Social Advertising Best Practices
Audience
Show your ad to your ideal customers.
Overview
An audience is a group of users who will potentially see an ad. The foundation of all audiences comes from Meta’s pool of user data, which is split into groups by targeting parameters. These parameters fall into 5 different categories:
- Location
- Demographics
- Interests
- Connections
- Behaviors
Advertisers can mix and match different parameters to create their own audience. The total size of an audience after these factors are applied is known as Reach.
Optimization
Meta combines an advertiser’s chosen targeting parameters with their desired objective to deliver the most effective ad to the right users on Facebook & Instagram. This process is known as optimization.
Meta will not only optimize this ad (see diagram) based on the selected Targeting Parameter — sports lovers — it will further optimize to show the ad to a subset of that group that is most likely to click on an ad. The combination of these will maximize ad performance based on very specific marketing needs.
Choosing Ad Target Parameters
In general, we recommend that local business advertisers start with the broadest audience possible. This prevents potential customers from being excluded in targeting too early and lets Meta do the work to find the right users at the lowest cost.
Don’t: Layer on too many targeting parameters as they can cause an audience pool to become extremely narrow, and you may miss out on users who would have otherwise been interested in your product or service.
Do: Use a simple geographic radius within/around your business’s city or address to capture a wide audience that has the potential to interact with your location physically.
Limit Parameters
Meta requires every audience to include the three demographic parameters: Gender (Men, Women, All), Location, and Age.
Layering additional parameters on top of one another will reduce the audience’s reach.
Keep Parameters Broad
Some parameters are broader or more detailed than others. Using even one detailed parameter can be as or more limiting as using multiple broad parameters. For this reason, it is best to use broad parameters instead of detailed ones.
To build a broad audience, we recommend using the following best practices:
- Limit the total number of parameters applied to an audience
- Keep parameters broad instead of specific (e.g., age is broader than interest)
- When possible, focus on geographical parameters: Target full populations within a certain radius of your location address, zip code, or city
A/B Testing
Tiger Pistol’s Ad Variations and Audience setup tools make it easy to A/B test one specific audience against one broader audience. To properly compare results across audiences, narrowly targeted ones should include only one parameter. The geolocations, age, and demographic restrictions should also remain consistent across all audiences:
Audience 1: Broad
Audience 2: Broad + Interest/Behavior/Demographic
