One of the key advantages of social ads over other forms of advertising is the ability to laser-target your audience.
Smart Facebook ad targeting can help you reach the people who are most likely to be interested in your brand. With advanced targeting options, you can go a step further and reach the people who are likely to be interested in specific products, and who have already shown they’re willing to shop.
All of this helps you achieve higher conversion rates with your existing ad budget. And show us a Facebook advertiser who doesn’t love a higher ROI!
Bonus: Use our free Facebook Ads budget calculator to figure out exactly how much you need to spend to get the results you want. Let us do the math for you!
What is Facebook ad targeting?
Facebook ad targeting is a way to make sure your ads are seen by the people who are most likely to be interested in what you’re offering.
Imagine you’re throwing a party. You wouldn’t invite everyone you know if only a handful of them actually enjoy the kind of event you’re hosting, right? Instead, you’d send invites to people who share your interest in the theme, activities, and even the food you’re planning.
Facebook ad targeting works the same way. It lets you “invite” the right people to see your ads by using various criteria. This not only narrows down your ad targeting, but also saves you money in the long run (in very simple terms, reaching a larger audience is more expensive than reaching a smaller one).
Pro tip: Check out the best Facebook ad examples to inspire your strategy. Then, learn how to perfect your Facebook ad strategy in minutes.
How does Facebook ad targeting work?
Facebook ad targeting works by helping you zero in on the audiences most likely to interact with your brand, and buy from you.
On Facebook, ad targeting is based on three different types of target audiences:
1. Core audiences
Core audiences use basic characteristics and behaviors to target your ads. For example, you might target your audience by selecting criteria such as age, gender, education, job title, interests, and geographical location.
Use case: If you’re promoting a new line of fitness apparel, you might target women aged 25-40 who live in urban areas and have shown an interest in fitness-related pages.
2. Custom audiences
Custom audiences allow you to re-engage with people who have already interacted with your business. You can create custom audiences based on data such as website visitors, customer email lists, app users, or people who have engaged with your Facebook content.
Use case: Targeting users who visited your website but didn’t make a purchase, encouraging them to return and complete their transaction.
3. Lookalike audiences
Lookalike audiences enable you to reach new users who share similarities with your existing customers. Facebook identifies common characteristics of your custom audience and finds new users who resemble them, but who may not yet be familiar with your brand.
Use case: A SaaS company can create a lookalike audience based on their current customers to attract new leads who share similar software preferences, or work for similar industries.
Basic types of Facebook ad targeting
Demographic targeting
Demographic targeting on Facebook lets you select who sees your ads based on specific traits such as:
- Age: Target ads to different age groups, from teenagers to seniors.
- Gender: Choose whether your ads are shown to men, women, or all genders.
- Education: Target people based on their educational background, from high school graduates to advanced degree holders.
- Job Title: Reach professionals in specific industries or roles relevant to your products or services.
- Location: Target users based on their country, state, city, or even zip code.
This type of targeting helps ensure your ads are seen by people who match the demographic profile of your target audience.
Behavior and interest targeting
Behavior and interest targeting focuses on users’ actions and what they like on Facebook. Facebook interest targeting takes your efforts a step further, by focusing on:
- Interests: Reach people based on their hobbies, such as fitness, travel, or cooking.
- Behaviors: Target users based on their shopping habits, device usage, or travel preferences.
- Engagement: Show ads to people who have interacted with your Facebook page or posts.
This targeting helps connect with users interested in topics related to your business, increasing engagement.
Value-based targeting
Value-based targeting goes beyond demographics and interests—it focuses on appealing to the shared values of your potential customers:
- Identifying values: Start by understanding the common values your customers prioritize, such as innovation, sustainability, or community involvement.
- Crafting ad messages: Tailor your ad creatives to resonate with these values. For example, highlight how your products or services align with their values of quality, environmental responsibility, or social impact.
- Building connections: By aligning your ads with customer values, you can build stronger emotional connections and foster loyalty among your audience.
Value-based targeting on Facebook helps you create more meaningful and relevant ad experiences, increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns and driving better results.
10 Facebook ad targeting strategies that actually convert
Ready to start targeting Facebook? Use these tips and strategies to boost conversions and keep your audience interested.
1. Target your competitors’ customers
The Audience tab in Meta Business Suite Insights offers a ton of valuable information that can help you understand your Facebook followers. You can then use the data to learn how to target potential new followers and customers.
It’s such a treasure trove that we’ve got an entire article dedicated to using Audience Insights for better targeting.
But our favorite Audience Insights strategy is to use the information it provides to learn who you’re competing with on Facebook, then target your competitors’ existing fans.
Here’s a quick how-to:
Open your Audience Insights dashboard in Meta Business Suite and select Potential audience.
Click the Filter button on the top right of the page and use the basic targeting options like location, age, gender, and interests to start building a Facebook audience that matches your target audience persona.
Don’t click Create audience just yet. Instead, scroll down to the Top pages section to see which pages your target users already connect with. Copy and paste this list into a spreadsheet or text file.
Go back to the Filter selection tool. Clear your existing filters and type the name of one of your competitors’ Facebook Pages in the Interests box. Not all competitors will come up as an interest, but for those that do…
Check out the presented demographics information to see if you can gain any additional audience insights that will help you target your ads more precisely. Then, create a new audience based on these new demographic insights, then test it against one of your existing audiences.
Or, simply click Save and you’ve got an audience based on your competitors’ fans.
Of course, you can further target this audience to make sure you get the best fit for your specific business and campaign goals, but this is a great way to start finding relevant people on Facebook.
You can find more details in our Audience Insights how-to article.
2. Use custom audiences for retargeting
Retargeting is a powerful Facebook targeting strategy to connect with potential customers who have already expressed interest in your products.
Using Facebook Custom Audiences targeting options, you can choose to show your ads to people who have recently viewed your website, people who have looked at sales pages, or even people who have looked at specific products. You can also choose to exclude people who have purchased recently, if you think they are unlikely to convert again soon.
Before you can use Facebook Custom Audiences based on website visits, you need to install the Facebook Pixel.
Once that’s done, here’s how to create your remarketing audience:
- Go to Audiences with your Ads Manager.
- Choose Create a custom audience.
- Under sources, click Site web.
- Choose your pixel.
- Under Événements, choose which types of visitors to target.
- Name your audience and click Create audience.
Another option is to create a custom audience based on data synced from your CRM. For this option, you’ll create your audience within Hootsuite Social Advertising.
- In Hootsuite Social Advertising, navigate to your Facebook ad campaigns, and choose to create a New Advanced Audience.
- Choose to target existing customers.
- Click Connect Add CRM account to connect your CRM data from Mailchimp, Hubspot, Salesforce, or whichever CRM solution you currently use.
- You can get quite specific about who you want to target with your audience based on whether they are existing customers or leads, and whether they have bought within a specific timeframe.
You can then use your advanced audience to create a Facebook ad campaign directly within Hootsuite Social ads.
Pro tip: Find more details in our blog post on how to use Facebook Custom Audiences. And, Learn more about targeting Facebook audiences with Hootsuite here.
3. Find people similar to your best customers with value-based lookalike audiences
Facebook lookalike audiences allow you to build Facebook targeted ads lists of potential customers who share characteristics with all the people who already buy from you.
Before you can incorporate customer value into a lookalike audience, you need to create a customer value custom audience:
Go to Audiences within your Ads Manager and choose Create a custom audience
Then, choose Customer list as the source.
Choose how you’ll import your customer list from the options given. Then, click Next, and upload your customer list on the following screen.
Click Upload and Create.
Source: Facebook Ads Manager
Now, you can use this list to create a value-based Lookalike audience to target your highest-value potential customers:
- Go to Audiences within your Ads Manager.
- Choose Create a lookalike audience.
- Choose the value-based custom audience you created above as your source.
- Select the audience locations to target.
- Select your audience size. Smaller numbers more precisely match your source audience characteristics.
- Click Create Audience.
Find more details in our guide to Facebook Lookalike Audiences.
4. Improve targeting with Facebook ad relevance diagnostics
Facebook helps you understand how relevant your ad is to your selected audience based on three ad relevance diagnostics:
- Quality ranking
- Engagement rate ranking
- Conversion rate ranking
All measures are based on your ad’s performance compared to other ads targeting the same audience.
As Facebook says, “People prefer to see ads that are relevant to them. And when businesses show their ads to relevant audiences, they see better business outcomes. That’s why we consider how relevant each ad is to a person before delivering an ad to that person.”
The whole point of Facebook ad targeting is to get your ad in front of the specific audience that’s most likely to take action based on that exact ad. This is the very definition of relevance.
Here are some simple ways to help improve your ranking scores for Facebook’s ad relevance diagnostics:
- Focus on quality, including great visuals and short copy.
- Choose the right ad format.
- Aim for low ad frequency.
- Time ads strategically.
- Optimize your ads with A/B testing.
- Keep an eye on your competitors’ ads.
If your ads aren’t performing as well as you like, you can use the ad relevance diagnostics to look for opportunities to improve targeting:
- Low-quality ranking: Try changing the target audience to one that’s more likely to appreciate the specific creative in the ad.
- Low engagement rate ranking: Refine your targeting to reach people who are more likely to engage. Audience Insights can be a great help here.
- Low conversion rate ranking: Target a higher-intent audience. This could be as simple as selecting “engaged shoppers” under purchase behavior (see Tip #5). But it could also mean targeting people who have an upcoming anniversary, or who have another behavior or life event that makes your product or service particularly relevant to them right at this moment.
Remember, relevance is all about matching the right ad to the right audience. No one ad will be relevant to everyone. Effective targeting is the only way to achieve a consistently high relevance ranking. Test regularly and aim for a regular Facebook targeting update to make sure you’re continuing to target the right people with the right content.
5. Target people who have recently shopped from Facebook ads
An often overlooked option within the detailed targeting options for Facebook ads is the ability to target people who have already expressed interest in making a purchase from Facebook ads.
Selecting the purchase behavior Engaged Shoppers limits your ad audience to people who have clicked the Shop Now button on a Facebook ad within the last week.
While some Facebook users might scroll past ads, this option ensures you reach people who have already (and very recently) shown that they are willing to shop from ad content.
To access the Engaged Shoppers targeting option:
- Create a new ad set, or open an existing ad set, and scroll down to the Audience section
- Under Detailed Targeting, type Engaged Shoppers in the search bar.
- Click Engaged Shoppers.
6. Find your unicorn content
This tip is a little bit different. It’s about targeting your ad’s content, rather than choosing the right Facebook target audience.
This concept was coined by MobileMonkey CEO and Inc. columnist Larry Kim. He suggests that only 2% of your content will perform well both on social and in search engine rankings, while also achieving high conversion rates. He argues that content marketing is a volume game, and you simply have to create lots of “donkey” content (you can guess what that means) to get to the unicorns.
So, what’s your unicorn content? It’s that blog post that absolutely blows up on your social channels, climbs to the top of the Google rankings, and drives a ton of traffic to your landing pages.
You can’t predict what will “go unicorn” based on factors traditionally used to define great content (like great writing, keywords, and readability). Instead, you’ve got to keep a close eye on your social media analytics and performance.
When you spot overachieving content, repurpose it as a Facebook ad. Make it into an infographic and a video. Test this content in various formats for your key audiences to make it work even harder.
Most importantly, use the rest of our Facebook ad targeting tips to make sure you match your unicorn content to the audience that’s most likely to engage with it.
7. Get ultra-precise with detailed targeting
Facebook offers tons of targeting options. On the surface, the options are divided into three main categories: demographics, interests, and behaviors. But within each of these categories, things get pretty granular.
For example, under detailed targeting, you can choose to target parents. Or, more specifically, you could target parents with toddlers. Or, exclude parents altogether.
Then, you can click Narrow Audience to add additional layers of targeting. For example, under demographics, you can choose to limit your Facebook target audience based on relationship status and job industry.
Think about how these layers of targeting combine to create a hyper-focused audience. You could choose to target divorced parents of toddlers who work in management. And that’s just looking at demographics.
Under Interests>Travel, you could then limit your target audience to people who are interested in beach vacations. Then, under behaviors, you can even further narrow your audience to target frequent international travelers.
Do you see where this is going? If you run a high-end beach resort that offers a childcare program and no single supplement, you could create a promotion that specifically targets single parents in management-level jobs who love beach vacations and travel frequently.
If you market products or services tied to life events, even tangentially, you can target people who have recently moved, started a new job, gotten engaged or married. You can target people in their birthday month, or leading up to their anniversary. You can even target people whose friends have an upcoming birthday.
As you build your audience, you’ll see on the right side of the page how small your audience has become, as well as your potential reach. If you get too specific, Facebook will let you know.
This strategy works best for specific promotions designed to target a precise audience, rather than ads to promote your business in general. Combine this layered Facebook ad targeting with a landing page that speaks directly to the exact audience for best results.
Note: Each time you want to add another level of targeting, be sure to click Narrow Audience or Narrow Further. Each item should say Must also match about the selected criteria.
8. Combine two unique audiences together
Of course, not every product or promotion is naturally suited to the kind of precise Facebook targeting explained in the tip above.
Maybe you don’t know exactly which demographic or behavior categories you want to target with a specific ad. You only have a broad sense of a category you’d like to target.
So, what do you do if that Facebook target audience is just too large?
Try combining it with a second audience, even if that second audience seems completely unrelated.
For example, let’s think about creating an ad audience for this GoPro video featuring LEGO boats:
To start, we could build an audience of people who are interested in GoPro, videography, or video cameras. Even limiting the audience to people aged 22 to 55 in the United States, that creates a potential audience of 31.5 million people.
Now, in this case, the video features LEGO boats. So, what’s the obvious audience to add in here?
Yep, LEGO fans.
That cuts the potential audience size down to 6.2 million. And it would likely result in a much higher engagement rate, since people would be specifically interested in the video content, not just the product featured in the video.
In this case, we worked backwards from an existing video. But you could also decide on two unrelated audiences to combine, then create a Facebook targeted advertising piece of content to speak directly to that group.
9. Use broad targeting to find your target audience
What if you’re just getting started and you don’t know yet who your target audience is? We’ve got a whole blog post on how you can start to figure this out through audience research.
But you can also learn a lot by starting with a broad Facebook ad targeting strategy. This works best for brand awareness campaigns rather than conversion-oriented ads, but the information you learn can help refine your conversion targeting strategy over time.
Create a new brand awareness campaign with some very basic targeting, such as a broad age range within a large geographic area. Facebook will then use its algorithms to determine the best people to show your ads to.
Once your ad has been running for a little while, you can check Audience Insights or Ads Manager to see which kinds of people Facebook chose for your ads, and how they responded. This can help you understand how to create your own target audiences for future campaigns.
10. Use Advantage+ audience targeting
If you’re new to Facebook ads, using an automated tool like Advantage+ audience targeting can help you target granularly, without requiring a lot of insider knowledge. This feature leverages advanced AI to find the best audience for your ads, making it easy to get started and see results quickly.
Here’s why it’s so effective: Meta’s AI learns and evolves, using data from past conversions, Pixel data, and interactions with previous ads. This means your ads reach people who are more likely to engage and buy, without you needing to figure out all the details yourself.
For example, imagine you just started an online clothing store. Using Advantage+, your ads could be shown to people who recently bought clothes online, visited fashion websites, or interacted with clothing ads. This precise targeting can lead to better results at a lower cost. And, you won’t have to input all in the inclusions and exclusions yourself.
Meta found that campaigns using Advantage+ saw a 13% lower cost per sale, a 7% lower cost per website conversion, and a 28% lower cost per click, lead, or landing page view. Not bad, eh?
Using Advantage+, you still have some control over your audience. You can set preferences to exclude certain ages or locations. If you want your ads to avoid younger audiences or specific regions, you can adjust these settings easily. However, Advantage+ works best when given a broad audience to start with, as it allows the AI to find the best matches more effectively.
This tool is perfect for most campaigns, except remarketing ones. If you’re running sales or app promotion campaigns, you might want to try Advantage+ shopping campaigns or Advantage+ app campaigns, which use AI across multiple steps for even better results. To see how well Advantage+ works for you, run A/B tests comparing it with other audience selections. This will give you a clear picture of its effectiveness.
Just remember, when using Advantage+, you can’t target ages under 18 globally, 20 in Thailand, or 21 in Indonesia. Keep this in mind when planning your campaigns.
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