Facebook Audiences

The term Facebook audience refers to a group of people who will see your ads.

Different approaches to audience creation

Before you start, business objectives for the future ad campaign and resources you can use need to be identified. After that, the most appropriate approach of audience creation can be selected.

There are two main approaches:

1. Targeting specifically. The target audience for your ads will be specifically chosen by you. For example, gender, age, and geographic location of the audience can be specified. These specifications will shape the final audience and increase the likelihood that people will be interested in your product or service. This approach involves the use of multiple resources because you will initially have to analyze your own target audience.
2. Targeting broadly. By targeting a broad audience, the system itself will pick which audience to display your ads to. After analyzing the results from board targeting, the most appropriate audience can be selected and specific targeting can be used.

Important: Be careful when using broad targeting as there is a high probability of wasting your budget on an unspecified audience who are less likely to interact with your ad and purchase your product or service. Tracking the performance of the campaign and your budget several times a day is recommended to assess the effectiveness of the campaign.

Audience Settings

Targeting broadly only allows audience location and language to be specified in the “Audiences” column. The performance of broad targeting can be analyzed afterwards:

You can see the audience size on the right panel:

If you already know the audience you want to advertise to, Facebook audience settings will help you specify it.

 You can set the following settings:

1. Locations. You can choose users from a specific country, region, and city to display your ads to. Below are the available parameters:

• Everyone in this location. The ad will be shown to people who live or visit this location.
• People who live in this location.
• People recently in this location. The ad will be shown to people who have recently visited this location.
• People travelling in this location. The ad will be shown to people who have visited this location recently. Important: They must live at least 200 km away from the chosen location.

 The pin tool can be used to show ads to people who are located within a certain radius from the selected pinpoint. Learn more about location targeting here.

2. Age. Choose the age of the people who will see your ads.
3. Gender. You can show your ads to men, women, or both.
4. Languages. You can show your ads to people who speak the chosen language/s.
5. Detailed targeting.

• demographics (education, lifestyle, occupation);
• interests (users’ actions in a social network and pages they follow);
• behavior (purchase behavior and devices people use).

 Learn more about detailed targeting here.

6. Connections. Connections allows you include/exclude people who interacted with:

• your company’s profile (people who have liked your page and their friends);
• your app (people who use your app and their friends);
• your events ( people who accepted the invitation to your event).

Learn more about connections targeting here.

7. Custom audiences. A custom audience is a group of people who you already know. A list of your customers can be uploaded to Facebook from your website. If people from this list have Facebook profiles, they will see your ads.

 Moreover, you can create the list using Facebook tools:

• Facebook Pixel (audience which interact with your website in a certain way);
• Facebook SDK (audience from mobile apps);
• Facebook engagement (people who interact with your content in Facebook apps and services).

Another powerful targeting type is lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences consist of people who are similar to the audience who are already interested in your company. Learn more in this article.