Facebook Ad Targeting Tips to Increase Conversions

By Madison Taylor
October 6, 2023
iPhone with Facebook ads on top of a laptop

Facebook ads are effective ways to reach an intended audience. Yet, many businesses and marketers may be underutilizing these powerful advertising tools as they haven’t configured the right settings. While Facebook’s Meta Business Suite has become commonplace for marketers and business owners, it is easy to miss advanced audience-targeting features to help your business optimize ad spend ROI.

Tailoring your Facebook ad content according to audience behavior, brand interactions, and past browsing experiences maximizes returns in the long term by leveraging their interest. We share the effective and commonly overlooked methods of boosting your Facebook ads targeting campaigns.

Leverage the Power of Remarketing

Remarketing is the strategy of regaining the interest of previous site visitors to your sales and product pages. Market research shows that retargeting strategies help address the 98% of visitors who leave a website without making a purchase.

You can automate Facebook ads remarketing for your business by installing Facebook Pixel and setting your custom audience from the Meta Business Suite’s Ads Manager.

The ad manager allows you to customize target audiences based on website traffic, contacts, and mobile applications. Select the website source option, a relevant pixel (specific codes for measuring, optimizing, and establishing your target audience with Facebook Ads), and the type of targeted visitors under the events option. Once set, your team can deploy remarketing strategies effortlessly, streamlining traffic toward improved conversions.

Perform Regular Ad Relevance Diagnostics

Your Facebook Ads are only as effective as their degree of relevance to your audience. Facebook makes it convenient and reliable to measure the significance of your ads based on three diagnostic metrics: quality ranking, conversion rate ranking, and engagement rate ranking.

You can access these ad performance breakdowns via your Ads Manager and view detailed information at the ad level. Poor values indicated in any of the diagnostic categories inform your teams about the suggested steps for improving ad performance.

For example, ads with low-quality ranking might require a reevaluation of content strategies including copy, keyword, and visual changes. On the other hand, low conversion rankings could suggest a need to reassess audience targeting techniques and a closer look at purchase behaviors. Facebook provides these insightful diagnostic rankings based on your ad’s performance against similar competitor ads to offer accurate, real-world insights into what works.

Narrow Your Target Audience

Facebook Ads supports audience targeting based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. However, savvy marketers and businesses can take it a notch further with greater personalization by utilizing the Narrow Audience feature in each respective targeting category. For instance, you could set ads to target or exclude specific groups of profiles, such as vegans or schoolteachers.

Doing so allows your team to hone in on specific preferences with additional layers of criteria. Essentially, narrowing your audience helps your brand speak to audiences at a more intimate level, keeping them thoroughly engaged.

Refine Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences refer to audiences that share characteristics similar to those of your best customers. Unfortunately, the category could prove too broad on its own. For example, lookalike audiences can amount to the millions within a region, simply based on their location. At worst, these may lead to ineffective ad targeting due to the generalization.

Instead, consider shortlisting the interests of your lookalike audience for a tighter fit. You can do so from Facebook’s detailed targeting feature. Facebook has broadened its interest options in recent years, expanding to include favorited sites and preferred brands. You could optimize your lookalike audience targeting strategies by selecting a mix of interests based on your business profile and offerings.

Closing Thoughts

Ad targeting is just one of the many strategic advertising strategies for Facebook. Through a refined targeting approach, you can consistently provide prospects with the content, information, and deals that stop them in their tracks and engage with your offering. Ultimately, with a proven audience targeting system in place, your Facebook ads always leave a positive impression that encourages interaction and is not seen and dismissed as online clutter.