Facebook Interest Targeting: The Ultimate Facebook Ads Guide

Facebook ads can often be a trial-and-error practice. Finding the best strategy for your industry and business can be a struggle at the best of times. This is why finding an ultimate Facebook Ads guide which works for you and your business is often a turning point in a business cycle.

Facebook advertising can be a scary place for the uninitiated. There are many moving parts to work with and keep an eye on, that it can get overwhelming for unfamiliar people.

Given that Facebook ads can be complex, we thought we’d give you a quick rundown on our strategy we use here at Caffeinate Digital. This strategy will help overcome the overwhelming part of managing your audience, budget, campaign length and statistics such as CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost per click).

Today we’re looking into a facet of PPC marketing called Facebook Interest Targeting, in addition to something we call, Interest Layering. This means we’ll be looking into how to maximize your Facebook Ads targeting strategy. As well as how it can reap rewards for your business by eliminating individuals from your target groups, who will not purchase. All the while only targeting those ready to buy.

Here it is. Our ultimate Facebook Ads guide where we discuss what Facebook interest targeting is, interest layering and how to do it.

What is Facebook interest targeting?

Facebook interest targeting is a targeting tool on the Facebook Ads platform where you build and target your campaign audience. It works is by taking a consumer group on Facebook and targeting them by what they’re interested in.

It’s important to do this. Especially in 2019 where advertising costs are rising and there are more advertisers fighting for market share of a small consumer group than ever before.

It goes without saying, to undertake this style of targeting, you must fully understand your target audience.

Gone are the days when you could cast a wide net and effectively target a lot of people at a low cost. As Facebook’s algorithms and advertising platforms have matured, its forced marketers and business owners to be savvier with their marketing.

Meaning you now need to understand your target audience better than ever. Or else you’ll be losing money as your CPC rises. This would then influence other parts of your sales funnel, like your cost per sale, cost per lead and your CTR.

How to maximize your Facebook interest targeting

In this section, we will go over the steps in which you can set up an effective targeting strategy for your Facebook Ads.

Step 1 – Create a Saved Audience

Here is where we’re going to create our audience which we can save for future Facebook Ads campaigns.

To begin with, we need to fill in the basics of your audience. So fill in the location, gender and a rough age group that you want your campaign to run to.

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Step 2 – Detailed Targeting

The next port of call is on the Create a Saved Audience page, called Detailed Targeting. This is a more important part of the setup and is where we’ll spend a lot of time.

It’s at this point where you have the option to do what every advertiser known to man does. This is targeting a wide audience set and be finished targeting your audience.

We are going to fill in this section, but we’re not going to stop here. So enter in the basics of your customer interests. For example, if we were a caravan park looking to advertise, some of the more basic interests we could choose could be Campsite, RV Camping, and Camping.

Step 3 – Interest Layering

What we’re going to do here is dig a little deeper and start to flesh out a more detailed target audience interest fields.

Below the Detailed Targeting box, you will see two links which you can choose. One is Exclude People and the other is Narrow Audience.

Both of these links are important for Interest Layering and will go into them in the next few steps.

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Step 4 – Narrow Audience

Click on Narrow Audience. It’s here where you can dig deeper into which audience you’re going to target on Facebook.

We do this because we want to increase the number of interests our target audience may have that align with our caravan park. Therefore, increasing the likelihood of the target audience seeing our ad and actually converting.

This works by increasing the number of interests which your target audience needs to have to see your ads.

Meaning, your audience not only need to match with one of the interests you chose earlier (Campsite, RV Camping and Camping), but must also match with other interest groups. We call this Interest Layering.

Note: The person who sees your ad does not need to match every single interest you list. Instead, they need to match at least one in every group. As per the video, we want a person who is interested in Camping, Cycling, and Scoutcraft for example.

Step 5 – Exclude people

In all forms of advertising, we have groups who it just isn’t profitable to advertise to. In traditional advertising, you can avoid certain people, but it is still nowhere near as targeted as digital advertising where you can ensure people outside of your target audience never see your ad. Meaning you don’t get charged for a useless lead.

Facebook Ads are the same.

Here, you can exclude certain people from seeing the ad you’re placing.

This is a great tool to use if there are subsets within your audience who don’t fit the mold you’re looking to target.

For example, if our caravan park is located near popular caves, then you may want to target spelunking or rock climbing. However, you may want to exclude people with glamping as an interest, as they are very different from the clientele you’re most likely to accommodate.

Our Created Audience

Once we’ve finished the above five steps, we have a refined audience who we believe are in the subculture which we’re looking to target. In our example, the subculture would be people who love the outdoors.

This ensures we have a much larger chance of accurately targeting an audience that is interested in purchasing your product.

By creating this narrowed and interest layered audience, we would have dropped down the potential reach of the campaign. However, we now know the people who will see the ad will all be interested in exactly what we want them to be interested in.

In doing this, we’ve streamlined our audience, taking away any unwanted people from our campaign. This closer customer match will drop your CPC and CTR, ultimately reducing your cost per lead making your Facebook Ads leaner and more effective, with less waste.

In summary

In your PPC strategy, getting your Facebook ads to communicate to your ideal target audience isn’t always straight forward. Although your targeting would work to a point with a more basic Facebook interest targeting, a more detailed approach has more benefits. Namely, your bottom line.

By implementing this simple addition into your PPC strategy, you’ll not only become more relevant to your ideal customers, but you’ll save and make more money in the process. Effectively meaning you’ll build brand recognition and making money in the process.

Let us know how you go with our ultimate Facebook Ads guide. We’d love to hear what results you’ve achieved with this method and if you have any tips yourself!

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