Facebook Display Advertisement Targeting Strategy

Is your company advertising on Facebook, but not achieving the conversion rates you are expecting? If so, you are probably not utilizing Facebook’s marketing competitive advantage: its ability to effectively target prospective customers. You need to rethink your marketing strategy. If misused, Facebook display advertisements can become very expensive and ineffective. If used properly, Facebook is one of the most cost-effective display advertising channels available.

So how do you effectively target prospective customers with display ads on Facebook?
The answer is simple: you need to make sure that the ads are being seen by your target audience. To do this effectively, it is important to understand the targeting filters available to you in Facebook so that you can identify your target buyer characteristics and use them to optimize the audience that is viewing your ads. Here are descriptions of the targeting filters available for Facebook Advertisements:

• Gender: You can restrict your ads to male or female audiences.
• Age: You can limit your ads to Facebook profiles that fall within one of the following age ranges: 13–17, 18–24, 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, and 65–100. Users without an identified age will not be shown ads if you use an age range filter.
• Birthday: You can limit your ads to only those who have an upcoming birthday.
• Location: You can limit the ad audience to specific countries and sometimes states if outside the US and specific states and sometimes cities if within the US.
• Relationship: You can target users based on their relationship status. The options include single, in a relationship, engaged, or married. 
• Language: You can target users based on their profile language settings.
• Education: You can limit your advertisements to targeted education levels. The options include In High School, In College, or College Grad.
• Interested In: You can limit your ads to people who state they are interested in Men, Women, or both in their profiles. Facebook profiles without an interest selected will be excluded from advertisements that utilize this filter.
• Workplaces: You can target users based on their listed employer. This filter is somewhat limited as the spelling of the Employer name needs to match the way it is identified in your advertisement, so acronyms and shortened names will not be identified through this filter if you provide the full employer name.
• Connections: You can use this function in conjunction with your company’s Facebook profile to advertise to your fans who like you or like some other profile page or you could use this function to target individuals that are attending an event, use an application, or are members of a group.
• Friends of Connections: You can use this filter in conjunction with the connections filter to target Facebook users who are not only connected to your Facebook Business Page but also have a minimum number of Friends connected to your Business Page. If you use this feature, then you can have the ad state which friends are already connected to your Business Page as well.
• Likes and Interests: You can use the keyword filter to limit advertisements by a user’s potential Likes or Interests (such as a song, book, movie, hobby, television show, etc.). Facebook identifies potential likes using an algorithm that makes inferential assumptions about your likes based on the friends you engage with most frequently on Facebook, so this can be a powerful way to identify your target audience.

Once you know the ways to optimize your Facebook display ad targeting strategy, you will need to design an effective advertisement that will catch the attention of your audience and increase your presence on Facebook, so that you can increase the number of touches you have with each potential customer and improve the targeting capabilities of your ads. Doing so, will vastly improve the effectiveness of your Facebook marketing strategy.
For information on how to use Facebook as a business tool, please see my previous post called “Social Media Sales 2.0: Leveraging Facebook as a Sales Tool.”