If you’re new to Facebook Ads or haven’t got much knowledge when it comes to targeting, then you probably have faced a couple of frustrations along the way.
Let me paint you a picture.
You’ve come up with a great idea that you spent hours brainstorming, you’ve hired a great designer to make a fantastic graphic, and you even went over the budget with your ad spending- but you still haven’t got the conversions or engagement rate you expected. Why? Well, one of the major reasons for this is usually weak targeting.
Weak targeting means that you just aren’t reaching your ideal audience who are more likely to be interested in your content. There’s no value in ad spending on people that are highly unlikely to engage with your brand.
Here’s a brief case study on how we targeted our ad to the right audience.
What we did:
For one of our projects, Top 10 Dhaka, we successfully targeted our ad to the right audience and got a great amount of engagement relative to the ad spending.
The goal was to get comments and reach. We wanted to use this ad as a way to interact with our audience, make them feel included in our work and to be seen.
Did we achieve the goal? Yes.
Here’s a summary of the steps we used:
- Understand your ideal audience
- Create customer personas
- Define your goal for the Ad
- Set up Ad parameters based on customer personas and goal
- Choose a suitable budget
- Choose your placements
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty details.
How we did it:
Before going on to setting targeting parameters for our ad, we had to first truly understand who our ideal audience is. That means, asking the Who, What, and Why.
Who are we trying to reach? The typical age range for our ideal audience was between 18-25. It’s important to pick a specific age range that isn’t too wide in order to make sure you’re hitting the target.
What kind of typical behaviors and activities would you expect from your ideal audience? Since we were focusing on young people who love entertainment, we assumed that our typical audience would be ones who watch Netflix, indulge in latest trends and love Dhaka’s night life.
Where would we find this particular group of people? We assumed that young internet users like these could be found in Facebook groups, Instagram and Messenger.
When understanding your ideal audience, it’s a good idea to create a customer persona for your brand which you can use as reference for all your ads targeting. Here’s what we created for Top 10 Dhaka.
Now let’s take a look at the actions we took after thoroughly understanding your ideal audience.
First, we created an eye-catching graphic that focused on a question to the audience, to create engagement.
We then published it and got ready for boosting by setting our targeting parameters on Facebook. To set the parameters, we clicked on “Create New” under audience, and went to the detailed targeting section. This section comprises of 3 parts; Demographics, Behaviors and Interests.
Demographics:
This part describes the relationships, educational and financial aspects of your audience. We checked the boxes that were for young students. Under life events, we also checked some boxes such as birthdays coming up and away from family, as we assumed it might describe a lot of young students.
Interests:
This one is particularly long and describes the general interests your target audience might have. Here we checked a lot of boxes under Entertaiment. We selected lots of different movie genres since our ideal audience is likely to watch movies a lot, we selected many boxes under games, and other entertainment such as parties, theatres etc.
The interests tab also includes hobbies, food and drink, family and relationships. So, we spent some time thinking about what young, fun-loving people might be interested in in these categories and checked each box that fit.
Behaviors:
The behaviors tab describes the typical online behaviors of your ideal audience, such as digital activities, mobile device users, consumer classification, etc. We selected the boxes that best fit young Bengali students and left some tabs unchecked.
One important thing to note is that you don’t have to check boxes under all the tabs; Only the ones that are relevant to you.
After properly setting up the parameters, you will see your audience definition. Ours was in the “fairly broad” level which is good. Getting your audience to the “specific” level would be good too if you’re looking at a very niche audience. As long as it’s away from the “broad” level. You will also see your estimated audience size which shows how many people approximately might meet your targeting criteria.
Lastly, we came to the ad spending part. We spent a total of TK 1250 over a span of 5 days. You can see the estimated reach range when you select your budget, and you can increase/decrease your budget depending on that.
Where you place your ad is also very important. Apart from Facebook, we decided to put placements on Instagram too since Instagram is very youth friendly. You can even choose Audience Network and Messenger for placements if that suits your needs.
The Results:
From both Facebook and Instagram platforms we were able to get a high reach and engagement. We achieved a total reach of 10,104, total engagement of 4,912 (2,262 on Facebook and 2650 on Instagram), and our CPE (cost per engagement) was TK 0.55.
The results were better than we expected given the budget and that was all thanks to knowing and understanding how to target our specific audience. This one step can go a long way if done right.
And there you have it! Now you have a better understanding of audience targeting which you can use for your future Ads to get optimum results. And if you ever need a helping hand, ProInfoSys is always there.
