To succeed in advertising on Facebook one has to take full advantage of the targeting system Facebook has developed for the advertiser. With over 350,000,000 active users the last thing you want to do is show your ad to the masses. Are you looking to advertise to people that are engaged? How about advertising to people whose birthday is today? “Keywords”, “Education”, and “Interested in” are all possible targets for your ads. Facebook actually has 11 targeting factors and with these the possibilities are endless to your target audience.
Let’s take a look at each of them now:
1. Location - Target by country, state/province, city, and metropolitan areas. You are required to have a location selected to advertise on Facebook.
2. Age - Age is a standard demographic factor.
3. Birthday - This is one of Facebook’s newest advertising targeting filters and to me this is one of the coolest.
4. Sex - Gender is a standard demographic factor.
5. Keywords - Keywords will are based on a user’s profile information including Activities, Interests, Favorite Books, TV Shows, Movies, About Me and more.
6. Education - Target based on level of education.
7. Workplaces - Target based on where they work.
8. Relationship – Single, In a Relationship, Engaged, It’s complicated, In an Open Relationship, and Widowed are all possible targets. Note: selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their profile.
9. Interested In - This factor is useful if a user’s preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising.
10. Languages – Another standard demographic factor.
11. Connections - The connections fields enable you to include and exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users are members of.
If you use the targeting factors correctly it will increase your chances of finding success with your Facebook ad campaign. Remember to use multiple ads and to test, test, and then test some more.
