If you’ve tried running Facebook ads based on audience interests, it can be kind of fun. Searching for things that might target your customers, thinking like they do, and getting that needle in a haystack. Until of course, you run ads and nothing works :/.
It happens to EVERYONE. And usually because everyone is doing the same thing as you are! Facebook is amazing at collecting data and using it to target your audience. But the fact is, if you give them money, they’ll gladly take it! It’s still up to you to make it work.
Facebook Ads are delivered via an auction - essentially you’re bidding against other ads and advertisers for impressions. You might ‘lose’ some auctions based on ad quality, success, and other factors. And when it comes to targeting, if you’re keeping your audiences too broad, you’re competing against everyone else who used broad targeting. More competition = higher costs, and less results.
That’s where Audience Insights comes in.
To find it, go to the top left navigation when you’re in your Ad Account > Track and Analyze > Audience Insights.From the first popup, choose “everyone on Facebook”. Then head straight to the Interests section.
What you’ll do is enter an interest, a competitor, another FB page, anything that matches your audience. (One super advanced way to do this is find actual people’s profiles by perusing your competitors or your own pages, and then seeing what those folks have “liked” on FB). If you’re selling Harry Potter products for example, your first interest might be “Harry Potter”. After entering that you’ll want to click on “Page Likes”. This gives you a list of the top commonalities between those who like “Harry Potter”. So essentially you’re looking for new, deeper interests here that you might be able to target. This could include characters from Harry Potter who have their own page, the author of the book, other books that Harry Potter readers/lovers read, etc, etc.
You know you’ve found a good interest when you click on Page Likes and ALL if not most of the interests/pages that appear are very similar in nature (as opposed to say, Walmart or Coca Cola). You want to start drilling down.
Find more pages and interests this way, and then enter those into the Interests section and see what Page Likes come up for them. After you’ve collected a good amount, pop them into your ad sets and start targeting super-niche interests and audiences to keep your costs low and sales/leads high.
Pro tips:
- Always test, test, test. Use one creative and duplicate it into all these other ad sets in order to see which audience is bringing best results
- Audience sizes for ecomm should be between 2m-6m. And, if you have higher or lower numbers, keep them in different campaigns because Facebook will spend the most money on the audiences with the largest sizes (not necessarily what works better).
- Audience sizes for lead gen will be much lower, but you can control how many times you’re sending ads to people by using the Frequency metric. If this metric is above 6 you want to spend less money on it, to get that number down. What it means is that on average people are seeing your ad 6 times - higher than that is too much and you’ll start to get some complaints.