Wordstream: Facebook Ad Targeting in 2024

Facebook has been a crazy powerful advertising platform for nearly 10 years now. Over the years, the targeting options have gotten super granular to help you better reach your potential customers.

But with new privacy measures—namely, the deprecation of third-party cookies and Apple's iOS 14 (and higher) privacy features—this is all changing. But there are still ways to effectively advertise on Facebook. It's just a matter of understanding the new landscape and how to best use each audience type. 

Photo: Wordsteream

Types of Facebook targeting audiences

Before we get into the specifics, let's do a quick overview of the three types of Facebook targeting audiences.

1. Core audi
2. ences: This is the default audience type in Ads Manager where you can target by location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections.
3. Custom audiences: These audiences are created using your own data (such as people who have visited your website or a customer list) and/or Facebook's data (such as behavior on the platform).
4. Lookalike audiences: Facebook can create audiences similar to ones you've already created or based on an uploaded list.

1. Facebook demographic targeting

Facebook demographic targeting is a Core audience type, based on any of the information users supply to Facebook about themselves in their profiles.

The most basic demographic targeting option is by age, location, and gender. 

Then there is Detailed Targeting, which includes education level, financial or relationship status, whether they're parents or not, and more.

Privacy challenges

Overall, these will stick around fairly well given the self-reported nature of the information and likely won't be impacted unless some new take on the privacy laws is started.

Infographic on Wordstream

2. Facebook behavior & interest targeting

This is another Core audience type. You can target behaviors and interests concurrently with demographics, but we just separated them out because they are more impacted by privacy.

Facebook can infer information about users based on the information they provide in their Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger profiles as well as their engagement with sites in the Facebook audience Network. 

Infographic Wordstream

You can find behavior and interest targeting options by browsing Facebook's predefined lists or just start typing into the Detailed Targeting search box and locate individual targeting options.

These options are very powerful. For example, you can target users who are interested in finance, but not just finance in general. You can segment by users who are looking at topics related to credit cards vs insurance vs mortgages: 

3.Privacy challenges

In the future, with signal loss from third-party tracking pixels around the Facebook network, it'll be harder for Facebook to create these segments with the same level of specificity.

For example, when you search for Olympics, you are presented with lots of different interest targeting options for different years, summer vs winter, NBC, etc. 

Just like with any other list segmentation process, it's easier to come up with lots of nuanced groups within a list if it's a big list to begin with. But the crackdown on third-party pixels essentially means Facebook will have a smaller list of signals to create new target groups from.

So Olympics targeting will still be around, but rather than a list of years and TV network names, we may only see "Summer Olympics" and "Winter Olympics," or maybe even just "Olympics."

Try interest stacking

With audiences getting less specific, it might make more sense to target multiple interests in one ad set.

For example if you're looking to target marketers, instead of creating an ad set to target users interested in Buffer, you might add Hootsuite + Sprout Social + StreamYard, etc. all into the same audience. 

3. Facebook custom audience targeting

Advertising isn't always about finding new audience members. It's equally important to reengage those who are already familiar with your brand.

Custom audiences allow you to retarget users who have engaged with your brand in two ways:

• Your own data: website or app activity, offline activity, and customer lists.
• Facebook's data: users who have interacted with your other Facebook assets, including videos, lead forms, Instant Experiences, Events, business Page, and more.

Challenges

"Your Sources" are the targeting options that are impacted the most (and most directly) by all the tracking changes we're experiencing now.

You may have noticed you're getting warnings like the one below, telling you that your audience may not include everyone who has been to your website due to tracking data loss. 

At the same time, you're probably also getting this message saying that you also can't exclude everyone you'd like from your campaigns because of…you guessed it…data loss.

So not only can't you retarget everyone who has been to your website, but you also can't exclude everyone who has made a purchase—due to privacy constraints.

Going broader with your audience's interests gives Facebook's algorithm more to work with.

5. Upload customer lists

Customer lists are one way to try and mitigate some of these losses, but they aren't and have never been perfect .Customer lists let you upload a list of user names, emails, phone numbers, etc. into an ad platform for matching to users in that platform's database. When a user is matched, they're added to your list and you're able to target them. 

But the issue here is that not all users are able to be matched. Maybe they gave you a bogus email or simply a different one than what they signed up for Facebook with. Or they have multiple emails and Facebook isn't aware of that.

No matter the cause, customer uploads can be a great way to backstop the loss of cookied website visitors, but it won't be a complete solution.

6. Rely on Facebook sources

The easiest way to have full tracking capabilities for your target audience is to stop relying on the cookies and uploads altogether and simply rely on the platform interactions instead. 

Anything in the second section is a Facebook-owned data source, meaning that Facebook owns that touchpoint and isn't subject to privacy issues if they use that interaction to target someone.

7. Retarget Facebook Page visitors

"Facebook Page" in that list of Facebook sources is a great option. With it, you can create audiences of users who:

• Like or follow your Page
• Engaged with your Page
• Visited your Page
• Engaged with any post or ad
• Clicked any call-to-action button
• Sent a message to your Page
• Saved your Page or any post

And then target them just as you would your website visitors. If they came to your page but didn't purchase, target them with a Catalog campaign. If they've liked a lot of your content, send them a lead gen form to download a guide. Just because it happens on Facebook and not your website, doesn't mean it's not user behavior that should be taken advantage of. 

4. Facebook lookalike audience targeting

Lookalike audiences is one of our ridiculously powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies.

While there are some Facebook Lookalke Audience best practices you can employ to ensure you're making the most of them, there are also some considerations with the latest round of privacy changes.

Since Lookalikes are based on machine learning from retargeting audiences, those data losses will also impact your Lookalike prospecting. Lookalike effectiveness will really depend on how well you can create source audiences for Facebook to model from.

My tips here are the same as for retargeting audiences.

9. Stay away from website audiences

Lookalike effectiveness will really depend on how well you can create source audiences for Facebook to model from, so our tips here are the same as for custom audiences. It may be worth taking a step away from the "all purchasers" or "website visitors" audiences to find a new source, as those website-based audiences are likely going to be less effective than they used to be.

10. Create a Page like lookalike audience

If you see good results with people who engage with your page, create a lookalike of Page likers and target them in a new ad set or campaign. This way you can differentiate them from your actual Page likers. 

Original Text: Wordstream