As a marketer, you create tens of Facebook ads each month. You spend hours tweaking your ad visuals and messages. But… are you even targeting the right audience?
Here’s a confession: I used to be so overwhelmed with increasing our company’s ad conversions that I completely forgot about targeting the 100% right audience.
But as we finally upped our targeting game, we saw an over 35% increase in our Facebook advertising ROI.
You too can improve your ad performance by targeting a 100% perfect Facebook audience.
In this guide, we walk through the basics of Facebook Behavioral Targeting and look how you can use this feature to create better audiences.
Ready to learn something new today? Here’s your go-to guide!
The basics of Behavioral Targeting
Before we dive into mobile devices, traveling habits and purchase behaviors of your target audience, there are a few things every marketer should know. First, let’s have a look at why you should even bother to target multiple small audiences instead of a larger one.
Benefits of Facebook Detailed Targeting:
- Higher relevancy – advertising to highly targeted audiences lets you create custom ads that are targeting specific ad groups
- Higher CTR – by showing highly relevant ads to people, they’re more likely to be interested and click on them, leading to a higher CTR
- Higher engagement – if people see a highly relevant ad, they’ll like and share it with their Facebook friends, giving your brand a free advertising boost
- Higher ROI – by excluding people who aren’t really interested in your product and offers, you can reach the right audience at a lower cost
Tip: Behavioral targeting works best in combination with location, interest, and demographics-based targeting. You can mix all of these together to build a highly defined Facebook audience.
How Facebook Detailed Targeting works:
As you start to create a new audience, take advantage of the Detailed Targeting.
You can narrow your audience by adding several layers of required categories. Start by targeting people by interests, continue with demographics, and add a separate layer of behaviors.
Using the narrowing option means that your audience must match at least one variation in each targeting layers. If you want your audience to match five specific characteristics, you need to create five separate targeting layers by narrowing the audience five times.
Do not insert all your audience characteristics into one targeting group as they will only need to match ONE of the following characteristics:
Read more: The Evergreen Guide to Facebook Ad Targeting Optimization
Behavior-based targeting options in Facebook Ads Manager
As I mentioned before, using behavior-based targeting helped us at Scoro, a B2B SaaS company, to reach a highly targeted Facebook audience we didn’t even imagine could exist. And it helped us improve our ads’ click-though-rate and relevance score.
How can YOU benefit from Facebook’s behavior-based targeting?
Let’s take a look at all the different possibilities that Facebook offers for building a well-targeted audience. First, we’ll examine the targeting options available in Facebook Ads Manager. Next, we’ll give you a short overview of additional options you’ll encounter when using the Power Editor.
When creating a new audience or adding a new campaign, Facebook gives you the following targeting options:
- Demographics
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Facebook Categories
Start by selecting Behaviors and a lot of new options appear.
1. Targeting by Digital Activities
1. Targeting by Digital ActivitiesUnder this category, you can target people based on the actions they make while online and the devices they use.
Your options include:
- Operation System Used
- Canvas Gaming
- Console Gamers
- Event Creators
- FB Payments (All)
- FB Payments (Higher than average spend)
- FB Payments (Recent)
- Facebook Page Admins
- Internet Browser Used
- Operating System Used
- Photo uploaders
- Primary email domain
- Small business owners
- Technology early adopters
- Technology late adopters
Audience segments that help to up your targeting game:
Event Creators – this group includes active people who organize both corporate and personal events. They might be interested in products used on events but also business-related offers.
FB Payments – target people who have used the Facebook Payments platform to reach an audience who is more likely to spend online. This behavior group can work wonders for B2C companies.
Facebook Page Admins – who creates new Facebook pages? You’re likely to reach many small business owners and marketers, but also bloggers.
Small Business Owners – want to target small businesses? This group includes people who have listed themselves as small business owner or own small business pages on Facebook.
Technology Early Adopters – if you’re bringing new products to the market, targeting this group of curious people might be your Golden Nugget.
Technology Later Adopters – if you’re promoting a product/service that’s already well-known, targeting this group can get your ads in front of people who had never heard of your brand before.
Read more: What You Can Learn from Facebook’s Audience Overlap Tool
2. Targeting by Mobile Device User
This behavioral targeting option obviously benefits software and app producers who only have their product available on specific devices. But it can also help you find the audience segments that prefer high-end products to cheaper ones.
You can craft your Facebook audience by the following categories:
- All Mobile Devices by Brand
- All Mobile Devices by Operating System
- All mobile devices
- Feature phones
- Network Connection
- New smartphone and tablet owners
- Smartphone Owners
- Smartphones and tablets
- Tablet owners
Take advantage of these Mobile Device User categories:
All Mobile Devices by Brand – get creative and imagine which smartphone companies your buyer persona might prefer. For example, Apple owners are likely to be well-off as iPhones are fairly expensive.
All Mobile Devices by Operating System – if your application or tool works best on a specific operation system, this is your chance to eliminate other OS-s.
Tablet Owners – by targeting this group, you’re more likely to reach tech-savvy young people (and toddlers, tell us about good parenting!)
3. Targeting by Seasonal and Events
Seasonal and Events lets you target Facebook and Instagram audiences by their interest in current events such as sports events and holidays. If you have a seasonal offer to make – go for it!
This is what you can target in summer 2016:
- Summer Games 2016
- Baseball 2015
- Cricket Enthusiasts
- Fall Football (US)
- Professional Football (US)
- Ramadan 2016
Get inspired and target based on the right behavior:
Summer Games 2016 – this is the perfect behavioral group to target people interested in sports. You can create content around the Olympics and advertise it to this particular group to catch their attention.
Fall Football (US) – as with any other sports event, this gives you the perfect opportunity to reach young (and mostly male) audience.
4. Facebook behavioral targeting by Travel
One of the most exciting groups in Facebook audience targeting is Travel behaviors. If you spend some time thinking about how you can make it work for you and use a creative approach, you’ll open up a chance to target just the perfect audience.
And it’s not just for travel agencies and airline operators!
There are many options to choose from:
- All frequent travelers
- Business travelers
- Commuters
- Currently traveling
- Frequent International Travelers
- Returned from trip 1 week ago
- Returned from trip 2 weeks ago
- Used travel app (1 month)
- Used travel app (2 weeks)
Whom you can target based on their travel behavior:
All frequent travelers – traveling is a fairly expensive hobby, so targeting frequent travelers might indicate they’re well-off or traveling for business. You can reach either audience by combining Travel with other targeting options such as Purchase Behavior.
Business travelers – whatever business-related (or B2B) offer you’d like to get out there, business travelers should be part of your target audience. But remember they’re a busy bunch of people, so make your offer as straightforward as possible.
Commuters – do you have an interesting book, podcast or application that entertains people? The commuters might be interested in spending time with your offer!
Currently traveling – just imagine how well this audience behavior plays when combines with location and age-based targeting? You’re able to address all the tourists happening to be near your business (or simply in town).
Behaviour-based targeting options in Facebook Power Editor
The Power Editor got its name for a reason – it truly is more powerful than Facebook Ads Manager. I personally like to use AdEspresso’s Behavioral Targeting feature as it presents all the options available without the need to use Power Editor.
The list is actually TWICE as long, go and check it out (if you’re an AdEspresso user)!
So let’s talk a little bit about advanced behavioral targeting.
5. Targeting by Purchase Behavior
There are tons of opportunities to reach your perfect audience by targeting them by purchase behaviors.
Which targeting segments should you try first?
Business Purchases – under this category, you’ll find the sub-categories of:
- Business Marketing
- Maintenance, Repair and Operations
- Office and Corporate Gifts
- Training and Publications
If your ideal client would buy any of these products, it is well worth a try to target them!
Purchase Habits – this category accommodates 3 advanced options:
- Above average spending
- Offline buyers
- Online buyers
This could be a gold mine for eCommerce businesses as well as store owners who’d like to attract people who like to shop offline.
Now find what works for you!
I could easily keep on raving about all these awesome options of reaching the 100% (alright, maybe 80%) perfect Facebook audience.
But in the end, it’s YOU – the marketer – who knows your buyers the best. So go out there and create a new ad campaign to test out all the new key learnings.
By following Facebook advertising best practices and by putting your best effort into understanding who your perfect audience is, you can lower your advertising expenditure by a significant margin.
Before you go, here’s a simple framework for getting started or improving your Facebook ad targeting (download the PDF here).
(Read more: 10 Burning Questions That You Can Answer by A/B Testing Your Facebook Ads).
Over to you. If you have any questions regarding Facebook Behavioral targeting (or any other aspect of Facebook marketing), leave a comment, and I’ll do my best to answer it.
How accurate do you think these interests really are? I’ve done just as you’ve mentioned in the article, and created laser targeted audiences only to get highly irrelevant likes to my page.
Plus, I’ve looked at the interests that Facebook has associated with me and some of them are so far off, it isn’t even funny.
Hi Tyson,
That’s a great question. Of course, it’s a lot to expect that Facebook gets their targeting right every single time. After all, it depends on the behavioral patterns and people’s actions online are hard to interpret.
This said, it takes some trial and error before you find the right behaviors and interests to target. But in the process, you’ll also learn which interests don’t work, and have the option to exclude these audience segments from your targeting.
great article guys.
but i had the same problem too. especially when it came to location targeting. i used to just set a general targeting of males aged 25-35 within a 30 mile radius from my location. but the responses i received were all irrelevant. some of the responses were from people not even from the same country.
i managed to fix this by setting a more specific targeting, males, aged 25-35, “living in” the location rather than “everyone in” the location. i also layered it with some behavioral taregting to get it more “laser targeted”. so far it has been working for me quite well.
i also recently started uploading my email list to let facebook do the optimization for me. its been working pretty well so far. keen to see the results.
Great article. I have an online fine jewelry and gift business. I cannot seem to drill down far enough to find my ideal customer. I would love to hear your thoughts about how to find she/he, the fine jewelry buyer!
Hi Karen, I’m in a similar industry addressing the same issue. Please contact me if you’d be interested in rxchanging some ideas.
Hi Karen!
I really appreciate your feedback.
Coming back to your question – have you tried creating the buyer personas? Start with these two guides:
https://adespresso.com/academy/blog/facebook-ads-buyer-personas/
https://blog.bufferapp.com/marketing-personas-beginners-guide
Understanding your customer’s problems, needs, and aspirations really helps to up your marketing game and find a common language.
And with this understanding also come the targeting ideas – maybe they have some popular interests or maybe they live in a specific area. You can come up with lots of great ideas once you’ve figured out the buyer persona.
Hey, thanks for the great post.
Just wanted to add that, unfortunately, those additional categories in Power Editor aren’t available in all countries.
Hi Mike.
Thanks a lot for your kind words, I really appreciate it!
Unfortunately yes, not all the behavioral targeting options are available in all countries. But I guess one could agree that it’s still a lot of options!
Say you have a list of banned Facebook users (1,000+) on your FB Page and you want to create a look a like audience to exclude them from future campaigns. Is there a hacky way to do it?
Hello , why i cant see purchase behavior in my behavior section ?
Hi Didi!
Are you using Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor? Some targeting features are only available on Facebook Power Editor. Moreover, some behavioral targeting options are only available in specific countries.
1. When behaviour targeting is used and after exclude some custom audiences, may restrict audience size to a very small pool, say 60K-80K. I found that delivery becomes a problem.
2. Some interest, say travel, Finance, may have high audience overlap. So, how to fix the problem?
Any advice is welcome
Hi Sun,
I must say that 60k-80k people sounds like a pretty large audience to me. And as you said, you excluded some custom audiences because you want to target the exact right audience. So I don’t think it’s a negative result you’re having there. What would you consider the perfect audience size in your case?
It is inevitable that people’s interests overlap. There’s no way to “fix” the problem. If you’d like to really test which interest group has a highest conversion rate, create two ad groups with a different audience. That should be sufficient to measure the results for each interest-based audience.
Hope this helps!
Thanks. I have no objection to smaller targeted audience. However, my experience is that when audience size in 1 ad set is small, Facebook cannot deliver impression. (I use optimise for conversion). Did you experience something like that?
Hi Sun,
Try increasing your budget for the campaign to kick-off your new ad campaigns. Later, you can lower it to the budget you had planned.
The problem might also be related to a low bid. Increasing your bid per conversion generally helps to increase the number of impressions.
I feel like I’m reviving an old post, but I seem to be trickling into answers I’ve been looking for lately.
Karla, you suggest that 60-80k is a large audience, yet you’re literally the second source I’ve seen suggesting to keep audiences at or below 50k. DigitalMarketer for example, suggests 500k-1M. To me, THAT is a huge audience and what I’m used to testing with.
They basically do no audience narrowing and suggest stuffing all interest into the same section. That baffles me to a degree and I can’t think of a scenario where it would actually be beneficial.
Is there any particular reason why you might disagree with larger audiences like that other than budget?
Nice article. Thanks a lot
How to improve relevance score?
Thank you Divinan!
The easiest and most obvious way to increase your ads’ relevance score is to promote highly relevant offers to an interested audience.
But there’s more to it. See this AdEspresso guide for further ideas: https://adespresso.com/academy/blog/4-strategies-improve-facebook-ads-relevance-score/
Hello Karola Karlson,
Thank you writing this post. I am fed up of Facebook fake profile likes whenever I run Fb ads. I don’t know why Facebook cheat with advertisers!!!!
Is it possible that the available behavior targeting options vary between countries? Because I really can’t find many of the behaviors mentioned here (specifically speaking of purchase behaviors). On the other hand, I found ‘more categories > facebook categories > nail care’…
Hey Elad,
Yes, definitely – some categories available in the US may not be available in other countries and vice versa.
I have IT company and we develop website & android application, may i know how to i make perfect audience.
Would be a useful article, but those like myself outside USA, we don’t get hardly any targeting options!
Can you please let me know how to exclude the people who didn’t complete their Facebook profile as location, profession and gender?
I want to sell auto parts and accesories. What behaviours should i select?
Can i get behaviour baded targeted audience for my posts boosts??
Thank you so much for this! While we are aiming for event engagements, yet still seem to be getting responses with the ads we have come out with thus far,
I completely looked over the narrowing option , which could have landed me in hotter water should it have been a different circumstance
Can i target people based on what they search on google ?
Can i target people based on what they search on google??
I’m looking for active roofing leads. Home improvement behaviors or renovation? Also how do know we’re not just advertising to people that just bought a roof? I mean a majority of people buy a roof within that week of them looking. So it’s too late to advertise to them. Seems like a scam sorta.
how can i select from what the user has been looking at outside of facebook? for example, someone that has been looking into shoes on google
Hello,
I recently launched an online wig business and not so sure how to begin with narrowing down my audience.Any ideas?
If you would like to get a great deal from this article
then you have to apply such methods to your own weblog as I did.
I have created a campaign to increase the facebook likes and my project is related to real estate. The client sells
2-3 BHK apartment and the targeting marketing is GURGAON, DELHI, REWARI, BHIWADI.
Before following the above method the cost per like was 8 rs and still ( after following the above method) the CPR (Cost per results ) is same.
What should i do now.
Hi I can’t find “Event Creators” as a listed category under “Digital Activities” when trying to create a customized audience. Did Facebook remove this option? If not, have they renamed it or listed it elsewhere, and where can I find it?
You have explained behavioral targeting very nicely with the help of those relevant screenshots. I personally love facebook behavioral targeting because it can help us target people who use specific brands mobile devices.
Great Author of the article very informative blog. Thank you for sharing.