Facebook Ads – Choosing Your Audience and Setting Your Budget

One of the key strengths of Facebook Ads is its ability to target specific demographics, ensuring your message reaches the right people—those who are more likely to engage and act upon it. After selecting the objective of your campaign, the next crucial steps are choosing your audience and setting your budget. This part of the process requires thoughtful consideration to maximise your return on investment (ROI).

Facebook Ads – Choosing Your Audience and Setting Your Budget

Defining Your Audience

On the right-hand side of Facebook’s Ad Manager, you will find an indicator that shows how broad or targeted your ad is. This simple gauge helps you understand whether your targeting is too wide, which can dilute your campaign’s effectiveness. Ideally, you want to ensure your ad reaches an audience that is not only interested in your offer but also likely to click through and convert.

For example, if you own a local taxi firm, your service area is naturally restricted to a specific region. Advertising to people 50 miles away, let alone across the world, would be irrelevant. If your target audience consists of people aged 20-30 going out for a night on the town, you can further refine your campaign. The more you narrow your targeting, the better chance you have of reaching the right people and achieving a higher ROI.

Location

You can choose a specific location and target everyone who lives there, people who have recently visited, or those who travel to the area. If you want to be more precise, you can target by postal code. You can also include or exclude specific regions if your business operates globally. As you adjust the location settings, you will notice the audience size changing, with Facebook giving you an estimate of how many people your ad could potentially reach.

Age and Gender

Next, you can specify the age range of your audience and whether you want to target men, women or both. You can also limit your ad to those who speak a particular language, which is useful if you’re running a multilingual campaign.

Detailed Targeting

Now it’s time to drill down even further into your audience by using detailed targeting options, allowing you to include or exclude people based on specific interests and behaviours:

• Demographics: Filter by education level, ethnicity, home life, whether your audience are parents or if they are interested in certain activities like sports or gaming.
• Interests: Include specific interests such as health, lifestyle, business, hobbies or relationships.
• Behaviours: You can target people based on their habits, such as whether they drive, use a mobile device, live abroad or regularly visit the gym.
• Facebook-Specific Categories: For even more precision, you can use Facebook’s own categories, such as whether someone likes family movies or frequently eats fast food.

The extensive targeting options available in Facebook Ad Manager are what make it such a powerful tool. When used correctly, you can create a highly targeted ad campaign that delivers excellent results.

Setting Your Budget

After defining your audience, the next step is to set your budget. You have the option to run your ad over a specific time period and allocate a daily spend. Facebook also allows you to choose between setting a manual cost per click or letting their system manage it automatically. Additionally, you can decide if your ad should run at specific times of the day to maximise visibility when your target audience is most active.

Once your budget is set, the next step is to create the ad itself.

Top Tips

• Be Specific: The more targeted your audience and message, the better your chances of generating a good return on investment.
• Test, Test, Test: It’s always wise to test your ad’s performance before committing to your full budget. A smaller test run can help identify what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to make adjustments before rolling out the full campaign.

In our next article, we will delve into creating powerful content for your Facebook ad. If you have any questions or would like help managing your social media campaigns, contact The Last Hurdle’s Social Ads team on 01604 654545 or email us at hello@thelasthurdle.co.uk.