Learn all about how to set up your Facebook Audiences in this article.

You’ve already learned how to set up your Facebook Ads Account, and how to understand your Facebook Campaign Structure. It’s time to understand your biggest asset: your customers. Setting up your Facebook Audiences can be the secret behind an amazing campaign full of successful traffic and high conversion rates. 

Finding the right Facebook Audience is important because there are 1.82 billion daily active users on Facebook and over 2.7 billion monthly active users. And what’s more impressive is that  78% of American consumers say they’ve discovered products on Facebook. 

This means that people are willing to be targeted by products and services that are useful for them. All they need is an ad copy that’s made just for them. They might also need to see your ad a couple of times before converting, too. But that’s a different story. 

Let’s discover more about Facebook Audiences and how to use them to your advantage. 

Who Should You Be Targeting?

The answer is simple and yet… not so much. You should be targeting your customers. But getting to know who your customers are exactly may be more complicated than you originally thought. In fact, your ideal target audience may not be at all who you were expecting it to be. 

Understanding this is crucial because any audiences that are not likely to buy your product are quite literally a waste of money. 

It’s Not All About The Creative

Your ad can be amazing. It can be the most beautiful, perfectly crafted piece of advertising greatness the world has ever seen. But if you send the perfect message to the wrong audience, you won’t get any results. However, if you send the right message to the right audience, bam! Conversions, results, sales.  So, yes. Your ad is important. But your audience is more important still.

Types Of Audiences

Before creating your first audience, you need to understand the differences between Facebook’s audiences. Here are the 4 main audiences:

• Saved Audiences: These are the audiences that you define by choosing your target audience’s interests, location, age, gender, devices, income level, etc. Think of them as your commonly used targeting options – available for easy reuse and tweaking.

• Custom Audiences: These are the highest value audiences, because they allow you to retarget people who have visited your site, engaged with your content, or interacted with your app. These customers have already shown interest in your business, so it’s a great opportunity for you to reach out and get them to convert.
• Lookalike Audiences: These are the audiences that can help you reach new people who are similar to audiences you already care about. People who like your page, added to cart, or simply are similar to previous customers. Facebook can find these people for you through lookalike audiences.

Facebook also has a Special Ad Audiences category, but this is only available for ads in a Special Ad Category, which include housing, credit, or job opportunities. If your business is none of these, then you can ignore this audience type.

Let’s dive into each audience category to explain a bit more about how they are made up. 

Saved Audiences

As we mentioned before, these audiences are built through demographic and behavioral factors. You can create an audience based on age and gender. You can target people in a specific location and exclude others in different places, down to the ZIP code. You can also target based on people’s interests and behaviors, or according to their job title or income level.

You can go as deep or as narrow as you like. It’s your audience. 

Let’s say, for example, that you owned an online jewelry store. You might want to target women who are 25-55 years old, who live inside the regions where you have delivery coverage, and who are interested in fashion, beauty, and of course, jewelry. But you can also target men who are in a relationship with a woman whose birthday is coming up and may be looking for a beautiful present. Being open-minded when creating audiences can help you find new customers and create shopping opportunities for them. Check out our How To Find Your Perfect Audience section below for more information on this.

Custom Audiences

These audiences are extremely valuable for you and your business. You can manually add a customer list from your store, or retarget users who have visited your website, people who have engaged with your Facebook page content, or who filled out a lead form.

If you plan on retargeting users using your Website as a source, then Custom audiences can create the perfect opportunity for conversion through ad frequency and the right message. You can reach:

• Everyone who visited your website (last 7 days, last 30 days, etc).
• Everyone who completed a Pixel conversion event (Add To Cart, Purchase, Lead, Pageview, etc).
• Everyone who visited specific web pages (perhaps a seasonal landing page, your blog, or a popular product collection).
• People who haven’t come back to your website in a certain amount of time in order to reactivate them as users.

And plenty of other custom combinations! For example, think of a customer who clicked on an ad and visited a store. They browsed for a bit, maybe added something to their cart but left the site without converting. Thanks to the Facebook Pixel, you can then retarget this person to offer them a 10% coupon on their first purchase in order to convince them to shop. They’ve already shown they’re interested, so you’re just giving them one more reason to come back and buy from your store. 

If you choose your Facebook Page as a source, then you can target users who have actively engaged with your Facebook content. This means that any users who have liked your page, viewed your videos, or liked one of your posts will be included. You can reach:

• People who liked your Facebook Page
• People who have visited your Facebook Page
• People who have engaged with your posts or ads
• People who have clicked on your CTA buttons
• People who have saved your posts

And plenty more! It’s your audience, so get creative with what you think works for you. 

Lookalike Audiences

These audiences allow you to reach people similar to your customer database or your other audiences. Since these individuals look like your customers (meaning that they match behavior, interests, demographics, location, etc.), it makes them very likely to convert – just like your customers would.

To create a Lookalike Audience, you first need to create a Custom Audience as your source. Then you pick the target location and finally the audience size (ranging from 1-10%). This percentage signifies the people most similar to your Custom Audience source. All of this combined allows Facebook to have a guide on what to look for when reaching for possible customers. 

Zima Media Tip: If your targeting allows it, try to keep the audience size around 1-2% in order to keep it small but still similar to your previous customers.

How To Find The Perfect Audience

In order to find the right audience, there are a couple of places where you can begin. They are your Shopify store, your Google Analytics, and Facebook Audience Insights. Each can help you find useful information regarding your existing clients, potential new customers, and interesting demographic data for an amazing targeting experience. Let’s discuss each one a bit more:

Your Shopify Store Audience

Your store is going to be your main source of information. You already have a list of existing clients that you can use to find similar clients. Just like we mentioned, a Lookalike audience can be based on people similar to your website’s traffic. But you can also manually upload a customer list (say, with your customers’ emails) in order to allow Facebook to find people similar to your existing clients. 

Google Analytics Dashboard

We already covered how to set up Google Analytics with your Shopify store. What you can do with this information is dive as deep as you wish. You can find all sorts of demographic data about your existing audience:

• Age
• Gender
• Interests (like Affinity Categories or In-Market Segments)
• Location (like Country or City)
• Language
• Behavior (Engagement & Frequency behaviors and whether your clients are New or Returning)
• Technology (Browser, Operating System, Network, etc.)
• Devices (Mobile, Desktop, Tablet)
• Users Flow (which shows you the user journey and can help you find your best performing landing pages).
• And much more…

As you can see, Google Analytics is an amazing source of information that can help you discover exactly who your converting audience is. This will allow you to build a successful audience for your advertising efforts.

Facebook Audience Insights Tool

Facebook Audience Insights is an amazing tool to get to know your audience like never before. It can provide extra information about two groups of people: those who are connected to your business’s Facebook Page and all the rest of people on Facebook. This will allow you to create a campaign and a message that will resonate and convert with people similar to your current audience.

This tool can provide a demographic overview with age and gender breakdowns, education level, job titles, relationship status, etc. It can allow you to discover interests and hobbies that you can use in your campaigns to narrow down your targeting. And it can also teach you about lifestyles: a combination of relationship status and location to let you know target the type of people that would be interested in your business.

Finding your perfect audience isn’t about guesswork. It’s about understanding your audience’s data, including demographics, interests, and even lifestyle. 

How To Create A Facebook Audience

There are two ways to build your Facebook Audiences. The first is directly in your advertising campaign, and the second is through the Audience Manager. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you the second one because it is easier to stay in control of your audiences this way. 

STEP 1: Sign Into Your Business Manager

Go to business.facebook.com and click on your business. 

STEP 2: Go to the Audience Manager

Click on the Business Tools Menu on the left-hand side and select Audiences.

STEP 3: Create Your Audience

Click the Create Audience button and select your audience type (Custom, Lookalike, or Saved). 

STEP 4: Write Down The Specifics

If you’re creating a Custom Audience, choose your audience’s source (Website, Customer List, Facebook, etc.). For example, if you want to create a retargeting audience then you need to choose Website as a source. Then you need to determine the event (website visits, pageviews, or other conversions events measured by the Facebook Pixel). You can narrow down the audience by excluding certain parameters. 

If you’re creating a Saved Audience, get down to business and be prepared to target everything you need. Age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, etc. – they’re all important. Narrow down your audience even further by using the AND/OR parameters and by excluding your other audiences.

If you’re creating a Lookalike audience, choose your Lookalike Source, select the location to be targeted, and select the audience size percentage. 

Click the Create Audience button to finish. 

And that’s it. You’ve created your first Facebook audience! You can add them to your campaign in the Ad Set Level, under the Audiences submenu. You can also create an ad directly on the Audience Manager. Simply click on the audience you want to use, click on the Actions button, and select Create Ad. 

Bear in mind that sometimes audiences need a bit of time to populate and be ready to run in your advertising campaigns. So if you can’t use it yet, wait a little and come back later ready to start running your ads to the right customers.