A guide to choosing an audience for Facebook adverts

In every ad set on offer on Facebook you can choose who to target. This opportunity to reach a specific audience is one of the network’s most powerful and significant benefits.

Choosing Your Audience
When you opt to use Facebook Advertising you can choose exactly who views your ad according to a huge variety of different factors. These include location, gender, age, interests, language, connections and behaviours.

Understanding Location Segmentation
Location segmentation means that you can exclude or include viewers of your ad according to where they are located in the world. You can choose to target every person in that location, everyone who lives there, people who have recently been in the area or people who have been travelling in the location but live elsewhere. You can even add a specific location using an exact address, postal code, city or regional description and then decide on the radius you want to target around this central point.

You can also decide on a maximum and minimum age for the people you want to target, as well as if you want to reach both sexes or just one, and change the language options if your target audience speaks another language apart from that usually found in your chosen location.

Targeting Interests and Behaviours
The most detailed selection of options you will face revolve around the interests and behaviours of the people you want to target. Demographic options include education level, job titles, income level and relationship status, whilst interests contain such options as fitness, sports, business and shopping.

In the behaviours section, there is the chance to specify details such as B2B company size, the type of operating systems use, recent homeowners and purchasing behaviour.

Lastly, you can opt to target your audience according to users’ previous interactions or lack of interactions with your Facebook event, app or page. This can be particularly helpful if you want to connect with people who already have some knowledge about your brand or to discover new people who are not familiar with you and what you do.

More on Custom Audiences
It is possible to build an audience entirely made up of people with previous relationships with your brand – either as contacts, clients or customers – and deliver your ads straight to them. There is a link to create such an audience and you will be offered a trio of different ways you can create your audience. You could use your customer list, app activity or website traffic.

You can upload existing contacts or integrate with MailChimp to help you create your custom audience or allow Facebook to use the conversion pixel from your site. Finally, you can use one of your connected apps to segment according to activity. Once you have your custom audience saved you can refine it further according to specific campaign requirements or business and marketing initiatives.