Facebok ads with Core Audiences Targeting

Facebook and Instagram

Facebook and Instagram are both essential advertising platforms in today's world. They are distinct platforms that lead both digital and mobile media.

Let's take a look at what they have to offer as individual platforms. Then we'll look at how they can be used to reach your audience in different contexts on these two distinct platforms.

We help people connect, discover, and share.

Facebook

Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

Instagram

Instagram strengthens relationships through shared experiences. It is a place where visual expression inspires visible action.

Distinct platforms for people, with a shared back-end for advertisers

Whatever your objective, Facebook and Instagram are both essential advertising platforms in today's world.

Together, Facebook and Instagram lead all mobile apps in time spent. In fact, they account for 1 in 5 US mobile minutes — that's more time spent than the next 10 mobile platforms combined.¹

By bringing Facebook and Instagram together, we’re making it easier for advertisers to get the most out of both platforms.

• Unified management: Manage campaigns efficiently and at scale. Buying, managing, and reporting are all streamlined and consistent.
• Expanded inventory: With the addition of Instagram to Facebook’s interfaces, you now have more opportunities to reach your target audience efficiently.
• Creative portability: Get more out of your marketing assets with the flexibility to run shared ad creative across both Facebook and Instagram.

^1,2Source: Nielsen Mobile NetView, US, Aug 2016

Using Creative on Facebook and Instagram

On both Facebook and Instagram, you have the opportunity to capture your audience’s attention with the use of autoplay videos.

In both the Facebook and Instagram carousel ad formats, you have the opportunity to drive people to your site to learn more.

Bringing your campaigns to life on Facebook and Instagram

Images have always been the currency for communication on Instagram. For brands, a strong visual voice is the key to driving real business results on our platforms. And we're seeing a variety of approaches work — from repurposing assets from Facebook or other channels to developing custom creative at a range of production investments.

Targeting: Core Audiences

Facebook advertising is part of an integrated marketing strategy, and offers tools to reach broad or extremely specific audiences across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or through mobile apps with Audience Network.

More than Two billion Two Hundred Million people¹ — more than half of all internet users² — access Facebook every month. Facebook’s audience types help marketers target ads using data that people self-report to Facebook publicly.

Core Audiences

Target ads using Facebook data

Custom Audiences

Use data from your CMS, website, mobile app, or other sources to target Facebook ads to people you already know.

Lookalike Audiences

Surface new audiences by combining Custom Audiences with Facebook targeting.

Elements of a Core Audience

The default Facebook ad targeting option is Core Audiences. Targeting happens at the ad set level, and audiences can be broken out into separate ad sets when you’d bid differently to reach each audience.

Building a Core Audience on Facebook lets marketers calibrate ad delivery around demographics, locations, interests, behaviors, and connections.
When building Core Audiences, you can opt to include or exclude people from your target audience based on any of these attributes listed below. You can save Core Audiences for future use, and can modify Saved Audiences to test and optimize your targeting.

Demographic targeting draws from information that people share publicly on Facebook about their education, political views, family/relationship status, life events, career, and more.

Location targeting allows marketers to target ads by postal code, city, region, or country — or worldwide — and to deliver ads based on where people are, whether they live in a location, are new arrivals, or just visiting.

Interest targeting focuses on consumer and lifestyle categories such as fitness, fashion, or hobbies.

Connections targeting is based on audience engagement with your Facebook Page, Facebook Events, or app.

Location-based Targeting

There are four different ways to target ads based on location. You can request that your ads be delivered to:

• Everyone in a location
• Locals: Only people who identify that location as their home
• New residents: Only people who recently updated their location
• Visitors: People who have checked into or been tagged in a place that isn’t their primary location

A local hardware store might target people who are residents or have recently moved to an area, but opt to conserve ad spend by excluding tourists. A restaurant or boutique, however, could advertise to everyone.

Geographic Targeting

Use the Browse feature to target your ads worldwide, by geographic area, country, city, or postal code.

Target by Region

Regional targeting provides a way to identify and target countries based on non-geographic commonalities. Regions that you can advertise to include:

• Free trade areas: Advertise within a single free trade area — for example, the European Economic Area.
• App Store regions: Target only countries where the iTunes App Store, Android Paid Store, or Android Free Store is available. Or mix-and-match.
• Emerging markets: Identify and advertise in one of more than 20 countries that are experiencing rapid economic growth.
• Euro Area: Target people in countries that use the euro as their common currency.

Demographic Targeting

Targeting ad delivery by demographic traits—such as age and gender—is a time-honored marketing strategy.

When targeting ad delivery by age, be aware that Facebook ad policies prohibit advertising certain product categories to people under the age of 18. These include financial services, gambling or lotteries, and health and fitness products — including herbal and dietary supplements. Additionally, age restrictions regarding alcohol can vary by country, state, or province. View our advertising policies to learn more about geographic targeting limitations for restricted content.

You should ONLY add language targeting if the language you’re targeting is NOT the primary language spoken in the location you’re targeting.

Facebook can provide ad delivery around people’s interests and behaviors.

• Interest targeting lets you advertise to specific audiences by reaching people based on their interests, activities, Pages and posts they like, posts and comments they make, and closely related topics. 
• Behavior targeting lets you reach people based on device usage and other activities

For example, choose “baking” as an interest to display ads to people who self-identify “baking” as an activity they enjoy, or who may follow the Pages of bakeries or baking blogs.

Once you’ve added an interest or behavior, Facebook may suggest additional interests and behaviors that correspond to the first one.

Audience Size

Your audience selection only needs to meet one targeting criteria, not all. When adding multiple targeting characteristics, be aware that each additional one narrows the total pool of people that your ad set can be shown to; the Audience Size indicator can help you find the right balance.
520,000 people could potentially see this ad set.

Only 1,300 people could potentially see this ad set.

Target by Device

Device usage is another important targetable behavior. You can create ads to include or exclude people by desktop browser and operating system under Digital Activities, or by mobile device under Mobile Device User.
 

Target by Connections

You can include or exclude people from Core Audiences based on whether they engage with your Facebook Page, your apps, or your Facebook Events. You can also target or exclude friends and connections of people who have engaged with your content.

Modify and Manage Audiences

When you save a Core Audience, you can reuse it and refer back to it for future ad campaigns. Access all saved audiences, Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences associated with your ad account in the Audiences area of Ads Manager or Power Editor.

Click the name of any audience to access the Audience Details area. You can edit or delete the selected audience, create new audiences based on it, or view its history. This is also where you can review when an audience was created, who created it, what edits have been made since its creation, and by which members of your team.

Audience Overlap

When you have two or more audiences selected, you can check the overlap between them using the Actions dropdown. Overlap means the percentage of people that are in both audiences. Overlap is not inherently bad, but can become problematic if the percentage of overlap and the budgets of the overlapping ad sets are high enough, and the audiences are being used at the same time. This can cause ad sets to end up in the same auction. We don't allow ad sets from the same Page or app to compete against each other because that could lead to advertisers driving up costs on themselves. So we remove the ad set that has a worse performance history from the auction. However, if we have to remove duplicative ad sets from auctions a lot, that can reduce delivery.

While it's useful to be aware of how much your audiences are overlapping, we recommend using the Delivery Insights metric “auction overlap” to know for sure if overlap is actually affecting ad performance in a negative way.

If you think overlapping audiences are affecting the performance of your ads, try these strategies:

• Craft different ads targeted to different audiences to segment audiences more specifically. If you’re looking to create awareness for cooking classes, customize different ads for each audience. For example:
• Females, ages 20–35: Cooking classes are a great date night activity
• Males, ages 20–35: Learn to make simple, five-ingredient meals
• Busy families, ages 36–50: Master fast and healthy dishes even picky eaters will love

This strategy not only helps create more relevant messages, but reduces targeting overlap and under delivery.

• Consolidate audiences into high percentages  of overlap into single large audiences. 
• Evaluate the timing of ad sets and decide if they can be run at different times.
• Exclude similar audiences.

Audience Exclusion

 To exclude an audience, select Exclude from the Audience section of your ad set.

Click in the text field labeled “EXCLUDE people who are in at least ONE of the following.”

And chose the audience that overlaps with your target.