Facebook Business Manager has helped lead the online advertising revolution in the past 10 years. With Facebook’s ad targeting becoming increasingly complex and accurate, now is a great time to take advantage of Facebook advertising for your small business.

The following is a breakdown of the different ad targeting demographics provided by Facebook along with some examples.

By Financial Situation

With the ability to pinpoint Facebook users based on Income and net worth, advertisers can now target anyone from the lowest income Americans to the wealthiest 1%. This can be advantageous if you know your product/business. For example, if you own a fast food restaurant, it may be worth targeting a lower income demographic. Meanwhile, if you’re advertising for an expensive, five-star restaurant, targeting a higher income demographic makes more sense. With this ability, it may even be worth increasing your product prices while targeting a more wealthy demographic to give the impression of higher quality and value.

It’s worth noting, however, that Facebook is in the process of revamping some of their targeting options, and this kind of detailed financial targeting looks to be disappearing in the near future. We’ll be covering that in an upcoming article.

By Purchase Behavior

In the purchase behavior section, users can choose the category in which their product belongs, and target users who are “known or likely buyers” of that product. This is one of the most obvious and effective ways of selling your product for a conversion campaign. How does Facebook acquire this information? They say it’s ‘based on information provided by Oracle Data Cloud. Loyalty card and transaction-level household purchase data with multi-channel coverage across all product categories’. While the data may not always be 100% accurate, however, it is constantly being improved with up to 15% of your ad spend going towards data costs.

 

By Gender

These demographic options aren’t always obvious. Of course, if you’re selling men’s care products, you should probably be targeting men. However, even targeting only men for a men’s care product has its flaws. Certain items are often purchased as gifts. By excluding either men or women you may be missing out on conversions. The best solution is to do your research before creating your ad to make sure you fully understand your target audience.

By Age

This is another demographic where research and real thought must be put into place. During the summer of 2017, when I started my first ecommerce store, I ran Facebook ads to sell fidget spinners. Of course, the minimum age for advertising was 18 years old, so I needed a way to target an audience that would purchase my goods. My first thought was the end user: children between the ages of 6-10. They couldn’t purchase fidget spinners because they couldn’t be targeted with ads. Their parents, however, could be advertised to, so I decided to choose a demographic of women between the ages of 30-38 for my first ad. My reasoning was that they were the perfect age demographic to have kids between the ages of 6-10. After running my campaign for a few days, my CPA (cost per acquisition) was around $1.50 –  a fairly low cost for the markup on my items. This helped drive sales on my Shopify website, and showed me the power of Facebook ads. Looking back, I would have created multiple ads within my Facebook ad sets to lower my CPA and drive more sales with the same budget.

Facebook ads have amazing potential to help grow your business with the ability to accurately target your audience. They often need to be thought out and analyzed using third-party data but you can see amazing results if ads are created properly. Consider Facebook Ads for your next marketing campaign, but act fast – again, Facebook is removing some of their most detailed targeting options.