One of the most important stages of an advertising campaign is targeting. Facebook Ads Manager offers a very detailed targeting strategy to users. With this detailed targeting strategy in Facebook and Instagram ads, it is possible to run a successful ad campaign with the right targeting. For this, there are some important points that all marketers should pay attention to. By paying attention to these points, you can reduce costs and increase conversions in your advertising campaigns.

Create a customer persona

Creating a customer persona, a technique that marketers have been using for years, is a technique that facilitates targeting, which should also be used in digital marketing and digital advertising today. A persona is the identification card of a fictional persona similar to the majority of people in your target audience. In creating this persona, it is important to identify his interests, religious views, likes, and fears, as well as name him. In fact, identifying the social networks that person is actively using for digital marketing will make targeting you much easier.

When you look at this person’s persona, it’s important to see the common denominator of the audience you want to target. Sometimes one persona may not be enough to describe your entire audience. In these times, you may need to create multiple people for the same audience across different age groups, genders, and interests.

The personas you create will be effective not only when targeting, but also when deciding which visuals and videos to use in ads for that target audience. For example; While the creatives you will use for the marine character can be more modern and attractive to young people, the traditional and TV creatives that you will use for the Oya character will increase your ad performance and conversions even more.

Create a large-scale Facebook ad campaign structure

Creating a broad targeting campaign structure is important for an ad campaign to perform better. It is possible to create different ad groups within a Facebook ad campaign and create different ads within these ad groups. In Facebook ads, targeting is done at the ad group level, not at the campaign level. With this feature, it is possible to target multiple audiences in different ad groups within an ad campaign.

Define ad groups for successful targeting

Targeting based on interests

It is enough to create 3 different ad groups in order to target the widest target audience with one persona. One of these ad sets must be the target audience interest of the character you select. After targeting the age range and geographic location, you must enter the detailed targeting options and add all interest fields to your chosen persona. You can also select Married, Single, or Parent with Children options in detailed targeting, since you pre-determine your character’s marital status. You should also consider audience identification as a useful tool on Facebook when choosing these goals. It is important that your target audience is not too specific and includes a broad audience.

As you can see here, our target audience is 53 million and our audience seems to have enough reach.

After creating this ad group, we’ll move on to another targeting strategy.

Target by creating a lookalike audience

Similar Audiences You can create similar target audiences using Facebook’s own algorithm. These target audiences can be your existing customers, Instagram/Facebook followers, people who have visited your website before or people who are actively using your mobile app. With the Facebook algorithm, you can get a chance to reach new users who are similar to these people with your ads.

You can create similar target audiences in different locations and advertise to win new users. For example, it is possible to create a target audience in Germany similar to your customers in Turkey. Since user habits are different from one region to another, it is generally recommended to choose the same site as the current audience site and a similar target audience site. However, if you don’t have target audience data for that region, it would be beneficial to create a similar audience for the country you have in another region.

You also have the opportunity to decide how similar your new audience is to your existing one. Here you can choose the percentage of target site you want to hit for similarity. If you choose a rate like 1%, you will reach a more similar and specific audience. However, if your estimated reach is too low, you can reach more people by reaching fewer people of equal reach.

Example of a similar audience of 1%:

Example of a similar audience of 3%:

Set broad targeting

In addition to targeting by similar audiences and interests, a broad targeting option is possible. With this targeting, you can reach more people, but you are more likely to show ads to people who are not in your current target audience. This way, you can target people who are outside of your current target audience, but have the potential to become your customers or users. What you need to be careful about with broad targeting is excluding existing customers and interests from your target audience. If you don’t opt ​​out, your ad will also be shown to those people.

The ideal structure for ad group in ads

The ideal ad group structure for a successful ad campaign should consist of ad groups containing all three target audiences listed above.

1. interests
2. similar
3. Broad targeting

Apart from targeting the above objectives in these ad groups, these objectives should be excluded from each other so that your ad campaign does not target the same people. That is, when you create a lookalike audience, there will already be people interested in the interests you want to target, so those interests should be excluded from this group of ads.

Similarly, the similar audience you target should be excluded from your interest-based ad set. You need to do this so that you can do Campaign Optimization more accurately and for the Facebook algorithm to work more efficiently. Likewise, you should remove both similar interests and target audiences from your broadly targeting pool of ads.

In a campaign you create this way, you’ll target different people across all of your ad groups. This way, the Facebook algorithm will work more accurately and you will be able to guarantee that your campaign will get more conversions.

Campaign budget optimization

Advertising campaign budget can be managed in different ways in Facebook Ads Manager. You can manage the budget at the campaign level, ad group level, or ad level. Managing the advertising budget at lower levels of the campaign is more challenging. It is an area that requires experience. It’s also boring for digital marketers who run too many ad campaigns. This is why using Campaign Budget Optimization on Facebook makes things even easier.

Campaign budget optimization is a setting in an ad campaign that automates entering budget at the campaign level and using that budget for more successful audiences and better performing ads. In other words, if the ad group you target with a similar target audience performs better than the ad groups you create when campaign budget optimization is turned on, your ad will be shown more to people in Lookalike Audience. Likewise, if there is more than one ad that you create in that ad group, your ad that receives more clicks will show more to that target audience.

If your only goal in an ad campaign is to get more new customers or generate more sales, turning on campaign budget optimization will automatically optimize your ads by the Facebook algorithm to be more successful.