conclusions.

Facebook states it takes 24 hours for an ad delivery service to adjust your ad performance level. 

Every time you adjust your Facebook advertising targeting to target a new audience, the algorithms have to find that audience to purchase ad placements at the auction. 

Facebook Custom Audiences – Everything You Need To Know

Most people who visit your website won’t convert after their first visit.

But, an eCommerce store owner mentioned in Shopify’s blog how remarketing leads via an ongoing email campaign helped most of them become buyers.

• The first email generated at least 45% of all sales
• The second account accounts for 30%
• Third place finisher was awarded 15%
• The fourth resulted in the final 10% of revenues

Custom Audiences are a great way to strike while you’re still hot.

Targeting custom audiences is almost like gaining superpowers. Imagine being an able target:

• Your blog’s most loyal readers
• Past customers of your online store
• Customers who added items to shopping carts but did not complete their purchase
• Visitors who visited your site five times in the past week. You can also check the Shipping Information page.

These audiences have become so close it is almost criminal to let them go.

Facebook is there for you. We are here to help!

This is a quick overview of all audience targeting options available in Ads Manager.

• Traffic to websites
• Customer file
• App activity
• Offline activities
• Facebook sources

You have many options to reach your most valued audience

Facebook Custom Audiences Based On Website Traffic

Does your business have a website?

Yes, it does!

Facebook Custom Audiences can be used to retarget website visitors.

Important! 

To be able to create Custom Audiences based on website traffic, you must first set up a Facebook pixel.

The Facebook Pixel is set up in approximately 2 minutes.

After you have added the Pixel to your website, you can now target:

• Everyone who visited your website in the past X days (Facebook supports up to 180-day timeframes).
• Visitors to a website that was visited in the last X days
• Visitors who visited specific pages, but not any other pages. (Use the “Exclude feature”) to exclude users from certain pages.

Facebook Pixel lets you retarget website visitors.

Target people who have attended an event by creating Standard Pixel events such as “Add to Cart”, or “Lead”.

Set up standard events to expand your targeting options.

This Facebook Guide will show you how to set up site events.

These are the most common Standard events that can help you keep track of the key actions people take on your website:

Uncertain if it is worth the effort to install the Pixel?

This is 100% true!

We’ll also show you how to target Facebook users with Custom Audiences.

1. Retarget customers who have stopped placing orders

Remarketing to abandoned shoppers is easy. 

Advertisers often forget that many people have purchased products.

A study by Adobe that looked at conversion rates for repeat customers showed that:

• Customers who have purchased twice from you before are 9x more likely than those who have bought once.
• 40% of US revenue comes from repeat or recurring customers. They make up only 8% of all visitors.

Recurring buyers offer the highest value.

How do you retarget customers from Facebook?

1. People who have purchased within the past 180 days can create a Facebook Custom Audience.
2. You can give users a break after making a purchase.

2. Retarget your Search ads audience

Google Search Ads can be highly effective in bringing people with high purchase intent to your website.

Google Search Ads’ cost per click is high. Highly competitive keywords can be as high as $20 per click.

You should use the less expensive Facebook ads for Search ads.

Larry Kim from Wordstream wrote in his article on Moz that remarketing is a great way to increase repeat visitors by 50% and convert by 51%. It also increases site time by an insane 300%.

How do you retarget your audience with Search ads and Facebook ads?

UTM tags must be used when you set up your Google Search Ads campaign. Google’s UTM builders are easy to use. 

UTM tags are added to the top of your website URL

Next, create a Facebook Custom audience with website visitors who visited links that match your Google campaign’s UTM codes. 

Remarketing is possible for your Google Ads traffic

3. Followers on Facebook and Instagram

A Facebook page for your company can be a great way to stay in touch with customers and share relevant information.

Facebook has drastically restricted organic reach for page posts because of the competition from thousands upon thousands of brands.

SocialFlow analyzed more than 3000 posts by Facebook publishers. It discovered that organic reach dropped 42% between January 2016 & May 2016.

How do you increase engagement on Facebook and increase their organic reach?

Share your page posts with your followers.

You can target:

• Everybody who has interacted with your Page
• Everybody who visited your Page
• People who interact with any advertisement or post
• Clicking on any call-to-action button was an indication of approval.
• People have sent messages to your Page.
• People who saved your Page and any of your posts

People who engage with your ads or posts could be re-marketed

We recommend you increase your Facebook page’s reach to people who are already interested in your posts and ads.

These people will interact more with your posts and increase your reach on Facebook.

Now you know how to target Facebook ads for Custom and Saved audiences. Let’s now look at the third option, Lookalike Audiences.

Facebook Lookalike Audiences – All you need to know

Our customers leave glowing reviews and are wonderful. They refer friends to our site.

Focus on your TOP 20 customers to keep your sales up.

Would you like to find more clients similar to your favorites?

Facebook Lookalike Audiences let you reach people with similar interests and activities to your high-value customers.

Here’s how Facebook Lookalike Audiences work:

A Lookalike Audience is created by selecting a source audience (a Custom account that you create with your pixel data, or fans of your Page). Facebook will identify common traits among people in the Lookalike Audience.

You can choose the size of your Lookalike Audience during the setup process. A bigger audience will increase your reach, but decrease the similarities between your source audience (source audience) and your Lookalike Audience.

The ideal size of a Lookalike Audience is between 1 000 and 50 000.

Shares on Facebook

• It may take 6 to 24 hours for you to create your Lookalike Audience. The audience will then be refreshed every 3-7 days as long as you are still targeting ads with them
• Your Lookalike Audience update is quick and easy to make it possible to target ads.
• Go to your Audience Manager page and see when your Lookalike Audience was last updated.

These five ideas will help you get started with creating Lookalike Audiences.

• Create a lookalike audience from your top 10% of customers.
• Create a lookalike audience for repeat buyers (people who purchased at least twice in the past).
• People similar to your blog readers.
• Test a similar audience of people who have visited your Facebook page.
• Create a custom audience from all your customers around the world and use it for country-based lookalikes.       

Congratulations!

You’ve read this far, which means you know all of the Facebook advertising targeting options.

Let’s now put our newly learned skills to use by learning more tricks for creating the ideal Facebook audience for your business type.

Let’s not fall for the traps of Facebook audiences before we move on to the third part.

Part 2: Top 5 Facebook Ad-Targeting Mistakes to Avoid

Facebook advertising can be mastered by creating campaigns and testing them.

It’s a sign you are trying new things and learning valuable lessons from them.

We have listed the top Facebook targeting errors so you can learn faster and focus on other mistakes.

Just kidding!

Avoiding these rookie errors will save you thousands of advertising dollars.

Here is a quick summary of the most common targeting errors we have seen while auditing hundreds upon hundreds of ad accounts:

• Over-optimizing your Facebook audience
• The most valuable audience is not used
• Advertise to multiple audiences at once
• Too early to make decisions
• Not testing new audiences

Let’s prevent this from happening to your Facebook ads account.

Mistake #1: Over-optimizing your Facebook audience

Facebook gives you many options to narrow or specify your audience.

You can be extremely precise when creating an audience by using the and-or or exclusion features.

Your audience can be narrowed infinitely

You can get so distracted by all the targeting options that you end up with just 1000 people in your target audience.

What is the point of a Facebook group with 1000 members?

Facebook algorithms can’t optimize your ad delivery if it isn’t a Custom Audience for a very narrow customer segment.

You will achieve better results when targeting broad audiences, especially if you use a Saved Audience (interest and location-based targeting).

We recommend these audience sizes based on Facebook targeting options:

• Reserved Audience: 20 000 to 500 000 people
• Custom Audience: 200 – 10 000 people
• Lookalike Audience: 10 000 – 50 000 people

Second mistake: Not using the most valuable audience

Sometimes we all become lazy and try to find the simplest way out.

Your Facebook ads targeting is not the place to cut corners.

Here’s a rule of thumb for those who spend thousands on Facebook ads: Make sure you take advantage of all targeting options.

This involves setting up a Facebook Pixel, using all targeting methods, including Custom, Saved, and Lookalike Audiences.

To build your remarketing list, start by running a campaign with the Saved Audience. Follow up with complex Custom Audiences or high-value Lookalikes.

For more targeting ideas, see Part 3 of this article.

Third Mistake: Advertising to the same audience too often

Are you familiar with the annoying Facebook ads of brands?

This brand may be suffering from a high level of ad frequency, which can lead to a lot of ad fatigue.

Facebook Ads Manager allows you to check the frequency of your ads.

Two main reasons your ad frequency is high are:

• Target a narrow audience and have a large campaign budget
• An ad campaign can run for years without changing its target audience.

If the same people are exposed to the same ad repeatedly, engagement is less likely, which can lead to lower ROI.

AdEspresso examined how the frequency of ads affects click-through rates, cost-per-click, and other performance KPIs for Facebook ads. Here is what they found:

Low results = High Ad Frequency

The click-through rate dropped by 8.91% when the audience was shown the same ad twice. The cost-per-click for repeat ads was already 68% (!!) higher.

Here are some tips to avoid high-frequency ads:

• Your target audience should not exceed 10 000 people.
• Every two weeks, you should change your ad copy.
• You can take a break if you have been advertising to an audience for more than a month. Then, resume your advertisements.
• Make sure to exclude converters from advertising campaigns so they don’t see the same sales ads after making a purchase.

You can exclude past converts from your Facebook audience by creating a new Custom Audience that includes users who have visited certain web pages (e.g. The check-out page.

Next, you can use the Exclude function to stop targeting these people.

Convert users are not included in sales campaigns

Fourth Mistake: Too early conclusions

Imagine you create a Facebook ad campaign and then check the results after five hours. You’ll see it is performing very poorly.

It is normal to see poor results (or none) in the initial days of a Facebook campaign.

Facebook’s algorithms take time to learn about your ads. This is known as the learning phase.

Here’s a Facebook explanation:

“When we deliver our ad set to you, either at the beginning of a campaign or after we edit it, we don’t have all the information necessary to make it as stable as we can. To get this data we need to show ads to different people to find out who is most likely to get you optimization events. This is known as the “learning phase.” Learn how to edit during or after the learning stage.

These changes are significant edits that reset the learning phase.

• Targeting changes
• Any changes to the ad creative
• Any optimization event change
• You can suspend your ad campaign or ad set for up to 7 days. The learning phase will resume once the campaign or ad set is unpaused.
• Add a new ad to your ad group

Your ad set must also receive approximately 50 optimization events once it starts to run, or the last significant edit to complete its learning phase.

Consider waiting at least 24 hours before making any major changes to your campaigns.

This applies to all changes that you make to your target audience.

5th Mistake: Not testing new audiences

It is possible to continue using Facebook until you find a target audience that produces good results.

You should also make sure you regularly monitor the performance of your target audience. You might be surprised by the results of an ad campaign that is left unattended.

AdEspresso made this error in their ads campaigns.

The average cost per conversion for their campaign grew by more than 1050% in five months from $3.33 and $38.47.

Here is Massimo Chieruzzi, CEO of AdEspresso:

Split testing helped us find a great product design and an audience who loved it, but we were only able to reach a small number of people. We spent a lot of money on this very small audience and it soon became saturated after two months.

Every Facebook target audience eventually stops performing.

It is a good idea to keep a list of potential audience ideas handy in case you need them.

Every month, keep testing new Facebook advertising targeting ideas.

Continue testing to find out what works.

To find new broad audiences, you can also use Custom and Lookalike Audiences.

You are now ready to launch your first high-performance advertising campaign by avoiding the mistakes in Facebook targeting and using all of your new skills.

We have a secret recipe to create the most engaged Facebook audience for three types of businesses.

• Small businesses
• eCommerce brands
• B2B companies

To learn more pro-level hacks, read Part 3.

Part 3: Facebook Ad Targeting Best Practices for the TOP 3 Business Types

Although it may seem unbelievable, targeting can sometimes be as simple as targeting a large audience of people between 18 and 65 with no particular interest.

However, there are other use cases in which Lookalike and custom Audiences work best. You can also narrow down your targeting to a particular mobile OS.

It all boils down to the product that you are advertising, the budget you have, and the events for which you are optimizing.

We are going to share the top 3 business use cases of targeting hacks with you. No matter what product or service you advertise, it is possible to win the targeting game.

You can be sure to do it right the first time.

1. Small businesses can target Facebook ads

Facebook is the best channel to promote your product or service if you are a small business.

But, small business owners face similar problems.

• Advertising is not an expensive option if you don’t have much money.
• Campaign optimization is difficult if you have low sales.
• You know a very specific user base you wish to reach

Facebook ads have been proven to be a great way for companies to increase their ROI. We’ve seen 90% of these companies get a positive return on investment. It takes only a solid initial setup, and some tweaking of targeting or creatives, to find what works best for you and your brand.

Tip: If your small business sells a particular service, such as a. You’re a bike repair shop. You can also set up Google Search ads to help people find your business when they search for similar services.

Both channels can be beneficial.

Begin with user research that is quick and easy

Before you begin to set up an online advertising campaign, take a moment to answer these questions.

1. What are their demographics? What are their age, background, and interests? Where are they located (urban or rural)? How tech-savvy are they?
2. What time are my customers buying my product? – Does your product get bought frequently after a consideration period (e.g. Furniture, technology that costs $100+ or as an impulse purchase (e.g. fashion, food, tech gadgets)
3. My product is being purchased in which country? – Do most of your customers buy my product online?

Based on your answers, you will be able to start building your Facebook advertising targeting strategy.

Setting up the right Facebook audience for your small company

For a campaign costing $500-$2000, a good Facebook advertising campaign will have between 10k-50k people.

This allows for a very small selection of users, while still allowing Facebook to optimize automatically.

Most likely, you have some idea of the type of people who will buy your product. You can find out their interests and age.

TIP: If your Facebook page is already up and running, you can use the Facebook Audience Insights tool.

To learn more about your social media audience, select “People connected to your Page” and use it for narrowing your campaign’s target.

It is especially useful to find out where your audience lives (so you can target them based on their country or city) and their gender +/or age range.

Facebook Audience Insights allows you to learn more about your audience

You can edit the following targeting options for a Facebook campaign that you are running for your small business:

Age range

Please specify the age of your target audience

Keep these best practices in mind

• Do not reduce the age range too much. A minimum of 10 years is recommended.
• Target potential customers of all ages if your product is appealing to them. Then, look at your campaign results to determine if any age group performed better than the rest. If so, you can target these people in your next campaigns.

Gender

This targeting option is great for targeting ads on only 50% of potential buyers, making sure your ads reach the most qualified buyers.

CNBC reported that more women shop online than men. This means you’re more likely to increase sales for your online store if you target women in your Facebook ads. If you are selling a product that is specifically targeted at men, you should target them.

Images source: Women shop online more than men – Figure source

Localization

Here are some reasons to target your ads for small businesses based on specific areas.

• You can make small business sales in brick-and-mortar stores rather than online. In this case, you can target people who live near your store.
• Shipping options are limited. Make sure that your ads reach people in cities and countries where shipping is possible.

Tip: You can use additional targeting options to target people who live near a specific area or have visited the area recently.

Please indicate who you wish to reach

Interests

Are there any big brands that have a target audience similar to yours? This is great – you can reach people who are interested in your larger company.

You can also define your audience using specific interests, such as fashion or cooking.

Tip: Use the AND + OR features of Facebook’s interest-based targeted targeting to narrow your audience. E.g. You can target people who are passionate about fashion, music, and Beyonce.

Use the “Narrower” button

Tip: Not sure what works best? By setting up multiple campaigns with the same ads, but with different targeting specifications, you can A/B-test targeting different age groups.     

Scroll down to the Lookalike Audience and remarketing sections if you’ve already run your first campaign.

Facebook Ad Targeting for eCommerce

Facebook algorithms are smart targeting combined with efficient eCommerce campaigns.

This is especially true for lifestyle brands since Facebook has a lot of relevant Instagram data about the interests and profiles of users.

If you are creating a Facebook advertising strategy for eCommerce, it is better to run 1-2 campaigns with a high budget than 10 smaller ones.

Why? Why?

Many large eCommerce shops have developed complex Facebook ad targeting strategies. They target buyers at all stages of their sales funnel and offer discounts, and next purchases, and run remarketing campaigns using automated product feeds.

You can have an e-store of any size, no matter how big or small.

All stages of the marketing funnel should be included in your ad campaigns.

Here is a list of Facebook audience targeting options that you can and should use for your eCommerce business.

1. Broad targeting – To increase brand awareness and drive sales
2. Remarketing with custom audiences – To drive the majority of your e-store’s repeat and first-time purchases      
3. To reach higher-value buyers, lookalike audiences of buyers are important

Broad targeting campaigns are a good place to start

Facebook algorithms are amazing at finding the most relevant audience for your product.

These are the best ways to get the most out of Facebook’s user data.

1. Choose the campaign objective “Conversions”.
2. Optimize your ad delivery for your online store’s “Purchase” events. You can track the tracking using Facebook Pixel.
3. Target a wide audience of 100k people or more.

Why target such a wide audience? – Facebook’s targeting allows you to reach high-potential buyers. You can build brand awareness, drive people to your online shop, create a retargeting audience, and make your first sale.

To build brand awareness, start broad.

After you have set up broad targeting conversion campaigns, follow up with retargeting ads to convert more leads into customers.

Create remarketing ads using Custom Audiences

Facebook Custom Audiences let you target your ads to people who have:

• You have their email address.
• Your website was visited
• Are you using your app?
• Engaged in your Facebook ads or posts

Create remarketing ads using Custom Audiences

Dynamic product ads are the best type of remarketing for eCommerce businesses.

Dynamic remarketing ads track the product pages a person visited on your website and create a customized remarketing campaign for them.

Create dynamic product ads

Sounds efficient, doesn’t it?

Facebook says that retargeting can be a great tool for online shops.

Kristi Argylian is Senior Vice President at target and noted that Dynamic Product Ads ads had a 20% increase in conversions when compared to other Facebook campaigns.

These steps will help you set up Facebook ads targeting Dynamic Product Ads.

1. Create your catalog for Dynamic ads for products – Facebook’s guide
2. Add the Facebook Pixel or Facebook SDK to Dynamic Ads For Products – Facebook’s guide
3. Step 3: Create an advertisement template for Dynamic ads for products – Facebook’s guide

Once your retargeting campaign is up and running, your audience can see Facebook ads that feature products they have previously viewed.

Lookalike Audiences can help you reach more buyers with high-value products

Lookalike audiences allow you to reach new audiences that are similar to your customers or visitors to your website.

A combination of Facebook Lookalike Audiences and Facebook Custom was used by one of France’s leading newspapers to increase its digital subscriptions by 20% in 2018.

Here’s how the logic of Lookalike Audiences works:

• A set of customers have purchased from your online store.
• You want to meet more people who are like your high-profit buyers
• So… you will tell Facebook “Hey, this is the group of people who have purchased at my store. Find me an audience like them.”
• Facebook’s algorithms work by identifying common traits in your buyers and targeting your ads on people who are similar to them.

It’s quite simple, right?

In a separate chapter, we’ll discuss the Lookalike Audiences in more in-depth. To navigate to the chapter, click here

A quick reminder: To target Lookalike Audiences, you must first create a Custom Audience. Then, use it as a “seed audience” for your Lookalike Audience.

In 2 easy steps, you can set up lookalike audiences

Your workflow for Facebook Lookalike Targeting in eCommerce could look something like this:

1. A Custom Audience is a group of people who have purchased items from your online store within the last 60 days.
2. To reach high-potential buyers from the same social range and demographic, create a lookalike audience of the above audience

Tip: You can only create one audience for each country when setting up Lookalike audiences. It’s okay to include all of your customers across the globe in the Lookalike audiences’ “seed audience”. This will give you more data to use for algorithms, which will lead to better results.

After you have made 500+ sales, it is the best time to start Lookalike targeting campaigns in your eCommerce business.

The Super Mario Superpower of Lookalike Audiences is only available after you have defeated a certain number of levels.

As you achieve more results, new targeting methods become available.

Here’s a quick overview of Facebook advertising targeting eCommerce businesses:

The above information may be helpful if you are new to advanced Facebook prospecting.

Let’s take a look at the steps that will make your Facebook ads more effective.

1. As Facebook’s algorithms are still learning about your product and target audience, it is important to start broad. Your first ad set should reach at least 20 000 people.
2. Set up remarketing campaigns immediately using Dynamic Product Ads and Custom Audiences.
3. After you have reached 500+ sales, you can try Lookalike Audiences. This will help you reach more people who are similar to your TOP buyers.

You can make a deal right now with yourself to try this 3-step Facebook targeting strategy for increasing sales at your online store.

Facebook Ad Targeting for B2B Products

Facebook may seem unlikely to be a marketing channel that works for B2B companies.

There are review sites, Google Display Ads, LinkedIn, and Google LinkedIn. All of these ad channels seem to be more relevant for business audiences.

But 99% of the time, you are a potential buyer for B2B products if you read this blog.

Take a look at your daily social media habits while you are having coffee at work.

While you might be checking LinkedIn and your inbox regularly, it’s also common to look at what’s going on on Facebook.

We are trying to show that Facebook can be an extremely efficient marketing channel for businesses in B2B.

B2B marketers also agree.

An analysis of 342 B2B marketers found that 58% see LinkedIn and Facebook as the most effective social media platforms for marketing ROI.

In 2018, 9 out of 10 B2B marketers had already included Facebook ads in their online advertising strategy.

But you cannot use the same Facebook targeting strategy for your B2B business that you do for the consumer brands.

It is different to sell chocolate bars and software for project management.

A game plan that is specifically designed for B2B products is required.

Begin by creating your B2B marketing channel

B2B marketing can be described as a game of seduction. You first have to convince the prospect to try your product. Then, you need to convert them into paying customers.

Your cold leads must be converted into paying customers.

You can’t target the same people with different ad messaging. Instead, use a single slogan through the 5-step marketing funnel.

Instead, you should create a smart B2B marketing plan that includes both digital and traditional sales channels.

Facebook ads can be combined with traditional sales methods such as pitches over conference calls, and other online channels like Google Search Ads to help you deliver the right message at the right moment to the right people.

We recommend that you focus on content marketing (blogging), and Google Search Ads to create awareness about your B2B product. B2B companies rely heavily on sales meetings to close deals.

Facebook ads are most effective for those who are in the Interest and Customer funnel stages.

Social media can be a soft-selling channel in B2B marketing strategies.

Let’s look closer at both these audiences on Facebook and what ads you should show.

Targeting B2B customers in the Interest stage

The interest stage in your B2B marketing funnel is when someone has heard about your product but isn’t yet interested in buying it.

This is a great opportunity to send them Facebook ads. Make sure the leads are warm instead of cooling.

Asana’s Facebook ad is an example.

• The ad brings back memories of Asana’s products.
• This ad builds trust by mentioning how many teams have used it
• You should take immediate action and start a free trial period

So now you know what a Facebook B2B ad should look like.

Who are you targeting?

These are the three most common suspects for targeting B2B ads on Facebook in the Interest stage.

1. You can create custom audiences of landing page visitors to reach specific people. This will allow you to reach people who have visited your product landing pages and indicates a high level of interest in your product.
2. Create custom audiences of blog readers to retarget your readers from the past 30 days. This will allow you to convert them into returning readers.
3. You can create custom audiences for e-book/whitepaper downloaders by offering gated content on your site, collecting contact details, and using these to create a Facebook retargeting audience.

Create a Facebook group of blog readers

Soft-sell offers such as educational content, a trial period, or a product demo should be promoted when targeting B2B audiences at the Interest stage. Facebook ads are not effective for closing B2B sales deals.

Facebook advertising for B2B is challenging because it must reach the right audience at right time.

Multiple ad campaigns can be set up to target people at different stages of your sales funnel. Each ad will move them closer to purchasing.