How to Target New Customers with Facebook Ads
A beginners guide to targeting cold traffic
You already know that social media advertising is a powerful way to connect with your audience and make sales. You’re interested in expanding your audience, but where do you start?
Whenever you look for expert advice online, they say ‘Well, it depends. You’ll need to split test.’ And you’re like split test what? I have no idea what I’m doing!
This blog post aims to shine a bit of light by telling you who you should target in your first ad. It isn’t the perfect way, there is no one cookie cutter solution. But this should give you a good place to start.
I’m going to make a number of assumptions
1. You have an existing audience, even if it’s small.
If you have no existing audience start building one by creating content that your ideal customer would like. You shouldn’t start paying for ads until you have some idea who you are talking to.
2. You have the Facebook pixel installed on your website.
You need to have the pixel installed before you run any ads, otherwise you will have no way to track your results.
3. Your aim is to grow your audience.
You want to get more page likes, email list subscribers, or sell a low ticket product. You are NOT trying to reach your existing audience. There will be a future blog post about targeting your existing audience to make sales.
Under these conditions I would use two types of targeting
- Interest based
- Lookalikes
Interest or Demographic based
This is an audience that may be interested in your product or service based on who they are and what they are interested in.
Sometimes a good demographic is obvious. If you’re a wedding photographer, engaged women who live in your area seems like a sensible target.
You can set up this audience in the audience tab in the ads manager by creating a ‘Saved Audience’. You can add Locations and demographics to target. You can also exclude people that already like your page.
Ideally you want to keep your audience size at least 200,000, otherwise Facebook may struggle to spend your budget.
Other times it is hard to know what your audience may be interested in. To help you, you can use the audience insights tool. You can see what people who like your page are interested in. You can also look at page likes by gender, age, location, or interest.
This can fuel you with some fresh ideas for audience interests to target. From the screenshot above we can see that people interested in Advertising also have interests in Lowe’s Home Improvement and Budweiser. Who knew? Then you can create Interest Based target audience. You can do this by creating a ‘Saved Audience’, exactly the same as above.
Lookalikes
A lookalike audience is a group of people that Facebook thinks are similar to your audience. This is a powerful type of audience to target because you hand the reins over to Facebook, a data machine with a huge amount of information and ability to predict user behaviour.
You can create a custom audience using the information you currently have — the visitors to your website the facebook pixel has recorded, or upload a CSV of your email list.
You can then use this data to create a lookalike audience.
You should create two audiences
- Your closest lookalikes — 1% — 2%,
2. A less similar, but boarder group of lookalikes — 2% — 6%
Sometimes the less similar group can produce surprising results so they are good to test. Again you want to aim for an audience of at least 200,000 people.
What Now?
So now you should have at least 3 audiences
- Interest
- Lookalikes 1%
- Lookalikes 2–6%
From here you can create campaigns to target each of them. As a general rule it is good to use a daily budget of $50-$100 a day for each campaign, but if you have less to spend you could just test Interests and Lookalikes 1%, or you could just reduce the budget.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if this was helpful, or hit me up with questions in the comments. Signup for my mailing list if you want more Facebook tips and tricks in your inbox
