Step-by-Step Guide to Targeting Your Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are effective in large part because you can target your ad audience. Unless your prospects live on the moon, you'll find that it is easy to narrow down the number of people seeing your ads to only those most likely to become leads and then commissions.

When you set up a new ad, one of the first steps is to define and target your audience. If you want to know the entire process for creating an ad, please refer to our blog post on How To Set Up Your First Facebook Ad. In this post, I'm going to show you a whole lot of targeting options. Some will apply to your ad depending on your target audience, and many will not. You know your market and your prospects, so it will be no problem for you to choose your targeting options and set limits. Let's get started.

Location

You can enter a city or town, or zip codes. For our example, I've entered Longmont, CO, with a 25 mile radius. You can adjust that for larger areas, but it was enough for this town. You see the radius circle on a map, and on the right you see that we've already narrowed the number of potential people we'll reach to 590,000.

Gender, Age and Language

The next targeting options are age, gender and language. The default low age is 18. You know your market and prospects, so set the age where you want it. I leave gender as All in most cases, and entered English (US) for the language.

Home Ownership

Next, I went to the More Options area and selected home ownership. This is a valuable option for some target audiences. If I want listing leads, I would obviously choose Homeowners. If I wanted buyers, I would make different choices here.

Home Value

If I'm wanting homeowners, I can also decide in what price range for home value. Sometimes this isn't necessary if you're tightly targeting location, but it's a nice option to narrow the focus.

Education

Education isn't usually important in real estate ad targeting, but you do have choices.

Generation

You can see how targeting Baby Boomers could be a good tactic to reach homeowners. For first time buyers, you can move to the younger side.

Work

Where they work could be important, especially if you're targeting an area where the usual buyer or seller is employed by a specific company. You also may want to market a special deal to employees of a company.

Financial

I can use income to reach higher income people. This is one you may want to use if you're targeting buyer prospects. After all, you do the same work for a low priced home as you do for one at the other end of the price window.

Interests

There are a number of categories in the Interests section, and you can go through them to find interests that may apply to your target audience. Another way is to type in a word or words and see if they're already in there, as that means people have entered them.

Under Interests, I started typing in Zillow and it popped up as a choice. Since sellers are checking for sale homes and Zestimates in their area, this could pull some great potential prospects.

Behaviors

There are even more options under Behaviors. You can search through the many choices, some of which have to do with their residence. Notice the "Likely to Move" option. It could be a good one for finding buyers who are renting or homeowners who may be selling.

Connections

If you want to appeal to people who already know you, liked your page, or they are friends of people who have liked your page, this is the way to zero in on them.

Save an Audience

You'll want to save successful audiences so you can work them again.

The point is that you have some amazing control over who is going to see your ads. HAPPY TARGETING!

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.