The Ultimate Facebook Ads Targeting Tutorial in 2024

Facebook ads targeting can be incredibly confusing and in this video I'm going to clear all that up I'm going to show you how to create and use all the targeting options that we regularly use as a Facebook ads agency and I'm going to show you which ones you should use and when so to put together this ultimate Facebook ads targeting tutorial and demonstrate all the stuff I'm about to show you I'm in an example Facebook ad account I'm in ads manager and I've just gone and quickly created a sort of dummy leads campaign and I'm

going to use this as an example to walk you through what I'm about to talk about though absolutely applies to sales campaigns and other campaign objectives a lot of the targeting principles and strategies are very much applicable across the board depending on what type of campaign you're running there are different strategies you need to use depending on your business but we'll talk about those later on okay so I've created a quick example leads campaign and what we're going to do is jump over to the ad set level because that's where we set up our targeting

I'm going to select this ad set click edit and that's going to bring up a window where we can scroll down and get into this targeting section here now couple of things I need to quickly mention at this point if you don't have an ad set level within your campaign that you've created that's probably because you selected the tailored campaign option when you created your campaign for the purpose of this I'd recommend you don't do that so if you've done that already just delete that one and create a new campaign and go ahead and select

manual settings manual campaign setup and that'll give you that ad set level where you can can do your targeting it's a little bit more complicated it with a tailored setup okay I'm also not going to cover all the other stuff that's you need to work out and get right at the campaign level ad set level Etc in this video I've got loads of videos to talk about all that sort of stuff just check out my channel and you'll find a whole bunch of other options there this is really going to be focusing on targeting and

we've got more than enough to talk about here because there's plenty of stuff so let's start with the basics we scroll down to this audience section and we need to Define who we're going to Target who do we want our ads to be put in front of now unless you are quite a rare business you don't want your ads put in front of absolutely anybody and everybody certain people are far more likely to buy your products than others that's the whole premise around targeting we want to put our ads in front of those people that

are far more likely to buy our products and services okay so the very first thing we need to decide is location now it'll default as it has here to the country in which you are located but you can select edit you can delete that out you can add in different locations and you can get really quite specific so let's say I go ahead and get rid of that let's say I had a local business and I live in a town in England called Cheltenham so I could choose for example just to advertise to the city

only just the city of Cheltenham nothing around it I could add in a bit of a radius you know I could say look I'm happy to advertise to Cheltenham and anyone within 15 miles because I think that's what's gonna people are willing to travel to my business or I'm willing to travel to them that distance depending on how it is that you're that you're set up but my basic recommendation around your location targeting that's the first thing you want to do because it'll affect the rest of the stuff you do is advertise in the places

where people will buy your products or services and don't constrain yourself so I see a lot of businesses let's say you're an e-commerce business and you sell to the whole of the US right but you think all my best customers are in New York so I'm just going to advertise in New York that doesn't really make sense metas machine learning process is powerful enough to work out okay we get a lot more sales from New York let's put a lot more ads people in New York but there's someone living in Texas that has interacted with

this Business website or has recently been searching for products that are similar to the ones that this company sells we think they'd also be a good Prospect to put an ad in front of therefore we're going to put an ad in front of them I'm not a fan of restricting your geographical targeting or location targeting unnecessarily just because you think that's where your best prospects are so if you can ship to the whole of your country like if we can ship to Holy UK we would absolutely be going to the whole of the UK if

we can provide a service to the holy UK we would be advertising to the holy UK the only time when we're going to narrow things down is when we are a local business and people just aren't going to travel into our location or we're not willing to travel Beyond a certain distance okay so think about that more from a business standpoint necessarily than a Facebook ad campaign optimization standpoint if you can ship internationally service business internationally you know I own a digital advertising agency and we have clients all around the world right Australia us et

cetera et cetera then what I would typically do is look to advertise to multiple countries but limit yourself there a little bit so for example we might advertise to our typically our best performing countries which is going to be UK US Canada Australia um Ireland New Zealand although their populations are smaller so we get less from those but we might start with just those four Once those are working we can look to expand to other countries because we do have clients in Germany and Singapore and South Africa and all over the world right we do

have clients all over the world but it's it's important to keep just your core demographics especially when you start getting into many different time zones many different languages things get a little bit complicated so that's the general principle around targeting what I'm going to do for now is assume that we're advertising for business that can just ship products in the UK or just serve customers in the UK and go with that as the whole country as the option now the reason why we set the location targeting up first is because it then influences some other

decision-making processes because this is the first thing that we've set up within our targeting we need to constantly be looking over here on the right hand side at estimated audience size it's a very important number so you can see that when I Target the whole of the UK we've got 46 to 50 4 million people as the total audience size of Facebook users Instagram users Etc within this location if we're going with a local business that audience size is going to be much much smaller and that means that we can't be as specific with our

targeting options later on in terms of what age ranges we're going to Target what interests we're going to Target because the audience size is going to get too small we want to leave things um broader if we are going more specific from our location standpoint and likewise if we're going International and we've got half a billion people to advertise to or maybe more than we can afford to potentially get really specific because the ultimate the end audience size won't be too small now there are general rules of thumb around this and I'm sort of reluctant

to give them because I don't want people to sort of stick to those numbers religiously if you find that there are options that would perform you know you think might work that fall outside these criteria absolutely test them nothing wrong with that but in general we don't like to advertise to an audience that's less than half a million people if we can help it on the upper side of things we're kind of happy to go as big as as as there is available I'll explain more about that later down the line but if you think

about half a million people being your lower limit roughly again for local businesses that absolutely is not possible a lot of the time cheltenham's got like a hundred thousand people in it if I just went to advertise to Cheltenham which would be absolutely fine I can't have a minimum audience size a half a million so it's going to be smaller than that that's absolutely okay but if you can advertise nationally internationally that half a million Mark um it is sort of a good Benchmark to not go beneath and don't worry about an upper end when

it comes to uh your audience size okay so that's the first thing we need to talk about once we select our location we then need to get into age what age range do your customers typically fall into I would recommend being quite generous here so for example as a Facebook Ad Agency we might say that the majority of our customers our age let's say 30 to 55 right they're going to be business owners or marketing managers within you know like a social media marketing manager within a company something along those lines and making making decision

making process so that might be our sort of typical age range but we might want to be a bit more generous and go for something like 25 all the way up to 65 plus and it's not a mistake necessarily to leave this age range open that might sound a little bit crazy but again remember meta's machine learning process is really clever working out who's most likely to purchase is the average customer 35 year old male great let's put ads in front of mostly people that are similar to that but if you've got a 27 year

old female or a 52 year old female that is mostly showing signs that they might be interested in this product or service then we can also put an ad in front of them because they might convert really well so if in doubt go with a broader age range and I think you'll be you'll be better off if you've got your typical customers at age 25 to 35 perhaps go with 18 up to 45 something along those lines okay again these things can always be adjusted default is all genders you can go ahead and edit this

my recommendation here is that unless you are very heavily skewed one way like let's say 80 to 90 percent one way or the other then you can just go ahead and go with men or go with women otherwise I would usually go with all same principle of prize with the meta machine learning process they can work out that okay you're selling women's jewelry most people are going to buy that gonna be women but there's also men will buy that particularly at certain times a year because they're buying Christmas gifts and Valentine's Day gifts and things

on those sites okay then we get into detail targeting now if you've made selection adjustments here you'll see that every time you do this changes right so if we go with 25 to 55 we can see that you know our audience size is shrinking significantly down here if we would just wanted to advertise to women for example again we can see our audience size is shrinking significantly so just keep that in mind for this next section which is detailed targeting now there's tons of strategies to find the detailed targeting options that you want to select

to work out the best possible interests and try and find those like sneaky hidden audiences that must be available when it comes to Facebook advertising and I'm going to tell you the truth is that they don't really exist people think there are secret hidden audiences that you can find that no one else can find it's not really a thing if you just don't make a bad mistake with your interest targeting if you just go with the options that sound true sound logical sound like they should apply you're probably going to be just fine so that's

normally what I'd recommend that most advertisers do so if for example we were advertising on Facebook ads agency we would just start searching for terms that are closely related and then targeted people that are interested in that so for example if Facebook advertising I know from experience searching is too specific that wouldn't come up but if we were to go with something like social media marketing as an example we could go ahead we don't want job titles we may do if we're looking to advertise those people specifically but most most businesses in this space are

going to more go with people that are interested in that because that's going to reach the business owners and things like that as well okay so social media marketing might be an example we might have things like digital marketing again as a as an interest as opposed to you know digital marketing strategist as a job title so you can start searching all sorts of things that are relate to your business right for example if I was starting a dog walking business I would start entering things like dog and you could just have people interested in

dogs that seems like a logical option to do you might have things like um dog walking dog groomer these are job titles but you can have interest dog walking dogs as an interest you could test these various options so it's not rocket science add some things in into here into this suggestions option that are closely related to what you sell and come up with a list of maybe 10 15 sometimes it'll be more sometimes it's gonna be less of options that are that make sense that seem relevant you know for dog walking business we're going

to advertise to people that are interested in dogs advertise people that are interested in dog walking fairly straightforward right so what I do is come up with a list of 10 to 15 options sort of set those aside for now just select the one particularly if this is the first time you run our campaign just select the one interest in here and let's say we're going with dog walking we'll go with with that and then test that you can test it alongside other options I'll explain more about that later on you can start to work

out which one's going to produce the best results for you and go with those over the long run okay I'm not going to talk about excluding or narrowing down audiences it's not something we do regularly and it's not normally something that we'd recommend it's kind of advanced technique but I said we don't do it because we don't just find there's that much new utility so I'm not going to cover that in this video I don't think it's uh it's useful for the vast majority people watching Advantage Detail targeting is something that's turned on previously I

was quite Keen to turn this off what this setting means is that we're saying to meta look I want to advertise people that are interested in dog walking but if you think there are people that aren't necessarily included within that category of Interest dog walking that might be interested in my dog walking Services then you can go ahead and advertise to other people on top of that this is getting better and better meta's machine learning process and AI algorithms that work out who to put your ads in front of are getting more sophisticated so I

don't think it's a big mistake to leave this on but for me personally during the testing phase I like to remove it I like to just advertise to people that are interested in walking dogs in this case and then I can test that properly against the other options and see which performs best estimated audience size is coming in at nine and a half million to 11 million that's absolutely fine it's a really good chunk of the UK population which is not surprising because tons of people have dogs but we might have it set up something

like this as I said if you want to leave this on it's not the end of the world by any means and if you end up selecting something here that's quite specific and the audience size is smaller I'd be more likely to leave Advantage Detail targeting on okay all languages in the UK that's probably what we'd go with but let's say you were advertising in a location where there are lots of languages or a couple of different languages that have really big basis like if you're advertising Canada for example and you only wanted to reach

the french-speaking part of Canada that's absolutely fine you can go ahead and put French in there and get more specific with your languages okay so those are the basic targeting options when it comes to location demographic and interest and that's how we would look to set things up and we would usually as I said we would create that list of 10 to 15 different interest targeting options and we would then work our way through those we would test them we would run an ad set with dog walking we would run an ad set with dogs

we would run an ad set people interested in dog food and pet supplies that might be another you know there's all sorts of things that we could test within that Niche that might be appropriate and we go ahead and get that done this stuff here is relatively straightforward it's just a case of don't mess it up as opposed to really getting it right what I mean by messing it up usually is just targeting a really small audience if you go look my my my target market is only 21. I'm only going to advertise to 21

year old women that are also into interested in dog walking you can see our audience size is starting to get really quite small and this would be a good example of messing it up particularly if you then went and compound it and said I'm there then they only live in Manchester so we're only going to Target 21 year old women in Manchester that are interested dog walking it's just too small too specific better to give Facebook a lot more flexibility and freedom and things along those lines okay now it's time to get into some more

advanced stuff some more exciting stuff that we do use as an agency all the time before I do that you want to quickly mention our done for you Facebook and Instagram advertising services so we can create manage optimize your campaigns work out all your targeting and everything else to do with your Facebook and Instagram campaigns to get you the best possible results and take that workload off your hands if you are interested you can book a free call with one of my team members there is a link in the video description below that'll take you

to a page on our website where you can go ahead and book in a free navigation call you can find out more about our service we can find out more about your product Services what you offer we've probably worked with a business like yours in the past we've worked with hundreds of different businesses from thousands of different campaigns at this point we've got a ton of experience and really know what we're doing so if you're interested go ahead and book a call and hopefully we get a chance to work together so now it's time to

get into some more advanced stuff and some really cool Facebook advertising features that you probably want to take advantage of so if we scroll back up to this section here that we sort of just skipped over before this custom audiences section and if we hover over this little eye you will see that meta give it a definition this is use custom audiences to reach people who have already interacted with your business and then goes on to talk about lookalike audiences that's a separate thing but people who have already interacted with our business are warm audiences

we're talking about retargeting it we're talking about being able to put ads in front of people that have already interacted with our business previously now I can basically guarantee that your retargeting audiences will produce the best results from a return on ad spend return on investment standpoint than advertising to cold audiences because people that have already visited our website or on our email list or have watched a video of ours on Facebook they are far more likely to be interested in what we have to offer than people who haven't taken any of those steps so

absolutely something you want to go ahead and set up get your custom audience set up so we can then retarget and I'm going to walk you through the various options and how to get all this set up now okay so what we need to do is we need to come out of ads manager click on these through the lines all tools and instead go into audiences I've got it up here in the shortcuts you might have it down under manage business but you'll definitely have that option click on audiences and here's where we create the

custom audiences now I deleted out all the custom audiences um that were in here and so I could sort of create these and demonstrate it and go through the process so if we click on create a custom audience now the first type of custom audience that I want to well actually before we get into touch custom audience what I want to do is first tell you about the two different sources of custom audience so we've got your sources up here so these are people that have interact with your business outside of the meta family of

apps so outside of Facebook outside of Instagram and you can take that information use that data and upload it into meta and then Target those people these this section down here meta sources includes all the options um that are based on actions that people have taken within the meta family of apps so within Facebook with Instagram that'll make more sense as we go through so let's start with your sources and we're going to cover the most common options that we will use when working with a business and when we're looking to Target so the first

one is going to be website okay so if you go ahead and select website and then click next now to do this you will need to have the Facebook pixel the metapixels that's now called installed on your website if you don't really have that you don't have a setup I'll include a link in the description below to another video that shows you exactly how to get all that set up and everything like that but assuming you do have the pixel installed on your website you can then create a custom audience from people that have visited

your website and that's great because people have visited your website are far more likely to be interested in buying inquiring whatever it is you want them to do than people who haven't so you want to take advantage of that you can get quite you can go with all website visitors which is a default or you can get really very specific so you could go ahead and select people who visited specific pages so my business for example we offer Facebook ads and we offer Google ads as a done-for-you service so we could for example if we

wanted to only advertise to people interested in the Google ad service we could say you know um anyone who has visited the Heath media Dot credit UK forward slash Google ads I believe is the URL our main page on our website about that we could add that in so it's URL equals this so anyone who has visited this page create a specific custom audience out of those people because we know they're interested in Google ads and then we can retarget them with an ad a retargeting ad saying hey you know if you're interested on Google

ad Services here's what it costs here's how it works all the stuff that you might want to do in a retargeting ad right you could also do contains so if you've got like a category on your website for example let's say you sell hats and shoes and you had a whole category of hats so you've got hats in the URL in the category and you wanted to put together like a catalog ad of lots of different hats and advertise those people and then a catalog ads of different shoes and advertise it to the people who

visited the shoes related page on the website you can do that you can do all sorts of really cool stuff in here you can also go one step further now I said I wouldn't talk about it in the previous section the exclude narrow further and things like that because I think it gets complicated that stage but once you getting into these custom audiences this is where you might want to start want to do it so let's say for example um we wanted to advertise to people that had signed up for our webinar but not yet

gone on to purchase our course you're selling an online course and you've got a webinar funnel so you could have something like let's advertise to people that have visited our URL that contains webinar let's assume you've got webinar in the URL you'd have to set this up and make sure you've got this right or you could just do equals and then pop whatever page it is they watch the webinar on you pop that in here and we want to exclude people that again click on people who visited specific web pages that have already purchased so

let's say if they visited a URL that's got thank you on it the only URLs that have thank you on our website are ones where people have actually gone ahead and bought and what that does is it creates a custom audience of people who have visited the webinar page but not yet bought because we're excluding all the people that have bought hopefully that makes sense so you can have a play around with these you can further refine people you can exclude other people you can create all these different layers of custom audience and have a

good play with this I'm going to delete this app for now because it's not something that most advertisers are going to want to do in fact most advertisers are just going to want to go ahead with all website visitors and I'll quickly explain some of the other options you can also do Visitors by time spent so you've got 25 10 5 so these are um if we go with 25 that we'd be advertising to the people that have been on our website longest that fit into 25 of the overall people that have been on their

most if that makes sense here we've got the 10 that have been our website the longest here the five percent have been on our website the longest um but that is an option just something to be aware of this could be really important if you are advertised if you've been sending people to like a blog post or something and you really want them to read it before you then retarget because it's going to help inform their buying their decision making process perhaps it's really advocating for a certain way of doing things and then it you

know that if they spent a lot of time on your website they've seen information about that that's great you can then retarget them otherwise you don't really want to do it okay and one other thing actually from your events um so we've only got ad cart set up on this this is an example um Facebook ad account so there's not all the various conversion events set up so we've only got add to cart but you would often have purchase and add to cart and initiate checkout and leads and things like that so you could specifically

this is a custom audience specifically of people that have added to cart that might be a custom audience you really want to run oh we want to Target everyone who's added to cart oh and we do want to exclude people that have you know we don't have it set up but we could exclude people that have triggered the purchase conversion event because we just want to capture those people that added to cart but didn't quite get over the line we can put an ad in front of them again and get them to take that next

step okay hopefully that makes sense but as I keep saying the thing that most advertisers want to go with is all website visitors and I'd recommend you can see this retention is 30 days so that's all website visitors 30 days into the past from today and that that will dynamically change so that audience will be slightly different tomorrow because it's going 30 days into the past from tomorrow same the next day same the next day and in 60 days time it's a completely different audience right with retention there's a trade-off here the longer the retention

window the more people you have in this custom audience and in general the larger the custom audience the better it perform but in theory the shorter the retention window the warmer those people are going to be if you only advertise for example to people that have visited your website in the last two days you're probably going to be much more top of mind it's going to be a lot fresher they're more likely to be interested whereas if you advertise to someone that visited your website two months ago or maybe they bought a competitor's product and

and they don't need yours anymore you never know right however this again is a situation where we're going I would recommend that you rely on metas algorithms to work it out so I like to go with maximum attention if you hover over you'll see that meta gives some information about this and for different custom audiences they have different maximum times just to make it confusing but with website custom audiences it is 180 days roughly six months right so I would go with the maximum and here's why meta knows that the people that visited your website

three days ago are much warmer than someone that visits your website five months ago so they are going to start by advertising to the really warm prospects and then once those have been exhausted then we're going to advertise to people that are slightly less warm than visited a long time ago again because remember meta might know based on someone web activity that you sell I don't know oven trays for example and someone visited your website five months ago not that one with Prospect but they've just been searching around various things for oven trays they visited

a competitors website or Facebook page um maybe they're thinking about buying this would be a good time to put down in front of them and get that sale because they're in a buying mode and you don't want to miss out on those people it makes a big difference so I go with all web services 180 days you just want to give your web your custom audience a name so all website visitors and in terms of naming obviously whenever it's coming naming anything campaigns ad sets custom audiences just name it something where you can glance at

it without having to go into it and you know what it is it's just a Time Saver before when you have lots of different custom audiences lots of different campaigns and things like that so all website visitors 180 days pretty simple right go ahead and click on create audience okay and you could create as I've said lots of different types of website visitor custom audiences break it down by people who've visited certain pages break it down by people who've spent time certain actions all that sort of stuff there's loads of fun stuff there to be

getting on with Okay so let's go ahead and create a new custom audience so we've just talked about website and the various permutations the next one I'll talk about is customer list now it says customer list but you can think of this as two different types of custom audiences you can think of it as customer lists so people who have bought from you previously but also email list people who haven't bought from you previously but perhaps have signed up to your newsletter or opted in for a webinar and you've got marketing permissions to be able

to email them and all that sort of stuff you can include those sorts of things in here now if you use MailChimp and that's what you use as your email service provider you can just literally click on import from MailChimp it'll then get you to log into your MailChimp account you will then just select which list you want to upload you click on it boom done super straightforward okay so I'm not going to demonstrate that because it's really really easy if you're not using MailChimp or you have the information stored somewhere else you'd use a

different email service by the different CRM what you can do is just export a an Excel document or a CSV file text to a CSV file um from wherever it is you've got that data stored and all sort of email certified the same thing will allow you to export that information and then you can go ahead and come into here click next and then you get to upload this list and I'll show you how to do that now because it can be a little bit complicated so before you get to the uploading what you need

to do is you need to tell meta do you have a value column this only really applies to a customer list not an email list from people who haven't bought but with a customer list you may have data around what each person's spent with you if you do you want to go ahead and click yes because that's really useful information for method to see because they can see okay not only have these people bought from this business before but certain people spent a lot more money and then when you go to use that audience for

retargeting they're going to prioritize the people that spend more money when you use it for things like lookalikes they're going to prioritize creating audiences of people that are similar to the higher Spenders as opposed to just similar to previous customers there is a difference there and that's important so if you've got a value column click yes in this example I don't so I'm just going to go ahead and click no and then you just simply upload a list okay so I've just uploaded this example email list very very straightforward upload it in there and you

can obviously give it a name I'm just going to call it example in my list but if you had different options you would want to get more specific with this I'm going to go ahead and click next and then what we need to do is map the information within our CSV file with information that makes sense to matter right okay so let me give an example so in in this list all I've got is uh first name Ben and then email Ben example.com okay So Meta has worked out that this column Ben example.com is email

they've worked that out for us great but they haven't worked out the name name Ben okay so I can either choose to not upload that data or I can just say oh by the way that is a first name and you can see that there are lots of different options depending on what data you have you just go through and say this column is um this information this column is this information this column is this information and that's really important because what meta does is they take this information here so name email that sort of

stuff and they match it to people's Facebook and Instagram profiles and that's what allows you to run ads to them I know that this data isn't always going to correlate so for example people might be using a different email address now to what they originally used to sign up to Instagram with in which case meta is going to have a harder time matching those people so match rates typically let's say 50 you're not going to get everyone it's not perfect but it's certainly better than not going through these steps and not using it at all

it's also why I'd recommend that I've only got name and email address in this because it's an example one but when you are uploading Data customer list or email lists into um meta it's best to have as much information as possible because the more information you have the more likely they are to match the person on your list to someone's actual Facebook Instagram profile so that you can then advertise to them okay so we just then go ahead and click import and create uploads and process and boom we're all done so you could do that

process with an example email list and a customer list and we would usually create two separate options we create an email list and create customer list because there are times when we want to advertise to people who haven't bought from us previously times when we want to advertise to both times when we only want to advertise the abort from us previously we might have like a loyalty repeat purchase scheme or something like that in which case previous customers are great but definitely get both of these uploaded I get a lot of pushback from Facebook advertisers

that don't want to advertise to people that have already purchased from them previously I think that is a little bit short-site and a little bit naive they think it's a waste of money I just think people aren't walking around in life thinking about your business they're thinking about all the things going on in their life have you ever had the experience where you've been to a restaurant it was fantastic you think we'll go there again at Lowe's and then you just completely forget about it and then someone else brings it up in a conversation two

years later or you drive past it for some reason you go oh yeah I forgot about that place it's just like that right I forgot about that place you needed a reminder we can do that with ads we can be that friend saying oh I went to that fantastic Mexican restaurant it isn't it isn't the food awesome let's let's go there again you can do that by retargeting previous customers so just wanted to sort of nip that thought process in the bud because I hear that from a lot of people and I think it is

incorrect Okay so we've got a couple of different custom audiences in there if we go ahead and to the next one so create audience custom audience there are of course other options in here things like catalog it's definitely one you want to use if you're an e-commerce business using something like Shopify app activity definitely something you want to use if um you've got an app but the majority of businesses probably aren't going to be using these maybe catalog if they're a lot of e-commerce own business owners watching um but everyone's going to want to use

website and customer list okay so I'm going to go with the ones that I said we use basically all the time as an agency not every single little Edge case otherwise this video will be about six hours long six hours okay so let's move on to the meta sources so the first one we've got in the list is video so let's start here now what you will find with the meta sources is that because it takes place within the apps the tracking so you know I said how the email list of match rate was about

50 so if you upload an email list of 2 000 people you probably only get a thousand people in a custom audience that is not true with the meta Source because it's in apps the data is basically perfect and also the barrier to entry with these actions is much lower so for a business that has I don't know a thousand people that have visited their website um from their Facebook ads they might have 15 000 video views on Facebook and Instagram in order to get that thousand maybe it's more who knows what your click through

rate is right so these audiences are much larger and that's great because I said the larger the custom audience the better so when we come in here the first thing we need to do is says choose a content type which is a little bit misleading because the first thing that you do is Select how much of the video or videos someone needs to have watched in order to be included in here now there is a trade-off as I've discussed here before okay so if um you want the largest audience possible then you want to go

with this three seconds of your video because that's going to contain the most people by far far more people are going to watch three seconds of your video the 95 of it most likely but the people who have watched 95 those are the really warm ones the more specific ones so you're trying to find that Balancing Act here I like to go with something like 25 if it's a short video if it's a longer video then we'd usually go with what's called a through play um so roughly 15 seconds um or depending if it's really

short it's going to be a shorter one but that those would be the two options that we typically go with obviously you don't want 25 if you're advertising a really long video because that's going to contain far fewer people I do think that whereas with the website visitor audience we heard on the side of well let's just make it as big possible and let Facebook work it out I'm not sure that's great here because everyone that's visited your website more or less is interesting what you have to offer someone can watch three seconds of your

video by accident they could just be scrolling on their phone whilst watching telly interesting bit of information is on the TV they glance up video plays for you know six seven seconds whatever the glance down and they're included and you think oh they didn't even notice it so I'd go with with one of these two options I think is a little bit better once you have selected this your 15 next thing you need to do is choose videos so here make sure you've got obviously the right Facebook page selected and then you can just go

through and select you know these are just like reels that have been published so I'm just going to go through and select as many as you want you could select all your videos you could select one video you could select all the videos within a certain category you could select um so you could have as I said before we could have one people anyone could shoot a video of ours on Google ads anyone could consumed a video of ours on Facebook ads two separate groups so we can retarget separately that's just the Facebook page Source

we could get people from our Instagram profile same sort of situation right we've got video views here so let's go ahead and grab these and and create custom audiences from them we could do from specific campaigns so videos that we're running in ads we can also use to create custom audiences from so there's a number of different options in here but let's say we're just going to go with Instagram well we've got a few Facebook ones and a couple of Instagram ones just for demonstration purposes so these seven videos click confirm and then you can

see the retention because we're in app meta is less concerned with privacy issues we can get away with advertising to more uh more people and keeping them within that for longer the retention default is 365 and you'll see that's that's the maximum but it's also the default which I think is really really interesting so you've got 365 which will I go with and then here we go with something like video viewers 365. if you want to get more specific you could then write in you know this is within the Google ads category for our business

or whatever it is just so it means something to you later on then you go ahead and select create audience don't worry about all this we're going to talk about that later on and that is the video viewers custom audience okay so the next custom audience we're going to create if I click on create audience and custom audience is the next one down the list which is lead form now again I just want to quickly touch on this because again not all advertisers are actually going to be able to use this one but this is

basically an option if you are running ads using instant forms lead forms and so if you're not familiar web someone clicks on an ad on Facebook we're going to describe instead of being taken through to your website or a landing page they are presented with an instant form I've got videos on those and if you're interested in a lot of advertisers are now using lead forms instant forms but we can create custom audience from people who've engaged with our lead forms so we could go with anyone open this form or people who opened and didn't

submit people who opened and submitted so you think about the ways that you could retarget with that so let's say someone who opened but didn't submit you could advertise that person to try and get them to do it again and actually follow through and submit the form let's say the opposite someone who did open and did submit perhaps they're now in your sales process where you're trying to you know you're having sales calls with them you send over a proposal whatever it is that you're looking to do and you want to try and convince them

to convert you could put a video testimonial from a previous client ad in front of them as a retargeting ad those people because they're at the next step so all sorts of creative things you can do with this setup and with the retargeting but obviously I would probably recommend that most advertisers go with anyone who opened this form to try and get people to actually submit the form I think that's the easiest way to get this up and running make sure you've got the right page selected and then you can just select your your lead

forms by name you'll have got this set up and you'll be familiar with these if you've run these campaigns before if not I've got videos on all this sort of stuff or you can just select all and go with the the whole option okay then we've got retention we've got another number you can see the default is 90 days and the maximum time is 90 days which is uh interesting but there we go and I would recommend you go with the maximum so then we need to go ahead and give this a name so we

could call this lead form openers um all forms because that's the option we selected and then we go in 90 days and then we can click create audience and that one is done okay so a couple more custom audiences that I want to um cover because I think they're really important and well done for for sticking with me on this stuff so create audience custom audience the next one I want to talk about is Instagram account so if we go ahead and select Instagram account and then click next so we can create a custom audience

of anyone that is engaged with our Instagram account before you can see there are very different options so obviously make sure you've got the right Source the right Instagram account you can follow me on Instagram by the way at Ben Heath marketing if you're interested events um anyone who engaged with this professional account is the default we can go with anyone who started following this professional account so followers and we can do anyone who visited your profile people engage with a poster on ad save the post or an ad this is just everyone and that's

why they recommend most advertisers go with for many of the same reasons we've already discussed let's give the biggest possible custom audience metal work it out retention is 365. great and this is a really good one because particularly if you're new and you've only just started advertising you probably already have a good amount of people who've engaged with your Instagram profile and then we're going to show you how to do the face at page one the equivalent in a second so this audience can be pretty big you might have enough people in an email list

or a website visitor list yet to be able to actually retarget with this you can pretty quickly so Instagram engages 365 is what we're going to go ahead and list click create audience and that one is done and then the last one I want to show you is Facebook page and I'm not going to come back to this page there are obviously other options here but again they don't apply to most advertisers and a lot of the prices are very simple just click through just follow the steps as I've been doing these other ones it's

not a difficult to work out but how many of you watching this uh need to click on AR experience for example not many in fact I don't want to select that I want to select Facebook page um so there we go so again make sure you've got the right Facebook page and then we can go with exactly the same options basically there are a few different three variations but basically the same options we've got on the other side people who follow our page people have engaged with our page it's the catch-all for everyone and we've

also got people who um have done various things so I'll just go with the default here nice big audience and then we're going to call this Facebook page engages 365. great audience and those are the custom audiences created now you may have different ones that you use depending on your business but I'd basically recommend that all advertisers set up effectively those seven assuming they apply I know and there's only six here but that's because we've not we've not done email list and customer list separately because the price is exactly the same but you would have

all website visitors email list customer list Facebook page engages Instagram account engages video viewers if you're using video and then lead form openers engages if you're using lead forms those last two would be be very much an if the other other ones you wanna you wanna get in there okay so if you jump back over now to ads manager I'm making I can show you how to put these custom audiences in okay so if we go back into this campaign go into the editable window it's gone to the campaign level we want to jump over

to the ad level ad set level even and I'm going to scroll down let me get to this custom audience section and we can now pop in here anything that we had previously if we wanted to retarget so we could go with all website visitors etc etc now when it comes to retargeting what I'd usually recommend is that you have a separate retargeting ad set maybe even a separate campaign to your cold audience targeting you don't want to mix and match these in and in fact it doesn't really work to mix and match these in

and I'll explain why in a second so because we've got a separate retargeting ad set I think it's best to put in all your retargeting audiences into this one ad set so we'd go ahead and basically go through and just add all of these ones in that are relevant and available to our business now I'm happy to bundle all these in together because we know that our warm audiences are going to produce the best results from a return on investment standpoint we often can't spend a huge amount advertise to these people because the audiences are

much smaller than the cold audiences that we talked about previously because I mean who has 11 million people on email list right not many not many um so you want to bundle these all in together and we also don't need to know how each one performs because the perform is so good so when I talked about the interest and if I scroll down now we've got this detailed targeting option of dog walking I said about you want to separate out the different interests into different ad sets because we want to see which one performs best

we don't need to do that with our warm audience our custom audiences and our retargeting because we know these are going to perform better than our code audiences we want to spend as much as we can on these people obviously without bombarding them you don't no one wants to see the same ad from the same company 10 times a day forever um so we don't need to separate them out and a larger audience helps now when you go ahead and add in your custom audiences if you can most ad accounts can I would definitely deselect

Advantage custom audience it's default is to be on it says reach people beyond your custom audience when it is likely to improved performance no I want this to be a retargeting campaign specifically for retargeting audiences and again you may not have this setup where you've just got them all lumped in here you might have really specific ones like people who have opted in for the webinar but not yet purchased you don't want your ads to be put in front of yes those people but also anyone else it wouldn't make any sense to them it would

just be random and not work very well at all so in those scenarios you absolutely want to make sure you've got Reach people um disabled we're going to capture those in our cold audience ad sets not in here now when you go ahead and add in your custom audiences it brings down your audience size massively so it's very very important that you leave the rest of everything really open look what we've got over here on our audience definition it basically says estimates vary unavailable it's too small and we've got estimated daily results reach less than

10 people okay because it's got so specific we've got age ranging at 21 so whenever you've got a custom audience in here just I want this as open as possible there's no need to make the specifics of no interest no detail targeting whatsoever no gender specification we're just going to go with all no age parameters we're only retargeting people that have done things like visit our website watch our videos um visit our Instagram profile that sort of thing we want to advertise to all of them we don't want to miss out even if it's one

of those scenarios where you're thinking yeah but my products are only applicable for this category of people well yeah but if someone visited your website who doesn't fall into that category maybe they have a a friend or a husband or a daughter or whatever it is that would fit that category so it still might want to put an ad in front of them because they might be getting research for that person you know we've worked the business before that was only advertising um I I was interested in students right so it's only advertising people of

a certain age and we found better results by increasing the age range particularly with things like custom audiences and I was explaining the minute look like audiences and our theory behind as to why was because well because for a lot of students are going to involve their parents in their decision-making process so being able to put ads in front of the parents as well to convince them you know which option is the best option for them that could make a big difference okay so just something to think about so when you're using custom audiences everything

else needs to be open when you're using when you're creating an ad set with cold audiences as I showed you before we got into this custom audience section then you want to be more specific and those are going to be in separate ad sets Okay so we've got this as new leads ad sets we would want to duplicate and then the other version create differences okay hopefully that's very very clear now one of the things you may have seen when we're creating these custom audiences pop up all the time was look-alike audiences so I'm going

to go ahead and jump back over in all tours and select audiences again because what we can do with our custom audiences is something really really cool and that's use them to create look-alike audiences so just to quickly explain what a look-alike audience is the name kind of gives it away it is a group of people that look very very similar to another group of people so let's say for example we had our customer list I know we've called this email list but let's assume that's a customer list we can now say to Facebook these

thousand people on our customer list they've bought from us previously I would like you to analyze those people and create me a list of people that are very similar to that group because we know that people that are very similar to people who've bought from us previously are highly likely to buy if we put ads in front of them and look like audiences can perform really really well and we use look-alike audiences still um a lot of advertisers do when I did a poll recently I think about a quarter of the people look-alike audiences where

they're best performing options so definitely something that you want to test so let's say we want to create a look-alike audience to people that are very similar to our email list or our customer list whatever select that there click on these three little lines and click create lookalike so you can see up here on the source that that example email list has followed through you can actually create a new source from within here or you can click into this and it will bring a drop down of like various options that you can go ahead and

add in and things like that okay depending on on what you've got then we need to select our audience location now you can't get really specific with this and this throws off a lot of people so let's say I'm a local business based in Cheltenham I can't just select Cheltenham in here what I need to do is create the look like audience for the larger area and then further specify what's going on at the ad set level with the location targeting okay so if for example I'm going to do this in the United Kingdom I

need to enter in the whole of the United Kingdom so I need to go with the whole United Kingdom you can't get more um specific than that so let's go with the whole country and now we need to select a percentage now the way this works is that the percentage we select here is the percentage of that country that most closely resembles your Source audience so in this case our customer list or our email list so is it the top one percent the top two percent Etc et cetera now I see a lot of people

and I still get comments like this where they say oh I created a look-alike audience in the UK it had 550 000 people in it is that good is that bad and I would respond with it's nothing that's one percent of the Facebook and Instagram users in the UK it's always going to be 550 000 because there's about 55 million Facebook and Instagram users in the UK so these these numbers are fixed right the the trade-off here is like we talked about previously the larger the audience size kind of the better meta likes that the

smaller the more specific they are with the lookalike audience I would earn on the side of specificity so because it's going to be more accurate and therefore likely to get you better results so again think about that half a million Mark being your sort of lower end of things so with a if we're advertising UK wide we can get away with a one percent just about if we're advertising a country like Ireland with a much smaller population we need to probably go with a 10 because again yeah it's going to be 10 of the Facebook

industry I'm users in the country if we're advertising locally and it's going to really bring our audience size down once we add in the location targeting parameters at the ad set level we really need to um think about increasing our audience size so if we're going to advertise a look-alike audience locally it's nearly always going to be 10 if you were to be advertising somewhere like Australia with I believe roughly 25 million people then again you're going to want to go with maybe something like five percent in fact we can we can add that in

just so I can show you exactly what this looks like and you'll see how the how the numbers change so if I go ahead and select Australia Australia in there we can see the temp service so there's 22 million Facebook and Instagram users right um so if I go with five percent we're looking at 1.1 million we could probably afford to go a little bit less than that three percent but you wouldn't want to be going like one percent like we would in the UK because that's going to be too small so you might want

to go with a three percent for example so just think about this in terms of where it is that you're advertising what it is that you're looking to do um and how that impacts audience size obviously advertising the us but one percent it's gonna be absolutely fine because you've got a nice fat audience there so obviously in the US because you've got a much larger population you can go with one percent it's absolutely fine okay so let's head on over into our ads manager go back into our campaign again um and we'll go ahead and

edit this leads campaign and we will go back to the ad set level okay if we scroll down to audiences now so we've created our lookalike audience in audiences and again you could create a different lookalike audience based on any of the custom audiences that you create right so you don't have to do it based on a customer list if you haven't got any people in it you could do it based on people who've engaged with your Instagram profile now what I'd say is that the the further down your sales funnel someone had to go

in order to make it into your Source audience the better quality that Source audience will be when it comes to creating a look-alike audience which makes sense right so a look-alike audience based on people that have actually gone all the way and bought from you it's going to form better than a look-alike audience based on someone that watched a video of yours on Facebook but there are many many many more people usually in the source audiences for people who've watched a video of yours on Facebook or Instagram engage with your Instagram account so there's a

trade-off there again do you want the larger numbers because the larger the source audience the better it is for meta the more accurate the look like will be or do you want the more um specific based on a customer list it really depends on how many people you've got if you've got a small customer point you probably will see better results with the larger options if you've already got like 10 000 people in a customer list that's almost certainly going to be a better option but you can always create a few different options and test

that's absolutely fine now when you're adding a look-alike audience into your ad set I'm going to go ahead and delete out all these custom audiences you don't want to do so with other custom audiences in there or other look-alikes remember a look-alike audience is not a warm audience everyone thinks it is they're wrong it's a cold audience it's based on a warm audience so you're taking a war audience you're saying create people that are similar to this warm audience but don't actually include the people in that warm audience in there it's just similar people it's

completely cold audiences so you need to treat them like cold audiences one per ad set and then test appropriately don't include custom audiences and look like audiences in the same thing even though they're added in the same search bar text field whatever I think that's where a lot of people get messed up and they end up putting in custom audiences and look-alike audiences and then not really retargeting and you're not really targeting leaders and it's all a mess so get your lookalike audience added in and I would usually deselect Advantage look like for the same

reasons that I discussed previously and then we also want this to be nice and open so this is where a look-alike audience will differ from other cold audience interest targeting things like that in that we will leave this open so we're going to leave the targeting at the age op the gender open and the detail targeting open as well we're not going to get specific and that's because the look-alike part of that look-alike audience takes care of all that it's based on your warm audiences so we know that the people met are going to identify

are going to be sort of in the right category and the sort of people we want to reach okay so I know this can start to get a little bit confusing but that's that's typically how we do it in terms of structure we might have a campaign with three to five different ad sets testing one lookalike two interest targeting options one more warm audience something like that so then we can see which ones perform best we can we're going to leave the warm running all the time we can pause the underperforming ad sets that are

not performing as well add a new one to test against the best performers and that's how we test our different interest targeting options and different look-alike targeting options and all that sort of stuff so those are some of the most common targeting options to talk about and there's one other that we really discussed that is becoming more and more popular by the day and that is open targeting right so open targeting is simply deleting out this look-alike audience and going with absolutely everyone that's going to give you the largest possible audience and the advocate of

open targeting often say that well meta is so good at working out who we want to advertise to we should just always go with open targeting right we should why why give any specificity why miss out on any potential um target audience and Prospects we could just give them the the total size and see what they come up with I think for certain business that can work well okay so if you have a lot of conversion data in your ad account already open targeting is likely to perform well for you because meta knows who is

likely to purchase they know how many times they need to see an ad to purchase what time of day they're most likely to purchase what type of person what do they need to have been doing what day of the week all the various things how old are they where do they live all the various things that constitute someone who's likely to purchase that's already in your ad account so that's really useful if you don't have that data then it's much more likely that open targeting won't work for you because yes meta is really going working

out who to Target but if it's a brand new ad account they don't know who purchases that's it's almost like the algorithm can get lost it takes them so long to work it out for you whereas you can give them some direction at the beginning with things like lookalike audiences and interest targeting options that can really help narrow it down so they can test within that pool first and then work it out so if you've got a lot of conversion data already thousands of conversions around account open targeting is likely to work really well for

you with a new ad account not so much also open targeting works best for businesses with really broad appeal so certain products and services just about everyone's interested in right there's like food items that just about everyone eats there's a huge percentage of population are going to be interested in a chocolate bar that sort of thing there are other items that are really Niche specific okay if I'm advertising um you know soccer boots that only work on a certain type of astro turf that's only going to apply to people that partake in that sport a

product like that just advertised to everyone is far less likely to do well because so if you're going to see the ad that's no boring skip on so you don't necessarily want to do that whereas I said if you're advertising a chocolate bar or things that have mass mass broad appeal it's far more likely to work so whenever you're doing open targeting think about I think about that when it comes to local businesses because the audience size is always a lot smaller than it is with national International businesses we are far more likely to use

open targeting just because of the audience size thing so if we advertising somewhere like Cheltenham hundred thousand people we're just going to use open targeted we can't use anything else the population is just not there the audience is too small if we're advertising in the city of London it's got eight nine million people we probably test open targeting but we can also test some other options if we're advertising in a city in one and a half million open targeting is most likely going to be our best performing targeting option maybe there's a couple of really

broad interests that we could get away with so that's just something to think about so when we're testing our different targeting options often one of our ad sets is going to be testing open targeting if we feel the business meets that criteria and that's probably one of the things that you've gotten throughout this video and I encourage you to sort of run with is that we are going to test lots of different targeting options every business is unique it's really important to work out what works best for certain businesses I did a poll recently on

the best friendly cold audiences and it was like 45 open targeting um 25 look-alikes and then the remainder was interested this is the three main categories so you can really see there's like a really big spread there so that's why you need to test for your specific business and why it's so important to work out the various combinations that that work for you so I'd really encourage you to have that mindset going into it not thinking this is the targeting option that works well but thinking okay I've been through this video I now know how

to create and use all these different targeting options let's go ahead and work it out the aside is warm audiences so we covered all the custom orders how to add those in they're nearly always going to produce great results for you much better than the cold audiences and therefore you constantly want to be retargeting them for me that is an absolute no-brainer now if you've made it this far in the the video firstly well done I know that a low percentage less than 10 of people a video this long will actually make at this stage

so well done if you found this video useful you probably have if you've made it this far please go ahead and subscribe if you haven't already that would uh help me out and be much appreciated and if you've made it this far you're obviously really serious about your Facebook and Instagram advertising about getting great results and using it as a thing to push your business forward in which case I'd strongly recommend you check out this video on scaling in it I cover a new Facebook ad scaling technique and given how seriously you've taken this I'm

sure you're gonna be scaling the Facebook ad campaigns up pretty soon they're going to be doing some great results and you want to scale and here this video is going to show you how to do it properly and it's really important you do do it properly so go ahead and check it out and I'll see you there