The Art of Online Business

How to Find the Best Facebook Ads Audiences to Target

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie • Episode 862

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We're getting into the basics of Facebook audience targeting. My wife, Jamie, joins me to explain the difference between warm and cold audiences and shows how to choose and target each effectively in Meta Ad Manager. 

Whether you're adjusting your ad strategy or setting up your first campaign, you'll learn how to handle the tricky parts of audience selection to improve your Facebook ads. Get ready to simplify the targeting process and boost your ad results.

Watch this episode on our YouTube channel. 

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Say hi to Jamie on Instagram

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to the Art of Online Business, where we are discussing Facebook ads. My wife and partner in business is here and her name is Jamie.

Speaker 1:

Hi I thought it would be really good to have her here because she brings a different perspective to Facebook ads during this year, which is 2024, the recording time of this video. Like, she's already been managing a couple of ad accounts and you actually learned how to manage Facebook ads from one of our Facebook ad mentors which is not who taught me Facebook ads. So we have kind of different perspective which helps us kind of tag team and client accounts and work together to get good results.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah, yeah. Well, let's get into it.

Speaker 1:

Today we are talking about audience targeting 101. So if you're confused when you open up Facebook ad manager, who do you target? How do you target? What are the best things interest to target? Possibly like what kind of targeting is going to get you the best results? Well, we're going to demystify that for you, and so my first question for you, jamie, is somebody says who do they target? Can you tell me, like the basics of targeting, like what do you process through when you put together targeting for your clients?

Speaker 2:

Right. So the first thing is your warm audiences, which, in Facebook ads manager, is going to show up as your custom audiences, and so those are the people who have already entered into your business ecosphere, so to speak. So these.

Speaker 1:

That's what I say.

Speaker 2:

Stole that straight from you. But those are all of your people who have already visited your website. They're on your email list, they have maybe already purchased something from you, they are your Facebook followers, your Instagram followers, all of those people who are already connected with you. They already kind of know, like and trust you, right. So that's your warm audience, and then from there you have your cold audience, which, again in ads manager, it's going to look like. Your look alike audience is what it's called, and so you're going to create those look alike audiences, which is literally what it sounds like. It's a lookalike of your custom audiences. So people who are like the people who are already in your business ecosphere. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1:

Makes sense to me. Somebody might be like but how does that get done? What's technically going on there? And the answer to that is you're telling Facebook a custom audience, a core audience, and you're saying hey, facebook, since you collect 52,000 data points on every single user, creepy, huh.

Speaker 2:

That is weird. Right, that's a lot.

Speaker 1:

They know more about us than we do. It's warm. I want you to tell me like 2 million more people who like the top 1%, basically, of all Facebook users that share the most in common, and Facebook, hopefully, will give you an audience of like 2 million folks.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

There's a cold audience.

Speaker 2:

There's a cold audience. Another cold audience you can have is an interest-based audience, and this one I get my interest based from my, directly from my clients. So when they do their intake form, their intake questionnaire, about their business and everything, some of the questions that I'm asking them is what is your ideal client avatar, right, where do they shop? What websites do they shop? Where do they shop, they shop, yeah, that's actually that helps, that does help okay for example, if you have people who are crafty they're gonna probably some of the main places they're gonna shop are hobby lobby, one of your clients.

Speaker 1:

Joanne fabrics, yeah, is in the crafting niche.

Speaker 2:

Right, right, right yeah okay, yeah, and so that's because they're going there for fabric. They're going, and so that's actually a very useful thing to know is where they shop.

Speaker 1:

And so what were some of the audiences that you found, based on where they shop?

Speaker 2:

Right. So different websites, things like that, that they that your audience might be interested in, or, for example, just crafts in general, or sewing or jazz music, or you know, it depends on what it is, but you can. You can find a lot of people and have a huge interest-based audience. And so find Facebook, find me, people that like or are interested in this.

Speaker 1:

What are some of the other questions that you have on your intake form that help them tell you interests to target?

Speaker 2:

Right, so yeah, so where do they shop? Even who are your top competitors? Yeah, what Facebook pages or Facebook groups might they be interested in? What publications do they like? Things like that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so what this is is you're asking yourself these questions, answering them and then going into the detailed targeting section inside of the Meta Ad Manager and then typing in those answers and seeing which ones are targetable, and then you note those down in your spreadsheet and you target away. I think somebody listening right now would be like well, what are the most important audiences to test? First, because there's so many different cold audiences, right?

Speaker 2:

Right, can I go back to the interest base really quick, though? You gotta just look in Ads Manager, though, because not everything is gonna be in there, right, but you also, as you're searching, you might you might find some other things that you're like oh I didn't know that this was in here. For example, I was surprised that, like sewing machines like sewing machines is in ads manager, yeah, yeah, and it had a quite a large audience.

Speaker 1:

And so he happens to have two clients that are in the crafting, sewing niche and I have never worked with anybody like remotely close to that niche. Yeah, it is yeah.

Speaker 2:

But not everything is going to be in ads manager, so some specific things that you're looking for as you type it in, it's just not going to show up. So but you will get lots of other ideas if you search. You know a general, a general topic like crafting or sewing or things like that, and then you'll get other ideas too for how to. Oh, I didn't know I could target this specific interest.

Speaker 1:

Well, since our gardener is about to start leaf blowing outside, what was the question that you had for me?

Speaker 2:

Oh, so I wanted to know what order should you test? In which audiences do you start with first?

Speaker 1:

I like to go with audiences in the order of value. So I think of the custom audience, right, that we're building a cold audience of like what's the most valuable custom audience? That's probably going to be and you have to test that's my disclaimer you have to test but that's probably going to be people who have bought from you already. Yeah, and if you don't have people, there are a lot of people who have bought from you Because Facebook needs a good-sized audience. So a good-sized email list to upload would be 600 people or more.

Speaker 1:

So if you're like Quajo, I don't have 600 clients. I've been in business for like three years but that's not six hundred clients yet, even though I'm loving life, okay, great. So it's not gonna be the customer email list, but think about your entire email list. That's the next order of value, because they have chosen to give you their names and their emails and sit on and that's like that's. That's a valuable exchange. You know, not everybody does that, as you know, if you're running your own ads or if you've like put a link in Instagram for free, like.

Speaker 1:

So the next value is, or on the value list, would be someone who is warm-ish. Maybe they follow you on social media, specifically Instagram or Facebook, or if you have a strong blogging presence, then that next most valuable audience could be people who visit your website.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

And did you know that you can target? If you have lots of people that visit your website, you can target like the top 5% of those people as by like time spent, so the people who spend the most time on your website. You can even target them versus everyone.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, I knew you could target website visitors, but I didn't even know to that specific degree.

Speaker 1:

Well, because you can target the top 5%, the top 10% and the top 25% of your best website visitors. So the thing about a website visitor is it includes everyone who's visited your website, which also includes people who click the link and they bounce right off the website and they don't look at anything.

Speaker 1:

So, like, yes, that audience is good to test, but if you have a huge blogging presence, it's actually very beneficial for you. Or if you just have a lot of website traffic, to build a lookalike audience off of the people who spend the most time on the website. And again, the disclaimer is is just because those audiences I've now listed them in order of quote unquote value to your business? I've seen what would be a lower value audience, cold audience, like a lookalike outperform. What would be a higher value audience?

Speaker 2:

Definitely.

Speaker 1:

And it just comes down to testing. So if you want to get lower lead costs or make more sales, you just have to test those audiences.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

Always. If you only use one, then you're definitely leaving money on the table. And if you don't get my free guide the 7 Biggest Mistakes that Burn Through your Hard-Earned Cash in Facebook Ad Manager, you're also leaving money off the table or throwing it off the table. So that is in the links in the description below. It's tutorials inside of Facebook Ad Manager. I'm showing you the mistakes and I'm showing you what to do instead of those and like screen share with tutorials. So it's not fluff, it's good stuff right, get down there.

Speaker 2:

And I do have one more question, because you can put a time frame in there. So what is better? Isn't it better to have usually a hundred and eighty days versus three hundred and sixty days? You want people who have more recently had interaction with you, so to speak, correct. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1:

In many cases, what she's talking about is the retention of the audience, and so, like if I choose website visitors, I think the maximum that Meta will let me do is 180 days, but you could tell it 10 days, and all that means is that audience updates dynamically.

Speaker 1:

And so if you tell it 50 days and that audience will only ever contain people who have visited your website in the past 50 days and if you have a lookalike audience built off of that, then that lookalike will constantly be updated based on the people who have visited your website in the past 50 days. I like to do 180 days, because 180 days how many ever months? That is like six, six months, six months. Yes, I got it right. Is that that's people? There's still some recency there. You're in their memory right some audiences. You can expand that retention of the audience to 365 days, but I don't like doing that, because do you remember what you?

Speaker 2:

were a year ago. A year ago, I mean, do you remember what you ate yesterday?

Speaker 1:

Right, I was looking at iPhone stuff a year ago. I know like that's pretty much a fact, but otherwise it's all fuzzy what even happened last week yeah let's keep it more recent so, speaking of recent, our kids went to school today. Kind of crying well, I wasn't crying at all but jamie was emotional as we were taking pictures and little videos to put online so our parents could see that anything else to talk about.

Speaker 2:

I think, I think that's it. That's the basics of audience targeting.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, you just have to make sure that you create those audiences first in Facebook Ads Manager before you go ahead and start up your ads, so that way they're already there. You just go to that audiences tab, create audiences, and then you'll set up all of them and it'll ask you right there you do the custom and then it'll ask you do you wanna make a lookalike of this audience? Yes, I do, thank you. So everything is already right there so that when you go in to set up your ad campaigns you can just click on those customer lookalike audiences. That's very easy.

Speaker 1:

Just wanna encourage you. Meta Ad Manager, that piece of software. It's just a minefield of mistakes wanting to be made. Get that guy, get that it is. There's different things to click and choose from, and then you've got all these suggestions from Meta that show up automatically to quote, unquote, improve performance, but you don't know which ones are good and which ones are trash. So get that guy that I made the seven biggest mistakes that burn, through course, creators' cash and don't pay so much ignorance tax, like we don't want to be ignorant. Don't pay the ignorance tax and until the next time you see us or hear from us, take care and be blessed. Bye, bye.

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