How to Use Facebook for Targeting

Stop wasting money on Facebook ads that reach the wrong people. Powerful targeting is what separates successful campaigns that deliver a positive return from ones that drain your budget without a single sale. This guide breaks down exactly how to use Facebook's targeting tools - from the foundational options to advanced strategies - so you can connect with the right audience every single time.

Understanding the Three Pillars of Facebook Targeting

Before you even open Facebook Ads Manager, it helps to understand the three main types of audiences you can build. Everything you do with targeting will revolve around one of these pillars.

• Core Audiences: This is targeting based on user-provided data, like age, location, interests, and online behaviors. You're defining your audience from scratch based on their characteristics.
• Custom Audiences: This involves targeting people who have already interacted with your business in some way. Think website visitors, email list subscribers, or people who've engaged with your Instagram profile.
• Lookalike Audiences: This is where Facebook finds new people who are similar to an existing audience you provide, like your best customers. It's a powerful tool for scaling your campaigns and finding new customers.

Let's walk through how to use each one effectively.

Mastering Core Audiences: The Building Blocks of Your Campaigns

Core audiences are your starting point, especially if you’re new to paid ads or don’t have a large existing customer base. This is where you tell Facebook, “Find me people who look like this.” The settings are divided into four main categories.

1. Location Targeting

What it is: Targeting people based on where they live, where they’re currently visiting, or where they’ve recently traveled.

How to use it:

• Local businesses (restaurants, stores, services): Use this to target people living within a specific radius of your storefront, like "10 miles around San Francisco, CA." You can get super specific by dropping a pin directly on your address. You can also exclude locations to avoid uninterested areas.
• E-commerce brands: If you only ship to certain countries or states, you can specifically include those regions and exclude all others. You can also target by larger regions like "Europe" or "North America" if you serve a wide area.

2. Demographic Targeting

What it is: Targeting based on self-reported information like age, gender, education level, job title, relationship status, and life events (like “Recently moved” or “Newlyweds”).

How to use it:

• Example 1: A wedding photographer. Instead of just targeting a wide age range, you could target people with a relationship status of "Engaged." This instantly finds people who are actively in your target market.
• Example 2: A financial advisor for young professionals. You could target based on Job Title ("Software Engineer") and Education Level ("Master's Degree") within a specific age range to reach people building their careers.
• Example 3: A children's toy company. Target "Parents with toddlers (1-2 years)" or "Parents with preschoolers (3-5 years)" to connect directly with moms and dads shopping for their kids.

3. Interest Targeting

What it is: Targeting based on a person’s interests, hobbies, and the Pages they like on Facebook. This is one of the most powerful and creative ways to build an audience.

How to use it:

• Think beyond the obvious. If you sell high-end coffee beans, targeting "Coffee" is too broad. Instead, think about the tools, magazines, or influencers your ideal customer follows. You could target interests like "James Hoffmann," "Chemex," or "Barista Magazine."
• Use Detailed Targeting for suggestions. Type in one broad interest (e.g., “Yoga”) and then click the “Suggestions” button. Facebook will give you related ideas that can help you find more niche options, like "Lululemon," "Yoga journal," or "Hot yoga."

4. Behavior Targeting

What it is: Targeting based on purchase intent, device usage, and other online activities tracked by Facebook’s data partners.

How to use it:

• "Engaged Shoppers": This is a must-use behavior for almost any e-commerce store. It finds people who have clicked the "Shop Now" button in the past week, singling out users who aren't just browsing but actively buying.
• Device Usage: Want to promote a new mobile game? You can target users of specific devices (like "iPhone 14 Pro Max") or people who primarily access Facebook from a mobile device.
• Travel Behaviors: For hotels or travel companies, you can target behaviors like "Frequent international travelers." This goes beyond just an interest in travel and finds people who are actually doing it.

Unlocking Custom Audiences: Reach People Who Already Know You

Custom Audiences are all about reconnecting with a warm audience - people who have shown interest in your brand before. This is where remarketing happens, and it's often where you’ll see the highest return on ad spend. You create these audiences from sources you own.

1. Website Visitors (The Meta Pixel)

What it is: By installing a small piece of code called the Meta Pixel on your website, you can create audiences of people who visited your site. More powerfully, you can create audiences of people who visited specific pages or took specific actions.

How to use it:

• General Remarketing: Target everyone who visited your website in the last 30 days with a friendly ad reminding them about your brand.
• Abandoned Cart Recovery: Create an audience of everyone who triggered the "Add to Cart" event but not the "Purchase" event. You can then show them a specific ad, perhaps with a small discount code that says, "Forgot something?"
• Product-Specific Targeting: If someone viewed your page for "Running Shoes," you can follow up with an ad featuring those exact shoes.

2. Customer List

What it is: You can upload a list of customer data (like email addresses or phone numbers) in a CSV file. Facebook hashes this data and cross-references it with its user base to find matches.

How to use it:

• Re-engage past customers: Upload a list of people who haven't purchased in six months and show them an ad for your newest products.
• Announce special offers: Use your customer list to tell your loyal base about an exclusive V.I.P. sale before anyone else knows.
• Exclude existing customers: This is a big one. You can upload an up-to-date customer list and exclude it from your campaigns that are trying to find new customers. This stops you from wasting money advertising to people who have already bought from you.

3. Facebook or Instagram Engagement

What it is: You can build audiences of people based on how they've interacted with your content directly on the Meta platforms.

How to use it: This is an amazing tactic if you don’t have a lot of website traffic built up yet. You can create audiences of:

• People who have watched a certain percentage of your videos (e.g., Target anyone who watched at least 50% of your product demo video).
• People who have liked, commented on, or saved any of your Instagram posts in the last 90 days.
• People who have sent your business page a direct message.

Scaling Up with Lookalike Audiences

Once you have a high-quality Custom Audience (like a list of your best customers or people who have made a purchase), you can ask Facebook to create a Lookalike Audience. Facebook's algorithm will analyze the traits of your source audience and find millions of new users who share similar characteristics.

How to use it:

• Source Audience Quality is Everything: A Lookalike Audience is only as good as the source you give it. An audience made from your 1,000 best customers with the highest lifetime value is far more powerful than one made from a generic email list.
• Choose Your Audience Size: When you create a Lookalike, you'll choose a percentage from 1% to 10%. A 1% Lookalike includes the people who are most similar to your source audience - this is the smallest, most precise audience. A 10% Lookalike is much broader and gives you more reach, but the users are less similar to your source. It’s usually best to start with 1% and test wider audiences as you scale.

Putting It Together: The Audience Layering Strategy

The real power comes from combining these tools. Don't think of each audience type as separate - think of them as ingredients you can mix and match.

Layering Core Audiences

You can use “Narrow Audience” inside the detailed targeting section to require that people match multiple criteria. Instead of targeting people who are interested in either “Sustainable Fashion” OR are “Engaged Shoppers,” you can layer them.

• Condition 1: Must have an interest in "Sustainable Fashion"
• AND MUST ALSO MATCH:
• Condition 2: Must have a behavior of "Engaged Shoppers"

This creates a much more specific group of people who are not just environmentally conscious, but also actively buy things online. Your audience size will shrink, but its quality will skyrocket.

Building a Smart Sales Funnel

You can map your audience types to a marketing funnel to guide people from awareness to conversion.

• Top of Funnel (Finding new people): Use broad Interest targeting and 1-3% Lookalike Audiences to introduce your brand to cold traffic.
• Middle of Funnel (Warming them up): Use Custom Audiences made from Facebook/Instagram Engagers and generic Website Visitors. These people have shown some interest, so you can share more value, content, or product benefits with them.
• Bottom of Funnel (Closing the deal): Use highly specific Custom Audiences like "Added to Cart in the Last 7 Days" or "Viewed X Product Page." This is where you make a direct ask for the sale, maybe with an offer for free shipping.

Final Thoughts

Successful Facebook targeting isn't about finding a single secret audience, it's about systematically testing and stacking these different methods. Start with what you know about your customer, build your initial audiences, and then use Custom Audiences to remarket and Lookalikes to scale. With a bit of practice, you’ll be able to build highly effective campaigns that connect your brand with the people who need it most.

Once you dial in your targeting and start getting a steady flow of high-quality leads, the next challenge is managing all the new engagement. Responding to comments and DMs across multiple platforms quickly becomes a full-time job. That's actually why we built Postbase with a unified inbox. We let you see and reply to every message from Facebook, Instagram, and more from a single dashboard, so you can build strong customer relationships without drowning in notifications or switching between apps.