How to Use Facebook Ad Targeting

Facebook's ad targeting gives you the power to find your exact customers among its billions of users, but navigating its options can feel overwhelming. Instead of throwing money at ads and hoping for the best, you can use a structured approach to reach the right people at the right time. This guide breaks down how to use Facebook's three powerful audience types - Core, Custom, and Lookalike - to build effective campaigns from the ground up.

The Three Audience Types You Need to Know

Facebook Ads Manager organizes all targeting possibilities into three main categories. Understanding them is the first step toward building a successful advertising strategy. Think of them as building blocks you can use alone or stack together for more precise campaigns.

• Core Audiences: This is where you target users based on their demographics, location, interests, and behaviors. It's the most common starting point for finding new customers who haven't interacted with your business before.
• Custom Audiences: This powerful feature lets you reconnect with people who already know your brand. You can create audiences from your customer email list, website visitors, or people who engaged with your social media profiles. This is the foundation of retargeting.
• Lookalike Audiences: Once you have a high-quality Custom Audience (like your best customers), you can ask Facebook to find new people who are similar to them. This is a brilliant way to scale your campaigns and find new customers who are highly likely to be interested in what you offer.

Part 1: Mastering Core Audiences - Building from Scratch

When you're trying to reach a completely new audience, Core Audiences are your go-to tool. Found in the "Ad Set" level of your campaign setup under the "Audience" section, this is where you define your ideal customer profile using Facebook's massive dataset.

Location Targeting: Who, Where, and When

This is your first targeting filter. You can get as broad or as specific as you need. Ask yourself: where do my customers live or currently exist?

• Target by Country, State, or City: This is perfect for e-commerce brands with specific shipping regions or national service businesses.
• Target by ZIP Code or Designated Market Area (DMA): If you’re a local business like a restaurant or a retail store, targeting specific postal codes or broadcast market areas helps focus your budget on people who can actually visit you.
• Radius Targeting (Dropping a Pin): You can drop a pin on a map and target a radius around that point, from 1 to 50 miles. This is incredibly useful for brick-and-mortar stores promoting a local event or sale.

You also have four location options to refine your selection:

1. People living in or recently in this location: The default setting, it includes residents and recent visitors.
2. People living in this location: Only targets an area based on their profile information and IP address data. Best for businesses where knowing someone’s permanent residence is important.
3. People recently in this location: Targets people whose most recent location is within the selected area, great for targeting tourists or travelers.
4. People traveling in this location: Targets people who are more than 125 miles from their home location, ideal for travel, hospitality, or local attractions.

Demographic Targeting: Age, Gender, Language, and Life Events

Demographics let you narrow your audience based on concrete, identifiable traits.

• Age &, Gender: This is straightforward but important. If you sell skateboards, you probably won't target 65+ year-old women. If you're running a spa specializing in manicures, you might primarily target women. Start broad if you're unsure, and let the ad data tell you which groups perform best.
• Language: If your ads and website are only in English, specify "English" here to avoid showing your ads to people who won't be able to understand your offer.
• Detailed Targeting - Demographics: This is where it gets really interesting. You can target people based on:
  • Education: Level, field of study, schools.
  • Financial: Household income (only in some regions).
  • Life Events: "Newly engaged," "Recently moved," "Anniversary within 30 days." A jewelry store could target people with an upcoming anniversary, or a furniture store could target recent movers.
  • Work: Employers, industries, job titles. This is excellent for B2B marketers who want to reach decision-makers in a specific industry.

Interest Targeting: Reaching People Based on Their Passions

Facebook identifies interests based on the pages people like, the content they interact with, and related topics. Being specific here is the difference between a good campaign and a great one.

Instead of using a broad interest like "Fitness," think about more granular identifiers:

• Companies and brands in your niche (e.g., Lululemon, Peloton, Gymshark).
• Influencers or thought leaders in your industry (e.g., people who like pages run by Ben Francis or Kayla Itsines).
• Magazines or blogs they read (e.g., Men's Health, Shape Magazine).
• Specific activities or products they are interested in (e.g., "CrossFit," "yoga pants," "protein supplements").

Behavior Targeting: Understanding User Actions

Behaviors are sourced from on-platform activity and offline data partners. This allows you to target users based on their purchasing habits, device usage, and travel patterns.

Some powerful examples include:

• Purchase Behavior: Facebook's "Engaged Shoppers" behavior identifies people who have clicked the "Shop Now" call-to-action button in the past week. This is an incredible audience for any e-commerce brand.
• Digital Activities: Target people based on their device usage (e.g., "Facebook access: iPhone 14 users") if you're selling a premium mobile accessory.
• Travel: Create an audience of "Frequent Travelers" or "Commuters" - ideal for everything from travel gear to coffee subscriptions.

Pro Tip: Narrow Your Audience with "AND" Logic

By default, when you add multiple interests to your targeting, Facebook treats it as an "OR" condition. For example, if you target "Yoga" and "Lululemon," you'll reach people who like yoga OR Lululemon.

To be more precise, use the "Narrow Audience" button. This creates an "AND" condition. So, you could target people who are interested in Yoga AND are also Engaged Shoppers. This significantly refines your audience to people who not only have the interest but also demonstrate purchase intent.

Part 2: Custom Audiences - Retargeting Your Warm Leads

Advertising to people who already know you is far more effective (and cheaper) than constantly reaching out to cold audiences. Custom Audiences are your primary tool for retargeting, allowing you to re-engage with users who have shown interest in your brand.

Website Custom Audiences

Powered by the Meta Pixel (a small piece of code on your website), this is the most common form of retargeting. You can create audiences based on who did what on your site.

• All Website Visitors: Anyone who has visited your website in the last X days (up to 180). Perfect for general brand awareness retargeting.
• Visitors to Specific Pages: You can target people who viewed your pricing page but didn't sign up, or those who read specific blog posts.
• Time Spent on Website: Target your most engaged visitor - for example, the top 25% of users by time spent.
• Key Actions (Events): This is the most powerful option. You can set up events to track specific actions and create audiences around them, such as:
  • ViewContent: People who viewed a specific product page.
  • AddToCart: The classic - people who added a product to their cart but didn't complete the purchase. Create a dedicated "abandoned cart" ad campaign for this audience.
  • Purchase: Your customer list! You can use this to exclude current customers from acquisition campaigns or to upsell them on new products.

Customer List Custom Audience

If you have a list of customer details (like email addresses or phone numbers), you can upload it directly to Facebook. The platform confidentially hashes the data and matches it with user profiles. This lets you run ads directly to your existing customers, which is perfect for new product announcements, special offers, or reactivation campaigns.

Engagement Custom Audiences

This is an incredibly versatile way to build warm audiences for retargeting, even without website traffic. You can create an audience of people who've interacted with your brand on Facebook or Instagram.

• Video Views: Create audiences of people who watched a certain percentage of your videos (e.g., 50%, 75%, 95%). Someone who watched nearly all of your 2-minute product demo is a highly qualified prospect.
• Facebook Page or Instagram Account Engagement: This includes anyone who has visited your profile, liked a post, commented, shared, sent a message, or saved a post.
• Lead Form: If you're running Lead Gen ads, you can retarget people who opened your form but didn't submit it.

Part 3: Lookalike Audiences - Scaling Your Success

Once you’ve identified who your best customers are through a strong source audience (like a purchase Custom Audience or an email list), you can use Lookalike Audiences to find millions of new people with similar characteristics.

How it Works

You provide Facebook with a 'source' audience of at least 100 people from a single country. The algorithm analyzes the common traits of people in that source (demographics, interests, behaviors) and then finds other users on the platform who match that profile.

Choosing a Great Source Audience

The quality of your Lookalike Audience is directly tied to the quality of your source audience. Junk in, junk out. The best sources are based on high-intent actions:

• A Custom Audience from your customer list (especially a list of your highest lifetime value customers) is the gold standard.
• A website Custom Audience of people who have completed a purchase.
• An engagement Custom Audience of people who have watched 95% of your key video ads.

Avoid using low-intent sources like "All Website Visitors" or general "Page Likes," as these audiences are too broad and contain a mix of qualified and unqualified leads.

Setting Your Audience Size

When you create a Lookalike, you'll choose a percentage from 1% to 10%. This represents a percentage of the total user population in your target country.

• 1%: This creates the smallest, most precisely matched audience. It contains the people who most closely resemble your source audience. Always start here.
• 2-5%: A good mid-range option that balances reach and similarity. You can test a 1-2% Lookalike against a 3-5% Lookalike to see which converts better.
• 6-10%: These are the broadest audiences, offering maximum reach but the least resemblance to your source. They are best for top-of-funnel brand awareness campaigns.

You can create multiple distinct audiences (e.g., 0-1%, 1-2%, 2-3%) to test different levels of similarity.

Final Thoughts

Effective Facebook Ad targeting is a system, not a single setting. By thoughtfully combining Core, Custom, and Lookalike audiences - and testing what works with your customers - you can move from speculative spending to a predictable system for finding and converting your ideal customers.

Executing a stellar targeting strategy also requires a pipeline of compelling content ready to go for each stage of the funnel. After putting in all the work to define your audiences, the last thing you want is to scramble for creative. With Postbase, we make the creative management part effortless. Our visual calendar helps you plan content weeks in advance, and scheduling your video ads and organic posts across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok from one place frees up time to focus on refining your audiences and analyzing results.