Picture the scene: you are in your company’s Business Manager. After choosing your campaign objective, you move on to the ad set, where you are asked to choose the audience.
But what exactly is a Facebook audience? And how do you tell them apart?
On Facebook Ads, the audience is where your ads go. Who do you want to show your lovely ad videos and images to? Well, that is the audience.
Audiences can differ depending on where a person is in your funnel. Indeed, most people have never seen your ads on Facebook. A small share have seen them but have not visited your website. And finally, a handful have seen your ads and gone to your website to take (or not) a valuable action such as a purchase.
These people do not all belong to the same audiences, and you need to choose those audiences carefully, because a poorly chosen audience guarantees that your ad will be shown to the wrong people, and therefore will not perform.
To keep it simple, there are three types of audiences:
Here we will mainly cover the last two, as the interest-based audience is fairly simple and intuitive. Let’s start with the custom audience.
This audience covers everyone who has taken an action on an app in the Facebook group (FB and Instagram) or on your own assets (video, e-commerce website, app).
These people can therefore be targeted again depending on your objectives and the context.
For example, someone sees a video ad from your company and watches it for 5 seconds before scrolling on. They will become part of the “Video” custom audience under “Facebook sources”. You can then target them with another ad, from a different angle, this time to trigger a higher-value action such as adding to cart on your website, or even a purchase.
Generally, these audiences are used for retargeting, that is to say targeting again someone who has interacted with your brand.
Now, let’s imagine you want to reach people who resemble your custom audiences but on whom you have no data: how do you go about it? After all, you have no data on these people because you have not reached them before.
This is where lookalike audiences come in. As their name suggests, they are people who resemble your custom audiences in their activities or behaviour.
This lets you target many more people while keeping your targeting more or less precise. It is a very popular audience, particularly for acquisition objectives.
You can choose between a 1% and a 10% Lookalike. The lower the percentage, the smaller and more precise the audience. The higher the percentage, the larger but less precise the audience.
As you will have gathered, a lookalike audience is created from a custom audience so that Facebook shows your ads to people who are… similar to those already interacting with your ads.
You now know the difference between Facebook audiences, what they are useful for and in which situations to use one rather than another.
To sum up:
Of course, knowing what an audience is for will not be enough to launch, manage and monitor effective campaigns. It is only a tiny part of the range of knowledge needed to master Facebook’s Business Manager. This article also only applies to Facebook & Instagram. Indeed, the interface and the way campaigns are built are different on other advertising platforms such as Snapchat Ads, TikTok Ads, Twitter Ads and co.
It is quite possible that learning the specifics of each platform, managing your campaigns day to day, and tracking and analysing your results is not your cup of tea: we don’t hold it against you. It is ours, though, and we actually love it (advertising as much as tea). So feel free to send us an email or book a free discovery call with one of our experts. We can discuss your project together and the different strategies available to boost your growth and increase your revenue.
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