Facebook Advertising: Reach Your Target


One of the most comprehensive features with Facebook advertising is the audience targeting options. It should come as no surprise that setting up your audience is vital to your campaign. If you want successful ads that drive traffic to your website, spark conversions and ultimately expand your business, it's important to reach the necessary audience. Luckily, Facebook makes it simple to do just that. If you haven't used Facebook advertising yet, or if you're debating on whether to get into it, this might just convince you it's definitely worth your time and money.


When you're in the Facebook Ads Manager, you'll head on over to Tools and down to Audience. This is where your creations will be stored. Facebook will ask if you want to create a custom, lookalike or saved audience. A custom audience allows you to target current customers by securely uploading certain information; you can match emails, phone numbers, Facebook user IDS or mobile advertiser IDs to reach them. Additionally, you can create a list of people who visited your website, viewed specific pages, or create a list of people who have taken a specific action in your app or game. If you want to target your current audience by reaching them on different platform, then this is the option for you. 

Your second option is to create a lookalike audience. If you choose this option, Facebook will find people who are similar to your current clients by building an audience from your Page fans, customers lists and website visitors. This is a great option if you want to grow your audience but want new customers that behave basically the same as your old. Because their behaviors are similar to your current audience, they'll likely be interested in your business. 

If reaching entirely new people is your goal, then you'll want to select the third and last option, which is creating a saved audience. If you select this you have complete control over who you want to target. The first thing you'll be prompted to do is pick a location. You can either enter in a specific zip code, city, state, or drop a pin strategically and then choose a radius; Facebook allows a 50 mile maximum radius around your pin. Another great advantage Facebook gives you is that you can exclude locations as well. So if your business operates in certain zip codes but not in others, you can make sure you're not targeting people in the wrong areas. Underneath location, you can select gender and age. It's possible to target both genders, or just one. Additionally, ages range from 13 - 65+. 

The next section will be the demographics. The information gathered from demographics are things people have shared about themselves on their profile, like their relationship status, education, work and life events. Think of demographics as factual information about people. When you select demographics, a menu will drop down with the following options:

  • Education
  • Ethnic Affinity
  • Financial
  • Generation
  • Home
  • Life Events
  • Parents
  • Politics (U.S.)
  • Relationship 
  • Work
Under each one of these is a plethora of options to further reach the desired people. For example, if you click on education, a tab will pop up with education level. Under that tab, you can select from various options: associates degree, college grad, doctorate degree, high school grad, in college, in grad school, in high school, Master's degree, professional degree, some college, some grad school, some high school or unspecified. Additionally, you can choose field of study, schools and undergrad years. And that's just under the education tab! 

Interests are just as comprehensive as demographics, Under this tab, Facebook advertising gets personal. Targeting this way involves tapping into people's hobbies and pages they like on Facebook. According to the company, Facebook identifies interests from information on timelines, keywords associated with the pages they like or apps they use, ads they've clicked on and other similar sources. Under the Interests tap, you'll find these options:

  • Business and industry
  • Entertainment
  • Family and relationships
  • Fitness and wellness
  • Food and drink
  • Hobbies and activities
  • Shopping and fashion
  • Sports and outdoors
  • Technology

After the Interests section, you can select Behaviors. According to Facebook, behaviors are activities that people do on or off of the site. They are constructed from both activity on Facebook, as well as offline activity data provided from trusted third-party partners. Here are the options: 

  • Automotive
  • B2B
  • Charitable donations
  • Digital activities
  • Expats
  • Financial
  • Job role
  • Media
  • Mobile Device user
  • Purchase behavior
  • Residential profiles
  • Seasonal and Events
  • Travel 

And as with location, you can also choose to exclude any demographics, behaviors or interests. Say you are running ads to promote a new app that's only available on iPhones and you want to encourage people to purchase it in the App Store. You can exclude all Android and Window users to make sure your ad is only being show to those that can use and benefit it. Another thing to remember is that you don't have to target every single one of these options. If you're looking to target men and women a certain age, in a certain location, you don't have to go into demographics, interests and behaviors. Lastly, those drop-down menus are only the beginning. There are so many options when it comes to targeting that it really would be impossible for us to show you every single choice you have. But trust us if there's a way you want to reach someone, Facebook probably has that option. And that's the great thing about Facebook advertising - it can be as simple or as detailed as you want it to be, allowing you as the marketer to be in control.

Now that you're loaded with audience information, it's important to get creative with your marketing strategy to hit the sweet spot within your customer base. You can develop campaigns specific to every month, different holidays, or around a different service you'd like to feature. The ad combinations that audience targeting allows are endless.


Get started with Facebook Advertising. Request a quote today!