Optimizing your ad targeting involves understanding the behavior and motivations of your target audience. So how exactly do you go about understanding your audience and improving your targeting?
To start with, there’s an important metric within Facebook ads called the Relevance Score, which is a number between 1 and 10. The relevance score is an important component used in the calculation of the total value of an ad for in the ad auction. If you can increase the value of the relevance score, then your ad will outrank the ad of a competitor provided other factors remain the same.
This is the formula for the ad auction;
[Advertiser Bid] x [Estimated Action Rates] + [User Value] = Total Value
[User Value] = [AdQuality] x [Relevance Score]
So let’s focus on the tactics to improve your relevance score, hence your audience targeting.
Build a Buyer/User Persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer or user that is created through market research on what you know about your audience. The buyer persona contains all of the attributes that make up your audience. It is a good starting point because you have a good reference point when you have to make targeting decisions in the Facebook targeting tool. It also helps you to stay consistent when you’re refining your audience composition at a later time.
Refine Your Buyer Persona Using the Facebook Audience Insight Tool
Enter attributes of your buyer persona into the Facebook Audience Insight (FAI) tool to validate your ideas about your audience. You can enter attributes such as Country of Residence, Interests, Age, Gender, and advanced options such as level of education, relationship status e.t.c. Once you’ve entered the appropriate attributes that represent the audience for your business, you can use the Demographics, Page likes, Location, and Activity tabs to understand how appropriate your selected audience is to your business. You can now save the audience, and use it to run campaigns.
Refine Your Facebook Audience Through Google Analytics
The purpose of running ads in the first place is to make the audience perform some kind of action on your website be it a purchase, filling a lead form, viewing particular pages, or spending some amount of time on your website e.t.c. Having run the campaign, it’s good practice to check how well your selected audience resulted in the achievement of your advertising goals.
Through Google Analytics or any other analytics platform, you can view demographics, location, and interest reports to know which audience segments were responsible for your conversion, and then shape your audience selection accordingly in Facebook ads.
Over the years, we’ve consistently been able to achieve good results for our clients using these simple techniques in selecting our audience, and you can now take advantage of them too.