Targeting options in Facebook

Recently, Facebook as a source of traffic is becoming popular. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is targeted audience. So, what are the options for targeting Facebook, and why is it "sniper”?

• The ability to receive traffic from any country in almost any volume.
• There is a huge number of variations of targeting, which make it possible to get the most targeted audience.

At the last point, we will dwell in more details. So, what are the options for targeting Facebook, and why is it a "sniper”?

Placement

Placement – website where you show your banners. FB don’t have placements. Your ads are inside this platform. But you can choose different location depending on whom and what kind of advertising you plan to show, what product or service to advertise.

What Facebook offers:

1. Post in the news line. Visible from both the computer and mobile devices.
2. Ad unit in the right column. Can only be seen from the computer.
3. Advertising post on Instagram (it is about  a ton of quality mobile traffic).
4. Audience Network or FB advertising network. Users can see your ads outside of the social network. For example, on mobile sites, in applications. It is worth noting that traffic goes from here cheap (this is good) and low-quality (this is bad).
5. Instant articles. The articles in a mobile Facebook application or in an instant messenger that load faster than regular ones and suit well for advertising in order to increase the involvement, sales and  promote applications.
6. Insert to video. Now a short advertisement can be inserted into the native social network video.

You can choose it depending on the purposes of the advertising campaign. Moreover, Facebook itself offers optimal solutions. The goal can be traffic, getting leads or conversions.

The budget of an advertising campaign

On Facebook, you do not buy advertising and its shows. You just expose the limit of funds that are ready to spend on an advertising campaign to get the desired result. On Facebook, you start advertising and pay for it in fact. So, you decide how much to spend.

There are no minimum payment thresholds, and money does not "hang" in the advertising room without the possibility of withdrawal. When creating an advertising campaign, you can set a budget for the day or for the whole campaign period and specify its schedule, start and end dates. Facebook will try to optimise your ad impressions to get the best result. Sometimes the actual amount of the daily budget may increase (but not more than 20%).

When you set the budget for the entire duration of the campaign, Facebook itself will determine the daily expenses and optimise them.

Auction: automatic and manual rates

In FB, the auction system of bets: you can set it manually or choose automatically. The setup works fine, and the budget is spent rationally. In the first days after launching the advertising campaign, the price for the targeted action can be very low or, conversely, too high. This is temporary, as long as the system collects data and optimizes your advertising campaign. Within 3-4 days the rates and expenses are normalized.

Audiences for your advertising

In general, targeting on FB  seems complicated only at the first glance. All the options of the advertising cabinet are thought out and configured to help the advertiser as much as possible, to simplify the creation of ads and customization, to spend the budget and get the most out of advertising.

FB receives data about its users not only from questionnaires, but also from third-party sites. Audiences are one of the key settings. 

FB offers 3 types: basic, individually configured and similar.

All parameters for the primary audience are configured manually. There are 4 main blocks.

"Demographic" –  means data on marital status, education, work, etc.

"Interests" – is an effective setting that helps to accurately describe your targeted audience. But all the chosen interests should be indirectly related. "Behaviour" and "Other categories" are useful blocks, if you want to set up advertising for travelers, friends, birthday person or those who recently made a purchase on the network. Setting up "Links" helps you to select users who have already interacted with your page, or their friends. Use if you need to increase the involvement or, for example, to advertise the stock.

An individually tuned audience is people who already know your product or service.

It is collected using a Facebook pixel (code snippet) posted on the site, downloaded to the advertising cabinet as a list of existing customers (phones, mail addresses in text file format) or use the data of those who downloaded your mobile application.

A similar audience is a special “good one" of Facebook and an excellent tool for finding new customers.

Facebook can find people who are similar to your customers, because they are likely to be interested in your advertising. To create this audience, information is used about the visitors of the site, about those who put "Likes", etc. It can be created automatically if you specify sources to retrieve data.

Targeting a similar audience is a way to get new customers who previously did not know about you. It should be noted that Facebook is looking for a similar audience very accurately (sniper after all).

Optimisation of an advertising campaign

Optimising advertising is another nice feature of Facebook. You choose the desired result from the advertising campaign, and the social network configures and optimises the advertisement in such a way that it is achieved. For example, you need clicks. Hence, the ads will be seen by those who are most likely to click on it. And if your goal is conversion, then FB will show ads to those who are more likely to make this conversion. When you choose the optimization option, the social network determines how and to whom to display the advertisement, on what to emphasize. The goal of optimization is to give you the best result from advertising at the best price.

Instead of conclusion

There is an unpleasant moment in working with Facebook – frequent bans of advertising offices and accounts. It is not particularly important, you attract clients on your online store of soft toys or on magic creams, Facebook can ban you. But it is completely different story, which we will necessarily consider if you want.