A Guide To Meta Ads Audience Targeting

Introduction

Meta Ads is one of the best advertising platforms for targeting specific audiences. When used effectively, audience targeting can help reduce wasted spend, improve return on investment (ROI), and ensure that your ads reach people who are most likely to engage, convert, or take action.

This guide aims to look at the different targeting options available. We’ll break down the different targeting options available and best practices.

Targeting Options

Demographics

Demographics are based on a range of things, including age, gender, location, language, education, or parental status (and income if you operate outside of Europe). Demographics are probably the simplest type of audience targeting and are often a good starting point to create your own audience.

The challenges that come with using demographic targeting are that the audience may become broad or there may be inaccuracies.

Interests And Behaviors

Interests and Behaviours are based on declared interests (pages liked, content engaged with) or behaviours (purchase activity, device usage).

Interests and Behaviours can be useful when looking to create a certain audience to narrow down people with relevant interests.

Interests and Behaviour audiences can be affected when privacy updates happen, as it can impact their precision. There is also a risk of over-segmenting your audiences and making them too small.

Be careful when using this audience segment and be sure to only make educated suggestions.

Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences are generally used from your first‑party data, including website visitors that are tracked from customer lists or past engagement.

We’d recommend using Custom Audiences for remarketing. Remarketing can work well for smaller audiences who are highly engaged and looking to make the next step.

These tend to be warmer audiences with higher conversion potential. The only downsides to using Custom Audiences are that it requires sufficient data, so you need to ensure that your data is accurate and that you have the correct measures in place.

Using Austom Audiences for remarketing can also cause ad fatigue, so it’s important to review your creative regularly.

Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike Audiences are a concept that identifies new users who resemble your best customers or existing audiences. It helps you reach new users who are likely to be interested in your business as they share similar characteristics with your existing customers.

There are some advantages to using Lookalike Audiences as they help to scale your reach, it is a way of cold targeting, so it’s crucial to run them for a longer period of time before making a judgment on their effectiveness.

Similar to custom audiences, you need high-quality data as it’s crucial for the audience to populate. Lookalike Audiences work best with a smaller pool of people; the bigger a ‘lookalike’ gets, the broader it may become in terms of targeting. It’s better to start with a smaller pool of people in the audience, so aim to start with 1%.

AI‑Driven Audiences

Advantage+ is a campaign type which has audience features within the campaigns. Rather than setting up the audience manually, Advantage+ will do all of this for you. It allows you to be more flexible and broad with your audience targeting while utilising Meta’s algorithm.

Depending on the objective of your campaign, Advantage+ does give you less control. It’s important to remember this when deciding which audience targeting approach will work best.

The effectiveness of the audience signals it uses through the algorithm also depends on how accurately the pixel receives data, so be sure to check this thoroughly before going ahead.

Best Practices

Selecting the right audience depends largely on your campaign objective. While each audience type can work across different campaign goals, some are particularly effective for driving actions like lead generation or purchases.

Once you understand the different audience options, it’s equally important to learn the best practices for choosing and applying them effectively.

1) Leverage Custom Audiences

It’s important to leverage Custom Audiences for retargeting to engage warm leads with tailored messaging. As mentioned above, look into the customers who tend to drop off or spend a lot of time on the site.

This way, you can then retarget website visitors, cart abandoners, or past purchasers to turn them into warm leads.

When using Custom Audiences, we’d also recommend excluding converters or irrelevant users to avoid wasted spend.

2) Monitor, Test And Review

Monitoring, testing and reviewing your audiences regularly is important for the optimisation of your audiences. We’d recommend reviewing every 3 to 6 months and making adjustments where necessary.

Adjustments could include excluding certain demographics, including age, gender, location, language, education, or parental status (and income if you operate outside of Europe).

3) Embrace AI

Embracing AI can be positive when it comes to Meta campaigns, so it’s important to utilise these where you see fit. It can be ideal to have Advantage+ audiences on a small budget campaign testing alongside your other audiences to see how they perform.

However, they do need solid conversion data so be sure to check this beforehand.

Helpful Links

Now you’re ready to set up your Meta Ads with the right audiences for an effective campaign! If you require our assistance with setting up and running your Meta Ad campaigns, then please contact us.

Or, to learn more about Meta Ad campaigns – check our other resources, including blogs about campaign objectives and Meta Ads best practices.