Intro to Google & Facebook Target Audiences

No matter what platform your business uses for digital advertisement, you can boost your results by adjusting the ad targeting options to target audiences on your Google and Facebook ads.

Google Ads and Facebook Ads can help you find the right target audiences for free. They can help build better brand awareness, increase your sales, and drive more traffic to your brand’s website. Ad targeting gives you the option to carefully select what type of customers will see the ads you create.

Google Ads and Facebook Ads: An Overview

Before we get into ad targeting using two of the world’s largest platforms, you must know that it will grant you access to billions of active internet users worldwide. This exponentially increases your chances of harnessing substantial ROI from your Google and Facebook Ads. if your ads are seen by the right audiences.

Importance of Targeted Audiences

First of all, it’s essential to understand that better ads do not automatically guarantee better conversions. For example, if you own an auto repair shop in a locale and you’re aiming to increase your revenue you can create an ad campaign that costs you 0.1 cent per ad view (this is a made-up value just for explanation). This would mean that you can reach 1000 people for only $10.

Now, would you rather spend $10 to reach 1000 people worldwide who are unlikely to visit your shop or spend the same amount to reach a thousand people within 10 miles who own cars?

Logically, you would rather target locals as potential customers instead of someone in a different city or country. Google and Facebook Ads allow business owners and marketers to limit or customize their ads’ reach. Those car-owning locals are your target audience.

Targeting them helps increase your ROI and conversion rates by displaying your ad only to the people searching for a product or service nearest to them.

Components to Adjust Target Audience

You may be able to adjust your target audiences targeting based on the platform you use to create the ads. Here are the basic variables that you can adjust as per your business needs. You should study your existing customer base to understand who they are. Then you can carefully target potential new customers by defining these variables.

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Life events
• Marital Status
• Education level
• Interests
• Homeownership
• Income
• Profession

You may also have the option to target your ads based on customers’ specific actions. For instance, you can retarget the customers who added a product to their cart while shopping on your website but did not complete the purchase.

Similarly, if you sell wedding dresses, you may want to target women between the ages of 23 and 40 who are engaged and may be interested in receiving wedding-related content.

Did you know, according to a report by eMarketer, Google Ads and Facebook Ads make up the most significant percentage of online ads at 37% and 22%, respectively?

However, to make the most of this incredible outreach by Google and Facebook, you must first learn the right way to find your target audiences. So let us walk you through how to target your audience using Facebook and Google Ads.

Target Audiences Using Facebook Ads

Facebook is the world’s leading social media platform, with approximately 2.5 billion users worldwide. If you wish to reach the most customers, Facebook Ads is hands-down one of your best options.

Creating Hyper-Targeted Facebook Ads

There are four main tools to focus on when targeting your audience via Facebook Ads.

Facebook Audience Insights

If you’re struggling to discover your potential customers’ interests, Facebook Audience Insight is an essential tool to help you figure it out. It can help in decreasing your advertisement cost exponentially.

It allows you to target super-specific audiences. For example, if your business manufactures running shoes, instead of promoting them to the general public who might be interested in running (this number can go in millions in the US). You can use Facebook Audience Insights tool to discover the most passionate runners who are likely to buy your product.

We go into more detail on this feature in our article on Facebook Audience Research. What you should know is that this tool allows you to see details on your audience’s top demos and geos, while also giving you some details on the other pages that your audience likes to visit on Facebook & Instagram.

Facebook Ads Library

The Facebook Ads library is a tool that helps you search for all ads currently active on Facebook. You can use this tool to gain information about trending ads such as ads about political issues, elections, economy, etc.

You can also check inactive ads and learn from their statistics, such as how much audience an ad reached across multiple demographics. Facebook stores all the ads in their Facebook Ads Library for seven years. This is where the Facebook search bar comes in handy for assistance.

How to Use Facebook Search Bar for Ad research:

Here is how you can use the Facebook search bar to find the right ads for your reference.

• Go to the Ad Library
• Always ensure that you have selected the correct country, which you can do from the top right corner on the Ad library page.
• Above the search bar, you can choose the type of ad you are searching for, such as politics, domestic, etc. You can also select click “All Ads” for broader results.
• In the search bar, enter what you want to find.
• A drop-down menu will appear with relevant results to your search. Click on any of the results to view the ads.

You can use the same strategy to search for relevant ads on your brand’s Instagram page.

Facebook Page Insights

Facebook Page Insights is a powerful tool for businesses interested in tracking the Facebook user interaction on their fan page. It helps you track the number of visitors and users on your page. This tool will give you insight into which days are the best to post an ad and what type of content is trending.

It is very easy to access your Facebook Page Insight. You can do so going on your Facebook Fan page and clicking on the icon shaped like a gear wheel. Now select “View Insights,” and you will be able to see the statistics in the form of a graph.

Using all of the above tools can help you analyze the data, get an insight into what types of ads work best, and what is trending so you can create the most relevant content for your ad campaign. All of these things will contribute to finding the right audience on Facebook.

Target Audiences Using Google Ads

According to a report by internet live stats, people perform over 3.5 billion searches on the world’s most popular search engine, Google.

Like Facebook Ads, your business can use Google Ads to target the right audience to promote your products and services. Google Ads allows businesses to create a wide variety of ads, including display ads, search ads, and video ads. Google Ads used to be known as Google Adwords.

Search Ads are the ones that show up as top search results when users search for something. Display ads promote ads by displaying them on various Google partner sites. You often see these ads like banner ads on the sidebars on the website. YouTube ads are the best example of Google Video ads.

How do I Create a Google Ad?

It is a simple, eight-step process.

1. Create a New Campaign

Sign in to Google Ads and select “New Campaign.”

2. Choose your Ad Type

Google offers 8 different types of ads. You may want to run multiple ad types to find out which type of ad is best for your business.

1. Text ads in search results
2. Display ads – Visual ads that contain images
3. Video ads on YouTube
4. Shopping campaigns – Product listings under the Google Shopping tab
5. App campaigns – Promotes your app using information from within your app
6. Local campaigns – Promote your business locally
7. Smart campaigns – Automates the process of creating ads using Google to optimize your ad
8. Performance Max ads – Ads driven by your conversion goals optimized by Google for maximum conversions.

Once you have chosen which type of ads you want to run, then it’s time to find your target audience. Each of the ad types above use the same audience targeting methods shown below.

3. Select your target audience

The first option you will get is to target your audience based on geographical location. You can even exclude a certain type of audience from these ads.

4. Customize Your Target Audiences

As you scroll, you will come across an option for “Audiences.” Here, you can choose detailed targeting for the type of audience you would like to see your Google Ad. You can choose from two options.

The first option is custom Intent that represents customers who are searching for a product or a service. The second option is custom affinity, which represents customers with interests aligned with your brand.

5. Name the Target Audience

You can name your target audience and save it so that you can use the same audience again and again for your future Google Ad campaigns.

6. Add Interests

You must add at least five different but relevant interests that represent your brands.

7. Back to Your Google Ads Manager

Once you have selected the audience and set the interests, scroll down until you see an option for “Demographics.”

8. Demographic Audience Targeting

Here, you can set which target audiences you would like to see your Google Ads. You can base this criterion on gender, age, household income, and parental status.

The next step will be to create your ad, set the budget, and make it go live.

Tools for Google Ads

Four major tools can help you create effective Google ads for your brand’s marketing campaign.

Keyword Planner

The keyword planner for Google Ads allows you to search for phrases and words relevant to brands, products, or services. This tool will help your marketing team find keywords that are most relevant via suggested keywords.

This is a research tool that provides your business an insight into how often a user searches a certain word and how these searches have evolved over time. You can use the keyword planner to narrow down your list of keywords to the really relevant ones.

Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool

This tool by Google Ads allows your business to identify why your ad may not appear in a search result. Ad preview option will also display a preview of a search result page on Google for a specific keyword or phrase.

The diagnostic tool will tell you whether your Google ad will appear in that particular search or not once you enter a keyword along with other criteria such as location and language.

This powerful tool by Google is also responsible for suggesting auto-completion of the search term as you type. Use this tool to check if your Google ad extension is coming up while searching a certain keyword.

Performance Planner

Google Ads performance planner lets you create a plan for an advertising campaign. You can also see how the changes you make will affect the overall performance and key metrics of your marketing campaign in real-time.

This tool allows you to:

• See the forecast for your digital marketing campaign.
• Explore possible outcomes by re-adjusting the Google Ad Settings.
• Understand potential opportunities during seasonal periods.
• Manage your budget across various campaigns.

Reach Planner

Google Ads Reach Planner is a planning tool designed to help you plan reach-based video campaigns accurately across YouTube and various Google video partners’ websites and apps.

It operates on Google’s Unique Reach Methodology with consistent actual reach. It updates itself to use the most up-to-date research data to adapt the outreach strategy automatically.

Final Thoughts on Target Audiences

Creating Google Ads and Facebook Ads using target audiences are probably two of the most effective ways to increase your business’ ROI. However, that’s just the beginning.

Now that you know how to create an ad on two of the world’s leading digital platforms and target the right audience, it is time to create your first ad campaign. You can always get help from expert digital marketing agencies to help you create effective Google and Facebook ads.