Targeting ads on Facebook

Combining broad categories with precise interests. Plus a clever alternative to the Boost Post button.

As you are probably aware by now, Facebook offers some really nicely drilled down advertising options for targeting possible customers. Using these could become more important in 2014 since Facebook are now admitting that they are further turning down organic reach and forcing brands to pay for exposure even to their fans.

As well as selecting demographics such as location, age and gender you can also target people based on all sorts of other criteria. In a previous post, I described targeting using custom audiences, enabling you to find people with similar characteristics. In this post I'll explore a combined targeting approach.

If you are familiar with the process of creating an ad you will know that you have the option of listing "Precise Interests" of individuals to target as well as some "Broad Categories" that Facebook has put together.

These include early adaptors of tech, parents of, say, 4-12 year olds, cat owners, cricket fans and more besides.

In the past I've tended to use either the Precise OR the Broad Categories but recently I've been experimenting with combining them to really drill down to a target audience.

My company, Musicademy, sells instructional DVDs teaching people to play musical instruments. So far so good, I can target, for instance people that like "Electric Guitar" or "Gibson Les Paul". BUT we really only sell to a very small niche of people within the musician category. We sell to church based musicians.

So my dream target group is "People who go to church and also like guitars (or keyboards, or singing or drumming)". Not surprisingly Facebook doesn't have that set up as a target group but with a little playing around I can start to get near it.

Facebook's broad categories are quite limited. They don't have anything under "Religion" or "Church" but they do have "Christian and Gospel Music". Now that is one very broad category - there are 144 Million people in the US, UK and Canada that fall into that category. That's kind of going to blow my budget...

But when I combine it with Precise Interests (you can see the ones I've chosen in the screen clip below), I'm down to 5.4 Million.  Now we are getting somewhere.

I've done some testing on this combination of precise and broad interests and the response has been very positive. Here's a typical campaign with a CTR of 4.539%, an average price of 10c per click (note I work in USD). Not only did this sponsored story result in 1,669 clicks to the website but also multiple likes and 45 new fans acquired.

And check out this sponsored story. A CTR of 14.015%! That's pretty impressive on Facebook. You might be interested to see the various precise interests I chose from other brands in our sector to magazines and activities:

Extending reach more cleverly with existing fans

As we move to an era of needing to pay simply to reach a majority of existing fans, targeting is even more crucial in order to keep budgets under control. If my organisation has a wide range of fans (in my case guitar, keys, bass players, drummers and singers), I don't want to be paying to promote posts about guitar to drummers. So I use targeting (in Power Editor of course) to "boost" posts to specific audiences. I NEVER hit the boost post button, instead I create a sponsored story from a page post and select my target audience in just the same way I would an ad.

If every brand did this there would be a lot less moaning from Facebook users about irrelevant ads in their newsfeed, and brands would have more budget to spend on ads that actually hit the spot. I hope this post will help you to do just that!