One of the more powerful tools that Facebook Ads offers is the ability to filter a range of demographics so that your message gets to the kind of people who are going to appreciate it and are more likely to act upon it. Once you have selected the objective of your Facebook ad campaign, the next step in our mini series is about: Facebook ads choosing your audience and setting your budget and it requires very careful thought.

The audience selection part of Facebook’s Ad Manager allows you to include options such as where people are located, their gender, age group and interests. You can then set how much you want to spend.

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Facebook Ads Choosing Your Audience and Setting Your Budget

Defining Your Audience

On the right hand side of the display, Facebook gives a simple indicator for how broad or how targeted your ad is going to be. If your parameters are too wide, the chances of you reaching your intended audience are reduced and you could be risking a low return on investment. Essentially, you want more people clicking on your ad link that are going to be interested in what you have to offer.

Let’s take location as a simple example. If you run a local business such as a taxi firm, then you can only provide your service to people in your region – so it doesn’t make sense to start advertising to users fifty miles away let alone halfway round the world. You decide that your main customers are people out for a night on the town between the ages of 20 and 30 which further narrows your field. The list can become ever more specific depending on the other choices that you make.

Location: You can select a specific location and include everyone who lives there, people who have recently visited or who travel in the area. You can include postal code areas if you want to be more specific and include or exclude specific regions if you are operating globally. As you fill in this parameter, you will notice the dial on the right begin to change and Facebook will also give you an idea of the number of people your ad will potentially reach.

Age and Gender: You can select your age group and whether you are targeting just men or women or both. You can also limit your ad to those who speak a particular language in this section.

Detailed Targeting: Next we come to the stage of drilling a little deeper into your demographic. This allows you to include and exclude a variety of interests and behaviours.

• Demographics can be split along lines of education, ethnicity, home life, whether your audience are parents, whether they are interested in particular sports or like gaming and so on.
• Interests include health and lifestyle, business, hobbies and relationships.
• Behaviours cover everything from whether your audience can drive to if they use a mobile, live abroad or spend a lot of time in the gym.
• Finally, there is the option to use Facebook’s own specific demographics such as whether they like family movies or eat fast food.

There really is a lot here to narrow down your audience and it’s one of the more powerful aspects of the Facebook Ad Manager. Get it right and you could run a highly targeted ad campaign that has great results.

Setting Your Budget

At the end of the audience selection, Facebook gives you the opportunity to set your budget for the campaign. You can opt to run it for a certain period and allocate a daily amount that you want to spend. You can also choose to manually set what you would hope to pay for a click-through or let Facebook do it for you automatically as well as whether you want them to run at a particular time of day.

Once this is done, the next step in Ad Manager is creating your ad. We will be covering this topic in our next article, showing you how to create powerful content. Our one big tip with all Social Media Advertising – be specific, be targeted and test, test, test! The more targeted and specific your message the more likely you are to see a decent return on your investment. It is always a good idea to test an ads response before going out with a full budget.

If you have any queries regarding Facebook ads, or would like an agency to create your campaigns for you the get in touch with The Last Hurdle Social Ads team on 01604 654545 or email sales@thelasthurdle.co.uk