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by Joy Thompson
Different Ways to Target Audience with Facebook Ads
Identifying a target audience and actually having your ads appear in front of them are two unique challenges. But with powerful tools like Facebook Ads available for any business owner to use, it’s never been easier to create a target audience of real users and have them see your content. Check out some strategies you can use to create target audiences with Facebook Ads.
Exclude Customers From Your Target Audience
If you want to move customers through your sales funnel and avoid wasting advertising revenue on people who’ve already made a purchase, exclude paying customers from your target audience. Instead, prioritize people who have either visited your site or added items to their shopping carts and not checked out. Use website retargeting to display ads on Facebook for visitors who have been to your site without making a purchase.
Use Facebook’s “Saved Audience” Feature
Once you know your ideal customer demographic, you can use Facebook’s “Create a Saved Audience Button” to build an audience to use in your ad campaign. The button to do this can be found on the Audiences page. You can then define your audience based on factors such as age, gender, and location.
Narrow Your Audience Further, Based on Their Likes and Interests
You can further target an audience by narrowing your search criteria — either for a Saved Audience or a Lookalike Audience — by including specific likes, interests, and even life events to create an audience. For example, an author can limit a target audience to those who like a genre or a certain book, and a jewelry company can target individuals in relationships who have an upcoming anniversary. You would never imagine the ways you can actually target people on Facebook, things can get weirdly specific!
How to Get Your Ads to Convert on Facebook
Developing strong ad campaigns on Facebook can help you drive traffic to your website, boost brand awareness, and generate conversions. Find out how to get your ads to convert on Facebook and learn how to meet your objectives.
Know Your Target Audience
No matter which type of Facebook ad campaign you’re planning to run, creating the right target audience is essential for social advertising. You can create a lookalike audience that’s similar to your existing followers, build one using relevant interests, or select one based on device usage. The specificity of options is exponential. You can target any group ranging from single mothers to home gardeners, to people in specific neighborhoods. Choose the combination of targeting that works best for you to make sure you’re targeting the right users.
Utilize Photos and Videos
Photos and videos offer a great platform for expanding brand awareness, building your audience, and even driving conversions. People scroll through timelines and newsfeeds so quickly, using a photo or video can be one of the only ways to grab the attention of people with crowded social media platforms. To get the most video views, start by choosing an eye-catching thumbnail and ensuring your video file uses the optimal aspect ratio. Try to use photos that convey your message or an emotional connection to attract attention. Because people lose interest easily, aim for a video between 15 and 30 seconds to maximize views.
Optimize Ads for Landing Page Views
Pushing traffic off Facebook and to your website is ideal if you have a high-performing landing page that creates conversions. To make the most of Facebook’s landing page views option, use a strong creative and an effective call to action (CTA) to get the high-quality traffic you want. Try out a few different versions of your landing page to make sure it gets the results you’re targeting. You can do this by creating different ad sets that include different pictures, carousel ads, and different CTA or ad copy content.
Drive Specific Actions With Website Conversions
To attract users who are primed to make a purchase, download content, or complete another type of conversion, you’ll need to tweak your audience to make it as specific as possible. Use copy with a specific CTA and test your landing page to make sure it converts effectively. Identify what your ultimate goal is and gear your ads from there.
Facebook Gets Rid of Accidental Ad Clicks
Creating and monitoring Facebook ads isn’t as easy as it might look, especially when you have to account for users accidentally clicking your ads. Find out why Facebook has taken steps to eliminate accidental ad clicks and learn what this means for advertisers.
Facebook Establishes a Two-Second Threshold for Ads
It’s happened to even the most frequent social media users. When scrolling through an article or your news feed, sometimes you accidentally click on an advertisement. In the past, Facebook levied charges for every single click-thru, even those generated by users who unintentionally clicked on the ad before returning to the original page immediately.
As of August 2017, however, that’s no longer the case. Facebook has established a two-second threshold for its Audience Network ads, which appear in non-Facebook applications. Essentially, a user clicking on one of these ads and returning back to the original page within two seconds will no longer count as a click. In the future, Facebook may shorten this length of time or even extend it to other aspects of its advertising platform.
Advertisers Can Expect More Accurate Metrics
This two-second threshold is good news for advertisers, as Facebook will no longer charge for these unintentional clicks. The benefits extend beyond budget alone, though.
Since advertisers will no longer see these accidental clicks in their reports, they can look forward to more accurate metrics. This change could help businesses improve their ad targeting, increase lead generation, and spend their budgets more wisely.
Facebook Discontinues 5,000 Ad Targeting Terms to Prevent Ad Discrimination
Facebook announced it is removing 5,000 ad targeting terms that could potentially allow for bias against different religions, races, and cultures.If you’re not sure what ad targeting is, it is a strategy for advertisers to reach certain customers based on demographics, psychographics, behavior, and interests. Simply put, when advertising using Facebook paid ads, you have a plethora of options to create campaigns that target your most valuable customers ranging from zip codes and marital status to interests such as “Latin America” or “Medicare”.
While Facebook does not categorize people by their race or ethnicity, advertisers could target people “interested in” certain cultures. For example, a person interested in “Passover” could be Jewish. Under bad practice, a person could use these targeting options to discriminate against Jewish people by not showing them ads for housing, jobs, or educational opportunities.
So why would this happen?
Advertisers must have some sort of strategy to get their ads to the most valuable customers whom will end with a conversion. Businesses are paying to get their ads to the right people, so typically they exclude certain segments from seeing their campaigns to avoid serving ads to unnecessary or redundant audiences.
Although excluding certain audiences can be a very useful tactic, Facebook has received scrutiny due to the tool’s ability to discriminate. By excluding someone interested in “mobility scooters” or “child care”, advertisers could potentially prevent disabled renters or working parents from seeing their ads.
This isn’t a subject that has been tread on lightly either. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed an official complaint against Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act by allowing landlords and home sellers to use its advertising platform to engage in housing discrimination.
The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing transactions including print and online advertisements on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status.
According to the press release HUD distributed, Facebook’s platform violates this act by enabling advertisers to:
- Display housing ads either only to men or women.
- Not show ads to Facebook users interested in an “assistance dog,” “mobility scooter,” “accessibility” or “deaf culture.”
- Not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in “child care” or “parenting,” or show ads only to users with children above a specified age.
- To display/not display ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in a particular place of worship, religion or tenet, such as the “Christian Church,” “Sikhism,” “Hinduism,” or the “Bible.”
- Not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in “Latin America,” “Canada,” “Southeast Asia,” “China,” “Honduras,” or “Somalia.”
- Draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.
This isn’t the first time either. The discriminatory misuse of its advertising product has been on Facebook’s radar since at least 2016, when ProPublica published an investigation on how the tech giant enabled advertisers to exclude specific groups based on race and gender, according to Gizmodo. Facebook was again found guilty of enabling this troubling practice at the end of last year—another ProPublica investigation found it was still letting housing ads on the service effectively exclude black, Jewish, and disabled users—after the company said it would no longer allow it.
Facebook has reportedly denied that the removal was in response to the HUD complaint. In Facebook’s blog post about the removal of potentially discriminatory ad targeting options, “While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important.”
Facebook is constantly updating its platform to better cater to users and improve user experience. They plan to share more targeting updates in the coming months as they continue to refine they tools for people and businesses.
In an effort to underscore the difference between acceptable ad targeting and ad discrimination, Facebook is requiring a continuing education certification for all advertisers. In order to continue advertising on Facebook, all advertisers will be required to complete the certification.
From Facebook to Google, all advertising platforms are always evolving and as a digital marketing agency, we always strive to communicate and apply these industry updates to all our clients to ensure we are strategizing effectively.
If you have any questions about increasing your leads, ROI, and valuable customer base through social media marketing or Google Ads, give us a call for a free consultation!