Facebook Ads campaign segmentation

Written by María Santoja

The strongest point of Facebook Ads is found in the audience segmentation options. The platform knows its users very well and will allow you to use that information to reach your exact target audience. The key to the success of your Facebook Ads campaign will be based on refining the definition of the socio-demographic profile and the interests of our customers to target our ads to the audience that responds to that profile.

Audience segmentation in Facebook Ads

For the success of our campaign it will be of vital importance to get a mental image of our potential customer, to define their socio-demographic characteristics, their interests and their habits. It is advisable to think about the typical customer and not to be distracted by the particularity, that is, by the anecdotal case. Of course we will have clients who, for example, are not single women between 20 and 35, but we must consider that they are an exception and that the bulk of our clientele will fall within that group. This will therefore be the segmentation that we will have to choose: generalization and not particularity.

It is advisable to segment as much as possible, as long as the information we enter is relevant to our customer’s relationship with our product or service. For example, if we are a travel company for singles, it will be relevant to carry out the “Relationship” demographic targeting configuration and show our ad to “singles”, “divorced” and “widowed”, which are our potential customers. However, that same targeting might not make sense if we are an online wine store and we advertise a sale in our store.

What will determine which fields of the segmentation we must configure and which not will be, on the one hand, our product, and on the other hand, the focus of our ad.

The platform allows us to configure different types of characteristics of our audience:

Locations:

It allows you to segment by country, province, postal code and even radius of action based on an address that we previously entered, for example, the address of our physical store. In addition, we can indicate if we want our ad to be shown to people who:

• They usually live in that location
• Have recently been on site
• Are traveling in the area

For example, if we are an online store that sells in Spain and Portugal, it will be recommended to introduce this segmentation, but if we are a physical store that is in Alicante, perhaps we should only target people from Alicante city and surroundings.

Demographic data:

The platform provides us with many demographic fields with which we can segment our campaign. On the one hand, we have the classics of age, gender and languages, but Facebook Ads also allows us to expand the profile of our audience with more advanced demographic data. However, it is important to pay attention, as some of these advanced demographic targeting options are only valid for the United States and therefore should not be used if our audience is not from that country.

Let’s take a look at the segmentations available in Spain:

• Age: you can choose an age range by selecting the minimum and maximum age of the users to whom the ad is shown.

• Gender: you can choose whether to show the ad to all users or only to men, or only to women. In case we want to reach with our ad profiles that do not indicate gender or that have used the gender customization option offered by Facebook, we will have to use the default targeting of “All”.

• Language: you can select from one or more of the languages in which Facebook is available. We recommend using it for campaigns in which we are working specifically on a language and not for more general campaigns (in these cases we will segment by location). For example, if we use the Spanish language targeting, someone with the Facebook in Catalan would not see our ad, or someone with the Facebook in English, who could be a British resident in Spain and may be our target audience.

• Relationship: we will select if the user is interested in men, women or both; and if he/she is single, married, divorced…

• Education: we can define the level of academic training, the field of study, the educational centers and the year of graduation.

• Work: you can choose companies, positions and sectors.

• Parents: delimit audiences by users who are parents and you can also choose from several options depending on the age of their children, for example, parents of children from 0 to 12 months, parents of children from 1 to 3 years old, etc. It also allows us to target our advertising to prospective parents.

• Important events: this last segmentation allows us to impact with our ads to users who are in a specific personal circumstance, such as living outside their country, married, engaged, recently moved or just found a job, among others. In addition to all these options we can use the “friends of” segmentation to search for users linked to people in these circumstances.

Interest:

This segmentation category is one of the most interesting as it allows us to choose from hundreds of interests and hobbies, such as movies, books, games, sports teams, etcetera. Our ad will only be shown to users who have previously followed a page related to the interest or interests we have entered, or have published in their profile that this topic is among their likes.

We can choose several interests but with this we will be adding their audiences, that is to say, the platform allows us to reach people who have shown interest in pages of topic A or in pages of topic B or in pages of topic A and B, but it does not work by limiting the segmentation only to the part of the audience that has shown interest in both options.

Behavior:

• Digital era activities: you can select different technological activities that users can carry out, such as whether they manage a company page on Facebook, the operating system they use or the email they use (AOL, Apple, MSN, Gmail…).

• Expatriates: you can select people who live outside their country and in which country they are currently living.

• Seasonal and events: this segmentation is updated with current events, especially sports events, although most of them are from the United States.

• Device users: you can select people who use Facebook from their desktop computer, from their cell phone or from their tablet. In addition, it is possible to refine by device models and brands, as well as by network connection type.

• Travel: here we can segment by people who use travel-related applications in a specific time period, people who are currently traveling, commuters, frequent international travelers, business travelers, or people who have recently returned from a trip. In addition, the country to which the user is interested in traveling to in the near future can be selected.

Connections:

The connections section refers to what kind of relationship our audience has with our company page, if we want to target our followers as an audience for our campaign, if we want to exclude them or if we want to reach our followers’ friends.

Custom Audiences and Similar Audiences

In addition to the audience segmentation options we have seen, there are two more ways to create audiences:

Personalized audiences:

This functionality allows you to reach customers you already know. To create a custom audience, you must upload a list with information about your contacts (e.g. contacts subscribed to your newsletter). Based on that email list, Facebook will search for those contacts on the social network and show them your advertising. You can also create an audience from the users who enter your website by installing a tracking pixel in the HTML code (this would be a remarketing strategy).

The custom audience you create will appear as a targeting option when you set up your ad group. It is advisable that the custom audience list has at least 100 contacts.

Similar audiences:

On the other hand, the similar audiences option allows you to create new groups of audiences based on the characteristics shared by Facebook users with your custom audiences. In other words, the social network analyzes what our customers are like and looks for users who are similar to them.

If you want to know more about configuration on the topic, you can read our previous article on Facebook Ads Campaign Structures and Types.