Facebook Audience Types – Saved Audience

Understanding your customer, also known as the user persona, is one of the most crucial steps in running a successful online campaign. Once you have created a user persona of the customer for whom your platform serves, targeting them through different platforms becomes much easier. Even with Facebook, understanding your Audience type is one of the crucial steps for running a campaign. Facebook caters to over a billion active users on a daily basis; hence it becomes all the more important to have a clear user persona in mind to run an effective campaign. Facebook Saved Audience, along with others, helps advertisers to accomplish that.

Facebook offers a wide range of targeting options that helps you to segregate your audience. They can be widely categorized under the following types:

• Saved Audience
• Custom Audience
• Lookalike Audience

Each of these audience types would provide you plenty of additional options to help you reach your target user.

Facebook Saved Audience

Facebook Saved Audience helps you target users based on features like user’s interests, location, gender, age, the device being used, income level, and others. This audience type can be created both in the Audience Manager and during Campaign set up phase.

Targeting options within Facebook’s Saved Audience:

1. Location-based targeting in Facebook

This option allows you to target users based on specific locations. This includes:

• Country
• State / Region
• City
• Postal Code
• Specific Address Radius
• Designated Market Area (DMA)

Simply type in the location and Facebook will provide you with the approx. users in that area who would be targeted.

For example: Adding location as “India” targets the following users:

Location-based targeting has another layer of location targeting which allows you to filter out more users and be more specific:

• Everyone in this location (default targeting option): Targets everyone in the selected location. This takes into consideration the last updated location of the user on Facebook.
• People who live in this location: Here, the users are populated based on the location set by the user in his Facebook profile and further confirmed by their IP address.
• People recently in this location: This is tracked by mobile device usage in the area that you are trying to target.
• People traveling to this location: This is the set of users who had the mentioned area as a recently visited area and which is at least 100 miles away from their home location.

2. Demographics-based targeting in Facebook

In Demographics-based targeting, we get lots of targeting options which are specific to the structure of the user population like their age, gender, language and others.

• Age: Facebook provides you with an age range option to help you select the range in which you want your user to be. All you need to do is provide Facebook with an upper and a lower range of the user’s age.
• Gender: If you want to target a specific gender of population, then select the same under this.
• Language: If you are advertising in a specific language and you want only those users who understand that particular language to be targeted through your ads, then mention the same here.

Example – Targeting the female user base who is 20-30 years old and who speaks French.

• Detailed Demographic-based targeting: Use this option if you want to reach people based on education, employment, household and lifestyle details. Some data is available for the US only. Each of the below displayed options further drills down under each category to get you the desired targeting.

3. Interest-based targeting

Interest-based targeting is one of the most commonly used Facebook targeting options. Interest-based targeting allows you to target users who are specifically interested in a subject that is related to your product. The segment under this populated if the user has expressed an interest in the topic you mentioned or has liked pages that are related to that topic. Interest-based targeting normally means that you are going to target large audience sizes. So, it’s best to evaluate the relevant audience size before starting the promotion.

To target users based on their interests, you can either browse through the menu which would provide you with an auto-populated list of hundreds of interests, or you can simply type the interest in the text box and Facebook will suggest the related topics.

For example – If you want to segment out the users who have shown an interest in the GMAT exam, just enter the GMAT term in the text box and chose the relevant option.

The interests are segmented based on Facebook users likes and interests, apps they use, pages they’ve liked, and more.

4. Behaviour-based targeting in Facebook

Behavior-based targeting allows you to target users based on their purchase behavior or intent, device usage or other aspects.  This data is gathered by Facebook by analyzing a variety of factors and also using external data sets.

Behavior-based targeting works best when used in combination with location, interest, and demographics-based targeting. You can mix all of these targeting options together to highly refine your segmented dataset.

The following are some of the targeting options available with Behaviour-based targeting. Each of these further drills down to further segments.

These are the various targeting options with Saved Audience. To learn more about the Saved audience feature, visit Facebook’s Help Center. In the next article, we will discuss the Custom and Lookalike audience.