How to Target Facebook Ads

Targeting your Facebook Ads correctly is the single most important factor in determining whether you find your next customer or just waste your budget. It's the difference between precision and praying. This guide will walk you through exactly how to master Facebook's powerful targeting tools, from finding brand new audiences to re-engaging your warmest leads.

The Three Pillars of Facebook Ad Targeting

Facebook's ad targeting options can feel overwhelming, but they all fall into three simple categories. Understanding this framework is the first step to building effective campaigns. Think of it as a funnel: you start broad to find new people and get more specific as you retarget those who show interest.

• Core Audiences: This is where you find new people based on their location, demographics, interests, and behaviors. It’s your go-to for reaching new potential customers who have never heard of you.
• Custom Audiences: This is where you connect with people who already have a relationship with your business. You can retarget website visitors, people who have engaged with your social media, or even upload a list of your existing customers.
• Lookalike Audiences: This is how you scale. Facebook takes one of your Custom Audiences (like your best customers) and finds millions of new people who share similar characteristics.

You'll likely use a combination of all three in your marketing strategy. Let’s break down how to use each one effectively.

Mastering Core Audiences: How to Find New Customers

Core Audiences are your primary tool for prospecting and bringing new people into your brand's orbit. This is where you define your ideal customer profile from scratch using Facebook’s massive dataset. You'll find these settings under the "Audience" section of your ad set creation process.

Location Targeting

This is more than just selecting a country. You can get incredibly specific with who sees your ads geographically.

• Broad Targeting (Countries/States): Perfect for e-commerce brands that ship nationwide or globally.
• Specific Targeting (Cities/ZIP Codes): Essential for local businesses like restaurants, retail stores, or service providers. You can target your city and the surrounding suburbs.
• Radius Targeting: Don't want to target a whole city? Drop a pin on your business address and target everyone within a 1- to 50-mile radius. This is a game-changer for businesses that rely on foot traffic.
• Inclusions and Exclusions: You can also combine these. For example, a real estate agent could target the entire state of California but exclude Los Angeles county.

Pro Tip: Pay attention to the "People living in or recently in this location" setting. If you're a local business, you will want to change this to "People living in this location" to avoid showing ads to tourists who have already left town.

Demographics Targeting

This setting helps you reach people based on who they are. While some basics like age and gender are obvious, the detailed demographics are where you can find your perfect customer.

• Age & Gender: Start with what you know about your customer. If you're not sure, it's better to go broad and let the data tell you which age and gender groups respond best.
• Language: If you serve multilingual communities, this is a must-use feature.
• Detailed Demographics: This is where it gets powerful. You can target based on:
  • Education: By education level or specific college they attended.
  • Financial: In the US, you can target based on income brackets.
  • Life Events: Target people who are newly engaged, new parents, just moved, or have an upcoming anniversary. A jewelry brand targeting "Newly engaged" or a moving company targeting "Recently moved" are perfect examples.
  • Work: You can target by industry, specific employers, or even job titles. A company selling sales software could target people with "Sales Manager" as their job title.

Interest Targeting

Interest targeting is based on what people have expressed an interest in on the platform. This includes pages they've liked, ads they have clicked on, and topics they engage with. This is your best tool for getting in front of people based on their hobbies and passions.

Think about what your ideal customer cares about. What brands do they love? What public figures do they follow? What magazines or blogs do they read?

Example: Let's say you sell eco-friendly yoga mats.

• Broad Interests: You'd start with obvious interests like "Yoga," "Meditation," and "Sustainability."
• Brand Interests: Then, you could add brands they might like, such as "Lululemon," "Athleta," or "Yoga Journal."
• Related Interests: What else might they care about? Maybe things like "Whole Foods Market," "Organic food," or "Patagonia."

Clicking the "Suggestions" button after you've entered a few interests will often reveal great new ideas you hadn't thought of.

Behavior Targeting

While interest targeting is about what people like, behavior targeting focuses on what people do. This includes their purchase history, device usage, and other tracked activities.

• Purchase Behavior: The most valuable behavior is "Engaged Shoppers." This targets people who have clicked the "Shop Now" button on Facebook or Instagram ads in the past week. It’s an audience of people who are predisposed to buy things from ads.
• Device Usage: You can target people based on the type of phone they use (e.g., iPhone users) or their network connection (e.g., 4G or Wi-Fi).
• Travel: Target frequent travelers, people currently traveling, or people who recently returned from a trip. Perfect for travel-related products and services.

Layering and Exclusions to Refine Your Audience

The real secret to powerful core audience targeting is using layering and exclusions. By default, when you add multiple interests, Facebook targets people who like Interest A OR Interest B. This can quickly create a very broad and ineffective audience.

Instead, use the "Narrow Audience" option. This changes the logic to Interest A AND Interest B. For our yoga mat example, you could say a user must be interested in "Yoga" AND interested in "Sustainability." Suddenly, you’re not just targeting people who enjoy a casual yoga class, you’re targeting the highly specific subgroup that aligns perfectly with your brand's ethos.

Exclusions are just as important. If you're running a campaign to find new customers, you should always exclude your existing Custom Audiences (like past purchasers or website visitors) to avoid paying to reach people who already know you.

Using Custom Audiences: Retargeting Your Warmest Leads

It often takes multiple touchpoints before a customer decides to buy. Custom Audiences allow you to re-engage with people who have already shown interest in your business. These are often your highest-performing audiences because you're not advertising to cold traffic.

Website Visitors (via the Meta Pixel)

If you have the Meta Pixel installed on your website, you can create audiences of people who have performed specific actions. This is the cornerstone of retargeting.

• All Website Visitors: A great general audience to stay top-of-mind.
• Visitors of Specific Pages: Target people who viewed your pricing page or a specific product category.
• "Add to Cart" but Not Purchased: One of the most profitable retargeting audiences you can build. Remind them what they left behind!

You can set the duration for how long people stay in this audience, typically from 30 to 180 days.

Customer List Upload

If you have a customer email list or phone list, you can securely upload it to Facebook. Facebook will hash the data and match it to users on its platform. This is a fantastic way to:

• Advertise special offers to your existing customers.
• Re-engage dormant customers who haven't purchased in a while.
• Create Lookalike Audiences based on your highest-value buyers (more on that next).

On-Platform Engagement

Even if you don't have a website or an email list, you can still create powerful retargeting audiences based on how people have interacted with your content directly on Facebook and Instagram.

• Video Viewers: Create an audience of people who watched a certain percentage of your video ads (e.g., 50% or 95%). This is an incredibly engaged group of people.
• Instagram Engagement: Target anyone who has liked, commented on, saved, or shared your Instagram posts, visited your profile, or sent you a DM.
• Facebook Page Engagement: Similar to Instagram, target users who have engaged with your page or posts.

Scaling with Lookalike Audiences: Finding More People Like Your Best Customers

Once you've found an audience that converts well - like your purchasers list or people who have completed a conversion event on your website - you can use Lookalike Audiences to supercharge your growth.

A Lookalike Audience tells Facebook's algorithm, "Here is a list of my best customers. Go find me more people just like them."

How to Create a Lookalike Audience

1. Choose Your Source Audience: This must be a Custom Audience you've already created. The higher quality the source, the better the Lookalike. A list of repeat purchasers is far better than a list of all your website visitors.
2. Select the Location: Choose the country or region where you want to find people.
3. Pick Your Audience Size: This is scaled from 1% to 10% of the population in your chosen location. A 1% audience is the smallest and most similar to your source audience - this is where you should always start for the best performance. As you expand to 2-5%, your audience gets larger but less precise.

Lookalikes are the key to scaling your ad spend efficiently. By letting Facebook's powerful algorithm do the work, you can find new, highly qualified customers at scale without constant guesswork.

Final Thoughts

Effective Facebook ad targeting isn't about using one secret setting, it's about strategically combining Core, Custom, and Lookalike audiences to guide potential customers on their journey with your brand. By starting with broad prospecting and then narrowing your focus with retargeting, you can build a reliable system for growth and stop wasting money on ads that miss the mark.

Of course, a perfectly targeted ad is just the beginning. When those new, highly-qualified people click through to your social profiles, they need to see consistent, high-quality content that reinforces why they should stick around. We built Postbase because we knew that managing that organic content calendar can be chaotic. By planning and scheduling all our social content across every platform from a single visual calendar, our team was able to spend less time juggling tabs and more time creating the content our newly acquired audience actually wanted to see.