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Understanding Facebook advertising audiences
Understanding Facebook advertising audiences

Target your ads with laser precision to the exact customers you want

Fiona Beckett avatar
Written by Fiona Beckett
Updated over a week ago

You can create three different types of audience within the Facebook Ads manager. Let’s break them down.

Saved

This is basically a ‘cold audience’, one that has perhaps never come across you before. This audience type allows you to add behavioural and interest targeting; gender and demographic information. So if you want to advertise to women between 25-45 in Blackpool who like shoes, you can do that. You can then save these to use again.

Custom

A Custom Audience allows you to take your Facebook page and Instagram page and build an audience based on who and how it's been engaged with over a period of time. You can also upload your customer email addresses here, and display ads to anyone you’ve also got on your email list (as long as the email you have for them is the same they log in to Facebook with). Or you can use data that your Facebook Pixel has collected from your website.

The Facebook Pixel records the behaviour of anyone on your website and reports back to Facebook. And actually it's a clever clogs, because it learns as it goes and communicates that back to Facebook. Facebook begins to use that knowledge to decide who and where to show your ad. Meaning your pixel, once firing, will look for the people most likely to do the thing you want them to. See how to add a Facebook Pixel to your own website.

Lookalike

This is the clever stuff, made easy. So let’s say you have created a custom audience from your email addresses, page engagement or pixel data. A Lookalike is where you take a ‘Custom Audience’ (and you can only do it on custom audiences) and find the top 1% of people in the UK or any place, who match your existing custom audience. Facebook will then find all the people in your Custom Audience, and then look for more people it thinks might be similar based on their Facebook activity.

Want to know more about audiences? Our video tutorial has you covered.

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