So far in the Coffee Break Guides, we’ve covered the pixel and the landing page, now it’s time to look at the ads themselves.
Facebook offers a huge range of audience targeting options, and you can overlay them to create ‘super audiences’ to get super-geeky….
1. Core Audiences
This is all the stuff you’d expect to be able to audience target on, including demographics and location, but also interests and behaviours. Demographic targeting is useful if you only want to target males for stag weekends for example, or over 50’s for 50+ holidays.
Location targeting is handy if you have a takeaway service only operating in a 3km radius of your restaurant – you can drop a pin and select people within a certain radius, or just select certain cities and countries.
Interest and behaviour targeting is super-handy to start to shape your audience. We find it works very well for the hair and beauty industry. If people are showing interest in lash extensions, and their behaviour matches those happy to spend money online, we know we can get great sales for an e-commerce store selling false lashes.
HOT TIP: Use the Google keyword tool or similar to research ideas for targeting, then search these keywords in the Facebook interests box.
2. Custom Audiences
This is where it gets interesting. Do you have a list of email address of customers who’ve shown interest in your business? Perhaps service leads or previous purchasers? You can load this data into Facebook, and it will match that data to Facebook users. 2.2 BILLION people worldwide use Facebook, chances are your previous customers do!
People who’ve previously used your services are 5 times more likely to purchase again, so make the most of that and retarget them with ads. If you’ve been talking to someone about your services and they didn’t go ahead, this is a great opportunity to soft-sell to them, by appearing in their Facebook feed. This will reinforce your credibility and keep you in their minds.
You can also retarget ads to people who have visited your website and set a window for this, for example, just showing ads to visitors in the last 7 days. You can also target ads to people that have visited certain pages, or who have got to a certain stage of your booking flow.
This works very well with people who initiated checkout or added something to the basket. It’s like sending an abandoned cart email, except instead of a measly 10% email open rate, you’re right there in their newsfeed with an incentive to come back and purchase!
Have an app? You can also use custom audiences to target ads to them, encouraging them to come back and use the app. This works very well for takeaway companies – show them a steaming pizza with cheese drooling down the side at 6pm on a Friday, and your app opens to order will be on fire!
3. Lookalike Audiences
So you have all this great data on who is visiting your website, engaging with your Facebook page, purchasing from your business and so on – now you can find people just like them!
The click-through rate for a lookalike audience can be a whopping 48% higher than on an interest-based ad – Facebook is pretty good at finding people just like your existing customer base.
You can create lookalike audiences based on any of your custom audience data, including those purchasers and leads you have info about, Facebook page engagers, video views, Instagram and many more. When setting up the add, click ‘create new’ in custom audience, and have a play around with the options in there.
We’re using this section of the site every day, and notice new options popping up very often. Make sure you join our Facebook group here to be updated when new options become available.
