Full Breakdown On Facebook Behavioral Targeting
Do you spend hours upon hours planning, writing, and designing Facebook ads every month? Curious on how Facebook behavioral targeting works? You’ve come to the right place then!
You commit your full attention to growing SEO, optimizing ad conversion, and social media marketing. But do you feel your conversions are not enough?
Well, you’re not alone. Many of us are guilty of focusing too much on the conversion side of our ads we forget a big piece of the puzzle.
Are you targeting the right audience?
With Facebook behavioral targeting, marketers can target ads for 100% of their target audience. It’s like mind-reading giving you an insight into people’s likes, interests, things they’re shopping for, and so much more.
Have your ads target individuals who have shown interest in your products or services via their actions. Behavioral targeting tracks users’ behaviors to determine if they’re part of your target audience.
Add Facebook behavioral targeting and your Facebook advertising’s ROI will balloon. These 13 tips will get you started in making the most of Facebook behavioral targeting.
About the Facebook Audience
Every business, company, and organization has a target audience. This audience is a group of people or businesses to whom you market your advertising.
You can break down this audience by demographics such as age, location, income, and more. The specificity of your target audience’s demographics will allow you to better plan and design advertisements that cater to your audience. Other targeting methods can include the users’ devices, their travel habits, and hobbies.
On Facebook, you can set these parameters and let Facebook find this audience for you.
The one drawback of this is it can lead to an audience that is too limited. It takes some experimentation and user understanding to find the right Facebook audience.
A Breakdown of Facebook Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting is a way to get your Facebook ads in front of the people who demonstrated a possible interest based on their actions.
By showing your ads to your target audience, the more likely you are to increase your conversions and advertising ROI.
Facebook’s behavioral targeting gives you an insight into specific behaviors such as:
- Shopping habits
- Facebook payments
- The Operating Systems they use
- Event creators
- Photo uploads
- Console Gamers
- Small business owners
- Facebook Admins
- Internet Browsers they use
- Main email domain
- Traveling habits/interests
- Other interests
- And more
Within each category, you’ll find subcategories. You can get a specific idea of your target audience’s habits to increase engagement, conversions, and click-through rate or CTR.
Facebook tracks most of what people do on its platform which helps marketers find the right audience. Advertisements are then more relevant to the user.
Facebook Behavioral Targeting Tips
The following tips will help you make the most of Facebook behavioral targeting. You’ll customize the right audience to view your ads.
In Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll find many options to filter your target audience under the Behavior section. We’ll dive into how to properly use these tools to find create a custom audience for each marketing campaign you plan.
1. Digital Activities Targeting
This category in Facebook Ads Manager allows you to target people based on the actions they make online. You can sort people based on the type of devices, operating systems, and any other digital things people use.
Do you want your target audience to include small business owners? Use this Facebook sub-category along with Facebook Page Admins to find anyone who lists themselves as a small business owner on a page.
Technology Early Adopters lets you target people who might have an interest in a new product your business has to hit the market. Other categories worth checking out include FB Payments, Later Adopters, and Event Creators.
2. Mobile Device Targeting
This part of Facebook behavioral targeting is useful for businesses developing apps and software for use on certain devices. Depending on your product or service, you could target higher or lower-end product users.
You can breakdown your user audience by the device brands they use. You can group people based on their device’s operating system. This is an important feature for app developers whose apps only work on certain operating systems.
You can shape your Facebook audience even more with tablet owners, network connections, and more.
3. Financial Targeting
The Financial category breaks down further into insurance, spending methods, and investments. A useful category lets businesses focus on those who are likely to buy your product. Whether you’re selling a recreational product or investment services, Financial targeting is your friend.
All 3 categories include data that people self-report through Facebook’s data partner, Axicom. You’ll find information on types of insurance people have such as health, automotive, and home.
With spending methods, you can create ads based on people’s payment methods and types of cards.
Then there’s the investment section that breaks down who is likely to invest and how they invest. Such as self-directed versus using a service.
4. Targeting by Charitable Donations
If you’re a non-profit organization or leading a charity campaign, check out the Charitable Donations section. It lets you find your audience based on their self-reported donations.
In this section, you will find categories that include animal welfare, environmental, and world relief. Health, arts and culture, and veteran affairs are a few more from that list.
This will help you shape your target audience based on their likelihood of donating again and to what types of charities.
5. Target Residential Profiles
Businesses in the real estate or mortgage industries will want to create a target audience that is likely to move or buy a home. With the Residential Profiles category, you can do just that.
Here, you can filter your audience based on how likely they are to move or if they are a recent home buyer. Other sub-categories include recent mortgage borrowers and recently moved.
With this Facebook behavioral targeting, you’ll create a well-defined target audience that finds your real estate or mortgage options useful.
6. Target Interests
An easy and successful targeting method on Facebook is Interest-based targeting. This section lets you base your audience on their interests relating to your product or service. You can broaden your audience to target people interested in your competitors and blogs in your market.
The menu in this section includes hundreds of different interests for you to choose from. You can type in key interests and quickly select the interests most relevant to your business. Selecting more than 1 interest will help broaden your target audience.
Peoples’ pages likes, purchase history, and app use help determines their interests.
7. Purchasing Behavior Targeting
Target your advertising to an audience that has purchased products or services similar to what your business offers. The Purchasing Behavior category lets you get as specific as you need to to find the right audience.
Business Purchases and Purchase Habits are the most useful targeting segments.
Business Purchases lets you find a business-based audience. The sub-categories here include maintenance and repair, business marketing, corporate gifts, and training. If you’re a B2B business you’ll want to check this out.
Purchase Habits has 3 options for advanced targeting. These include offline buyers, online buyers, and those who spend above the average spending amount.
E-commerce stores can target people who shop online while other store owners can target offline buyers.
8. Event Targeting
With the Seasonal and Events targeting category, you can target audiences based on their interests in current and holiday events. You can do this targeting on both Facebook and Instagram.
Businesses sharing seasonal offers or hosting an event will benefit the most form of event targeting. The most popular event target categories are sports-based such as football, baseball, and the Olympics. Holidays are the second most popular.
If you have an upcoming event, you can target people based on their relationship to your event. You can filter your audience even further with event engagement. You set the criteria users need to meet for your ads to target them.
9. Target Traveling Habits
People travel for more than just vacations and relaxing getaways. This exciting targeting method lets you target traveling habits you can break down your target audience into the types of traveling they do.
If your business isn’t directly related to the travel industry you may need to get a little creative with finding a way to link travel to your business. Why? Because it’s a fun opportunity to find the right audience!
This category includes:
- Frequent travelers
- Business travelers
- Commuters
- Currently traveling
- Frequent international travelers
- Returned from a trip (1 or 2 weeks)
- Use of travel apps (1 month or 2 weeks)
Traveling is an expensive hobby meaning your frequent travelers probably have the money to afford high-end products. Targeting business travelers is great for B2B companies to reach out to other businesses.
If you’re in the news or entertainment industries, travelers and commuters will benefit from your products. This is true for any product or service that helps them pass the time or travel in comfort. Targeting people who are currently traveling based on their interests and location can open your target audience to tourists.
10. Utilizing a Lookalike Audience
With Facebook behavioral targeting, you can target audiences that have similar qualities as your current audience. Lookalike Audience allows you to grow your audience with people who are likely to convert.
This step comes after you create your Custom Audience, based on the tips and categories listed above. But if you don’t have a Custom Audience set up yet, you can still create a Lookalike Audience.
You can make your Lookalike Audiences broader or more specific than your existing custom audience. This can change depending on your ads and campaigns. Facebook will help you find the top 1-10% of people with similar traits to your current audience.
The main benefit of using Lookalike Audiences is the ability to grow your campaign. It will only target people who are likely to engage with your offer or campaign.
11. Creating Ad Angles
Facebook behavioral targeting lets you get creative and promote ads that relate to a user’s behavior.
Copywriting is one of the most important parts of effective marketing. An ad angle is an idea that drives the copywriting in your ads. The purpose of an ad angle is to relate to and compel your audience to follow an action.
In Facebook, you can match different behavioral target categories to match with your angles, ads, and landing pages. Combine behavioral targeting with demographics and you’ll find an audience with a high likelihood of converting.
12. Creating Relevant Ad Sets
To fully use behavioral targeting, you need to create ads that speak to those behaviors. This means every aspect from images and headings, to the copy and CTA should have a connection with the behaviors you are targeting.
Imagine you’re a business that sells all kinds of camping products. The type of people you’d target enjoy the outdoors, like camping, and enjoy hiking. You would want to create an ad that speaks to these behaviors by including images and text about hiking and camping.
When drafting your ads, keep your target audience in mind and make them straight-to-the-point.
13. Add Layered Targeting Options
By adding more filtering layers with targeting options, you can set up a super-specific target audience. You can get so specific by layering your target options you can limit your target audience to a small group of people.
An example is a business offering a discount on suitcases for students. You can layer people who travel with an 18-25 year age range with their education level.
Layering your target options is great for matching your ads to a specific target audience that finds your ad interesting. Understanding users’ intents, needs, and the likelihood of response will make layered targeting options a successful tool.
Start Targeting Your Perfect Audience
Using these 13 tips for Facebook behavioral targeting will help you find the right audiences. You can create custom ads and marketing campaigns to fit your audience’s needs. In turn, you’ll get a greater conversion rate and a larger ROI on your advertising efforts.
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