Facebook Audience Targeting - Interest Targeting Facebook Ads

hey it's Andrew here from andrew Hubbard dot CEO and in this video we're talking about Facebook audience targeting and how to choose the right interests for your Facebook ads so one of the biggest mistakes I see with advertisers on Facebook when they're trying to set up their targeting is they pick interests that are way too broad and what ends up happening is because these interests aren't narrow enough because they're not specific enough they end up not getting the results they want with their ads and then they end up giving up and saying well Facebook Ads don't work for me or they end up paying way more than they need to compared to what they would actually be paying if they got their interest targeting right so whether you're brand new to Facebook ads whether you been running them for a while and you want to improve your costs and improve your results this video is for you now before we jump into the content if you enjoy this video please give that like button a click it means a lot to me it really helps this channel a ton and if you want to get notified every time I release a new video with free content on Facebook ads and digital marketing hit the subscribe button and hit that little bell so you get a notification whenever a new video gets published alright so getting straight into the content now let's talk about what makes a good interest and what makes an interest that's not so effective so a good interest is one that is specific and what I mean by specific is it's something that only your target audience would be interested in so think about it like this if I wanted to target entrepreneurs and I was trying to get my ads in front of people who were either entrepreneurs or interested in becoming entrepreneurs then I could target let's say Mark Cuban as an interest that however wouldn't be a great interest to target yes Mark Cuban is really well known he's got a huge following on social media and on Facebook and it would seem to be a good fit the problem with targeting Mark Cuban as an interest if I want to get in front of entrepreneurs is he's also a bit of a mainstream celebrity now he owns the Dallas Mavericks he's on Shark Tank which means that there are hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of people who know of mark who aren't necessarily entrepreneurs my wife nor an entrepreneur but I say do you know who Mark Cuban is and she would go yeah he's the guy off Shark Tank right so that makes it not a great interest target because inside that target audience there are going to be people who are interested in Mark Cuban that don't fit my ideal customer which is an entrepreneur now in contrast to that a better interest target would be somebody like Peter Thiel now if you're watching this and you don't know who Peter Thiel is and you're not an entrepreneur that's a good thing right but Peter Thiel he was one of the cofounders of PayPal he's written a book called zero to one he might have written other books as well but he's really well-known in entrepreneurial communities but he's not so well-known outside of those communities so again if I use my wife as an example if I said to her do you know who Peter Thiel is she would go I've got no idea who you're talking about and that's a good thing she's not an entrepreneur she doesn't fit in that group so you can see between those two examples although on the surface Mark Cuban might seem like a good interest to target if I want to get in front of entrepreneurs when I look at it and say is it really specific or is he more well-known outside of those circles as well or outside of that target audience group then the answer is yes and I'll rule him out and we want to go for that more specific interest so that's the key you want to get in front of really specific interests that only your target audience or your ideal customer would be interested in so if it passes that test it's a good interest to target ideally now people ask me about how big how many people should be in these audiences because when you choose an interest to target on Facebook it gives you an estimated audience size now I like to say you know you want at least a million people but not all interests will have that many a lot of them will be much much smaller and that's okay you don't want to disregard an interest from your targeting because it doesn't have a million people in it we can simply stack multiple relevant interests together in one ad set to get our audience over that million person threshold so you're not going to rule it out but you might have to stack a bunch of interests together in the one ad set to get to that one median people so now let's talk about how to actually research and come up with a great list of interests for you to target step number one brainstorm you will need to go ahead a spreadsheet or grab a pen and paper and create a list with five columns we're going to brainstorm in five different categories first one at the top of the first column I want you to write websites in this column we're going to brainstorm all different websites your ideal customer looks at so which websites are they spending their time on at the top of the second column I want you to write competitors in this column we're going to list all of your biggest competitors then at the top of the third column we're going to write people or influences and in this column we're going to go through and we're going to put all of the influences that your particular audience is following so who are they following on social media who are the big influencers in the space authors as well so if there are really popular books best-selling books in your space that your target audience or your ideal customer are reading what books are they see who the author is and you can either put the title of the book in this column or put the author as part of the brainstorming process in the fourth column at the top I want you to put live events or conferences and in this column I want you to brainstorm all of the different live events and conferences that your ideal customer attends so for me in the digital marketing space you know I'm going to put conferences like social media marketing world like traffic and conversion summit and all those different things but for you it's going to be totally different depending on your ideal customer and the niche you're in but put down all those live events they can be great to target as interests in Facebook now at the top of the fifth column I want you to write tools and in this column we're going to put all the different tools and services that your ideal customer is using for example if I stick with the digital marketing audience I might put tools like active campaign because that's the email provider that a lot of people use and Infusionsoft could be another one so people in online business and online marketing they use these tools but for a lot of different you know other groups let's say local businesses and things they probably have no idea what these tools are the tools are unique to my audience so again in each of these columns I want you to brainstorm the relevant groups and try to think of those things that are unique to your ideal audience okay and list those out and that's this first step just sit there for a little while and go through everything you can think of each of those categories in those five columns and fill that out now this doesn't have to be a complete exhaustive list it's a starting point so do those things that come to the top of mind but don't stress if you only have a few in each column we're going to expand on it there are a few different tools and techniques that we can use to really expand on those and find new interests that you may not have thought of so that moves us on to step two in this process which is expanding on the list and there are a few tools that I'm going to walk you through now and we're going to apply those tools to that brainstorming list that you've come up with and really come up with many many more interests that you can potentially target so the first tool I'm going to share with you is called similarweb so if you go to similar web com you can actually enter a website and that will bring back a list of similar sites so if you have a website that you know lots of your ideal customers visit and spend time on you can pop that in here it's going to give you a list of other websites that you might also be able to use in your interest targeting really really helpful so what I've actually done is created a demo sheet you can see that here with a few different things entered I've got those five columns and I've entered some data in each one so what I'm going to do is grab social media examiner com is the first example put it into similar web and show you what kind of results we see so now we go back over to similar web and I'm just going to put social media examiner comm and hit Search now that's brought me back a lot of information on the site but what I'm most interested in is down here in the competitors section so if I go to competitors I can see sproutsocial.com Jeff Bullas comm ad espresso Neil Patel and a bunch of others so what I can do is grab those and now I should mention that for this example my avatar or my ideal audience are digital entrepreneurs so people who are in the online business space they've got startups or their early stages of online businesses that they're working on they want to learn how to market it and how to grow those businesses so that's the kind of avatar or the audience that I'm using in this example so that's why I've chosen these websites these influencers okay yours is going to look very different obviously but to continue this example I'm gonna go okay sprout social you can click on that check it out make sure that it seems like it is something that your audience would be using and if it matches that criteria that we talked about earlier which is being highly relevant to your audience and not a broad audience then you would add it to the list so I would go yeah definitely sprout social and Jeff Bullas as well I know is one to add so I would just go over to my list and add those two and you can continue doing this for as long as you want you can add in all these different websites continue popping them in to similar web getting more results and it kind of creates a bit of a spiral because you'll find new websites when you do a search and then you can actually enter those websites into similar web again and get a different set of results and keep digging so keep doing that until you've got a fairly comprehensive list you feel like you've exhausted all of the really likely candidates and you can also enter things like if you go back to your spreadsheet you might notice things like these influences have their own websites you could put those into similar web these tools have their own websites you can put those into similar web and you can expand your tools list so if we go Infusionsoft com let's try that and now you can see that gives us other tools like shoutmeloud upwork.com which is a hiring site where people highest remote staff zoom which again this is another great example zoom you might think okay that is something that people use for remote videoconferencing so yeah that would apply to these online business owners however it goes back to that example I used at the start of the video Mark Cuban appeals to a broader audience and not just the entrepreneurial online business type audience zoom now with everything that's going on in the world zoom has now become a tool that's used by a very broad range of people so many people are using zoom now it doesn't just apply to the entrepreneurs that we're going after now so I would actually rule zoom out because it's not specific it's too broad okay so I'd go and add these all to the list based on similar web so that is the first tool that I wanted to share with you so you can go in your similar web to expand on that brainstorming list the next tool I want to show you is one that you're probably familiar with them sure you might have heard of this one it's called amazon.com all right so we're going to go over to amazon.com and what we can do once we're here is it's suggestions engine is really powerful so we want to go to our spreadsheet and let's say we take our influences peter thiel was one that i used at the start of the video so let's grab peter thiel and we're going to search for Peter teal you can see his book comes up but what also comes up are a bunch of other books in the same category so you can see there are bestsellers here B's anomic s-- ok so who's the author of that so Brian domain and we can go and look into all of these different authors and if their influence is in the space that we're looking for so for my target audience if the influencers in that industry I can go and add them to my influencers list so I might scroll through this list and go ok Elon Musk no not specific enough everybody knows Elon Musk whether they're in my audience or not but we might go ok Eric Ries agrees yes he's influencer that only really appeals to my target audience so I would add Eric into the list and the same principle applies here you can continue to enter different search terms into Amazon see what comes up you can dig into different books so if I click 0 to 1 it's going to suggest and here customers who read this book also read and I can go and look at the different authors he researched each one learn a bit more about them and if they fit into my influencers category I can go ahead and add them so another fantastic tool and a really easy way to expand on what we're actually brainstorming so that's tool number 2 now let's look at the third tool this one is probably going to be the most helpful out of all three this one is called Facebook audience insights you can access it from the Facebook ad manager in the menu you can go click up there and they'll be audience insights go to Google Google audience insights it's a free tool that facebook offers all advertisers to let them research their audiences so if you go over to audience insights you'll see a screen like this basically what this allows you to do is enter in any interest and it will give you a bunch of information about that interest so I'm going to go to my sheet and I'm going to grab something like this influencer Mari Smith go back to my audience insights tab and down here in the interests section you can see I just cleared the location and I'm putting Mari Smith in the interest section click on that and now that's going to give me a bunch of information once I'm here I can see age and gender so it shows me interest group sixty-one percent of people are women and 39 percent of people are men compare that to the entire audience on Facebook which are 56% men and 44% women see this interest skews more towards females and we can see relationship sales education level all that stuff that's not what interests us most here we want to click on this page likes tab that's going to show us other pages that people who like Mary Smith also liked so if we look at this top section we can see it's categorized for us so business consultant and suggesting Jon Loomer digital network marketing pro then we've got service here meet Edgar we've got right up problogger so we can go through look at all of these so I would click on each one and I will go in and I'll look at what it is so problogger what is problogger it is it's provided bloggers and pre bloggers with information on profitable blogging since 2004 you can go look at the website and if I think that is a great fit for my target audience then I just add it to my list and I can keep going through audience insights and doing things like that so I can look at things like add espresso and all these different things you can go to here and say page likes so Ryan Deiss Ryan Deiss was actually an influencer that is on my list already but I can go through and just keep searching through these looking at each one getting an understanding of hey is this something that my audience would be interested in and if it is yes I'll add it to my list then I can even dig further as I said before so Amy Porterfield I know Amy Porterfield is somebody that I would want to add to my list but she's not on there so I would add her to my sheet and then I would actually search for Amy Porterfield in audience insights and it's going to give me even more suggestions James Wedmore Jeff Walker Derek Halpern all of these different things software keep clickfunnels mods MailChimp and I can add those to my tools list so you can just keep digging through audience insights until you expand your interest list too you know as big as you really need it and ultimately what we want to do is get to a point where we can go into the ads manager create our ad sets and we just want to add our interests in groups inside each ad set so we've got at least a million people in that audience and the way I like to do it is set up an ad set for each of those five columns that we created in our sheet so I'll have an ad set that targets all of our influences and I'll put all of the influencer interests into there and I'll have another ad set that targets web our websites and I'll put all the interests into that ad set and so I'll have a bunch of ad sets to test and I can test all of those interests in groups like that and then once I get my test results back I can start to split those ad into smaller and smaller groups to really optimize but it's a great way to get started so that's it for this video if you are looking to improve your interest targeting on Facebook's follow those steps and I can tell you it's going to greatly improve the way you do things it's going to improve your results because if you're targeting really broad interests now not getting the results you want following this process is going to allow you to narrow down and get in front of your specific audience while still having a really big audience to target so I'm not telling you to target very tiny audiences but if you follow this process you get specific with your targeting so if you enjoyed this video the only thing I ask is that you click the like button if you want to find out whenever I release new videos on digital marketing and facebook advertising click the subscribe button hit that little bell and you'll get a notification every time as always I really appreciate your time and appreciate you're watching this video and I'll talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Andrew Hubbard

Views: 6,472

Keywords: facebook ads targeting, facebook audience targeting, facebook targeting, Interest Targeting Facebook, interest targeting, interest targeting facebook ads, facebook ads targeting interests, facebook ads targeting audience, facebook ads targeting strategy, interest targeting on facebook, facebook audience insights targeting, facebook targeting tutorial, facebook targeting audience, facebook targeting course, facebook ads interest targeting, how to choose interests for facebook ads

Id: ZGVjlCXTCtQ

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020