How to Create Facebook Campaign Audiences
One of the main reasons Facebook has been so attractive to advertisers is for the Facebook ad targeting options. The wide range of Facebook ad targeting audiences are a fantastic opportunity to ensure you spend your budget wisely and your ads are only shown to people who are most likely to follow your call to action. But with so many Facebook targeting options, also come challenges, as knowing which advertising audience to target and when to target it can be tricky.
This is why I’ll share with you all the different types of Facebook custom audiences you can create and target for your Facebook campaign.
When it comes to creating Facebook ad targeting audiences, divide audiences according to “warm audiences” and “cold audiences”. A warm advertising audience is made of people who are already familiar with your business, such as your Facebook page fans, website visitors, newsletter subscribers, your video viewers and people who have engaged with your Facebook campaign ads previously.
A cold advertising audience on the other hand is made of people who have never heard about your business previously and have never interacted with your business.
As a Facebook campaign advertiser, your ads will have to target both cold and warm audiences. In fact, your warm audiences will help you better define your cold audiences.
To create a warm Facebook audience, also known as “Facebook custom audiences”, you will have to login to your Facebook campaign ads manager dashboard, and then select “audiences” and “create custom audience”.
Note that Facebook custom audiences can be refined even further, by narrowing down who you want to include in your custom audience by specifying where you’d like them to be located geographically, or by specifying their age or their gender.
In terms of cold audiences, you can create two types of cold audiences. Either “interest audiences” or “Facebook lookalike audiences”.
Interest audiences is creating a group of people based on their demographics, interests and behaviours. For example, you can choose to create a Facebook target audience of people living in Sydney, aged 30-55 years old who are fans of Anthony Robbins and fans of the book “The Secret”.
Facebook lookalike audiences on the other hand can be created by leveraging either your Facebook custom audiences or your interest audiences.
A lookalike audience is a Facebook audience that is similar to an existing audience. For example, you can create a lookalike audience from your “website visitors” custom audience and you can create a lookalike audience from your interest audience.
So before you can create a lookalike audience, you’ll have to have created audiences, either custom audiences or interest audiences. In terms of the size of your existing audience, from which you’ll create a lookalike audience, Facebook recommends to have an audience of 1,000 to 50,000 people. Any audience smaller than 1,000 people might not give Facebook enough data to create a quality lookalike audience.
What is also important to know about Facebook lookalike audiences, is that the users in your source audience will be excluded from the lookalike audience Facebook creates.
When you create a lookalike audience, you’ll be able to refine it further by specifying the country or countries you want the people in your lookalike audience to be living in.
Once you have created both warm and cold audiences, you’ll have different groups you can target in just a few clicks. For example, you could have the following 4 audiences at your disposal:
-Warm Facebook target audience 1: Website visitors (custom audience)
-Warm Facebook target audience 2: Facebook page fans (custom audience)
-Cold Facebook target audience 1: Australia, 30-55 years old, fans of Anthony Robbins (interest audience)
-Cold Facebook target audience 2: Lookalike Facebook fans (lookalike audience)
At first of course, if you’re new at Facebook advertising, you won’t be able to create custom audiences and Facebook lookalike audiences, so start by creating interest audiences and Facebook page fans audiences if you already have a large enough audience on your Facebook page.
When creating an interest audience, avoid creating one single audience with different interests. Instead, create multiple interest audiences, ideally made of a single interest or just a few interests, to be able to see which interest performs better.
That way, you’ll be able to have a clearer understanding on which segment of your Facebook target audience is most receptive to your ads for future reference.
