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Best way to target on Facebook ads?

Scot

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I'm trying to create an ad group for our upcoming launch and I'm having some issues setting up my target audience. The goal of our initial lead magnets is to target only the professionals, not the general public. I want to do this by targeting people who like certain pages on facebook i.e. tool manufacturers, pages that they frequent, pages for trade shows they visit.

It was my understanding that I could select a page and my ad would target people who have liked that page. However, when I type in the name of several pages that our target professionals frequent, nothing comes up. Is there something I am missing here?

Lets pretend I am targeting mechanics for example. I look at Mechanic Memes on facebook, almost 200,000 followers. If I was targeting mechanics, I'd love to serve ads to those people. When I type Mechanic Memes into advert manager, "No results found".

Any help would be much appreciated.
 
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Mazino

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Not all Facebook pages can be targeted by Ads. No one knows the exact reason Facebook allows you to target certain pages and not others. As far as I know, it's largely controlled by an algorithm that looks at things like page size and engagement, but sometimes it seems completely arbitrary.
 

Scot

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Not all Facebook pages can be targeted by Ads. No one knows the exact reason Facebook allows you to target certain pages and not others. As far as I know, it's largely controlled by an algorithm that looks at things like page size and engagement, but sometimes it seems completely arbitrary.

Well that's extremely frustrating because every fan page I want to target where my professionals hang out can't be targeted.

I really don't want to serve ads to random people.
 

safff

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Well that's extremely frustrating because every fan page I want to target where my professionals hang out can't be targeted.

I really don't want to serve ads to random people.
Unfortunately it forces you to think laterally. If you can't target specific pages, find out trends between where else they hang out, mutual interests etc. I haven't mastered the targetting yet, far from it.. As for why you can't target certain pages, part of me says to stop poaching which would be bad for facebook - the cynic in me says because random clicks has the scope to make them a lot of money...
 
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katana

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When I type Mechanic Memes into advert manager, "No results found".

I came across the same issue and, unfortunately, like @safff has mentioned you'll probably have to find out and target some general trends specific to your demographic. I'd target behavior (do they use smartphones vs desktops, OS, browser, CC spenders), geolocation, net worth. I'm a noob though, would like to hear what the experts have to say about this.
 

Mazino

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Well that's extremely frustrating because every fan page I want to target where my professionals hang out can't be targeted.

I really don't want to serve ads to random people.

If you can't find any pages to target, then start by trying to target your ideal customers in the way @katana mentioned. Then, set up a custom audience that tracks people who visit your landing page. Once that custom audience reaches around 100 people in size, you can then setup a lookalike audience based on your custom audience. That lookalike audience would be better than any page targeting anyway.
 

Scot

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If you can't find any pages to target, then start by trying to target your ideal customers in the way @katana mentioned. Then, set up a custom audience that tracks people who visit your landing page. Once that custom audience reaches around 100 people in size, you can then setup a lookalike audience based on your custom audience. That lookalike audience would be better than any page targeting anyway.

I definitely plan on utilizing look alike audiences and the FB pixel to retarget landing page bounces.

What we are trying to accomplish is a giveaway. We got some top of the line tools our pros use, and are going to do giveaways as lead magnets to build our email list.

Obviously we don't want random people just trying to get free stuff, so I'm trying my hardest to narrow down targeting to the actual pros.

Also, my pros aren't exactly prolific on social media. It's a small profession, where the biggest fan page is ibly 20,000 likes.

Now that I know that only certain pages are "blocked" I went back and did more digging. I have list of about 20 pages, tool brands, events that my pros go to that hopefully advert manager will let me target 50% of. Thanks for the advice guys. Rep+ for everyone
 
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Scot

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What this thread all boils down to is the age old problem we face as entrepreneurs.

I've spent the past 2 months sitting on my hands waiting for our website to be developed. Inthat time I've listened to every podcast, audio book and article about product launch and advertising I can get. I know the theory inside and out.

But the minute I sit down and try to apply it, I am completely lost.

We learn more by doing than studying. I'll own up to that mistake.
 

Scot

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Would it be possible for you to reach out to the owners of those fan pages directly and pay them to advertise your brand/product/giveaway, skipping FB ads completely?

I'll have to check their audience interaction but yeah, that really could work. Thanks for that idea!
 
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CycleGuy

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I came across the same issue and, unfortunately, like @safff has mentioned you'll probably have to find out and target some general trends specific to your demographic. I'd target behavior (do they use smartphones vs desktops, OS, browser, CC spenders), geolocation, net worth. I'm a noob though, would like to hear what the experts have to say about this.


Finding your audience trends is for sure a good way to target.
Instead of hitting mechanic meme page look to target people who like "horsepower TV" or "power block". FB tends to let you target general interests and sometimes popular meme pages are not on the radar of those interests.
Targeting your audience is a trial and error lesson. Lots of different quality creative then boost to different set audiences until you find the right one that delivers.

Also be careful to not target too narrow of an audience. You will throw money away. If you target a broader mechanic themed audience you can get professionals, shade trees, former professionals, aspiring mechanics, etc.
 

Scot

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Finding your audience trends is for sure a good way to target.
Instead of hitting mechanic meme page look to target people who like "horsepower TV" or "power block". FB tends to let you target general interests and sometimes popular meme pages are not on the radar of those interests.
Targeting your audience is a trial and error lesson. Lots of different quality creative then boost to different set audiences until you find the right one that delivers.

Also be careful to not target too narrow of an audience. You will throw money away. If you target a broader mechanic themed audience you can get professionals, shade trees, former professionals, aspiring mechanics, etc.


That's a really good point. I have been digging deeper today. I'm going after a lot of educational mediums too. The vocational programs these guys use for their certificates and licenses too.
 

CycleGuy

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That's a really good point. I have been digging deeper today. I'm going after a lot of educational mediums too. The vocational programs these guys use for their certificates and licenses too.


Good luck man. There is a decent size niche of spenders for sure. I think you're on the right track.
 
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Scot

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Good luck man. There is a decent size niche of spenders for sure. I think you're on the right track.

Thanks! (I'm not in the mechanic niche btw, that was an example). The good thing about my niche is, even though they're notoriously cheap, they want more money. If we can get them to use our product, we both make more money. ROI will be measured by lifetime value, not by purchase.
 

Scot

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Ok I lied. Tried 15 additional pages. None of them registered in the search function. I still hate Facebook advert manager. I guess we'll just have to launch and learn.
 
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@Scot is there any other social media platform that will allow you to target to specific pages/profiles?

I haven't tested the channel, but Reddit comes to mind.
Subreddits can get VERY specific.
But again I haven't used their advertising platform, I am assuming this is the case under ideal conditions...(Anyone with experience want to chime in?)

If you CAN'T target specific subreddits, than just giving value to the community could help - because that's what it is, a community.
It's harder to blast advertising in people's faces there.
...It's for this reason I've found it's a very good source for organic traffic.

On the other hand, if your audience isn't on Reddit, than it's obviously not a good choice.
 
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Scot

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@Scot is there any other social media platform that will allow you to target to specific pages/profiles?

I haven't tested the channel, but Reddit comes to mind.
Subreddits can get VERY specific.
But again I haven't used their advertising platform, I am assuming this is the case under ideal conditions...(Anyone with experience want to chime in?)

If you CAN'T target specific subreddits, than just giving value to the community could help - because that's what it is, a community.
It's harder to blast advertising in people's faces there.
...It's for this reason I've found it's a very good source for organic traffic.

On the other hand, if your audience isn't on Reddit, than it's obviously not a good choice.

To be honest, I've never even used Reddit, so I have no clue. But I'd venture to guess my target audience doesn't use Reddit either. We're playing with targeting right now and going to mess with the wording and copy to qualify our leads.
 
G

GuestUser4aMPs1

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To be honest, I've never even used Reddit, so I have no clue. But I'd venture to guess my target audience doesn't use Reddit either. We're playing with targeting right now and going to mess with the wording and copy to qualify our leads.

Understood. What about Twitter?
Turns out they do targeting to people who follow specific pages.
Will have to test it for effectiveness; but if you wanted to target the pro's, adding a username of a specific trade show for instance may help.

But, again...Need to test it.

(I'm only pestering because we're having the exact same problem. We had to look at our strategy differently and ask "How else can we do this?" lol)
 

Scot

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Thanks for the feedback guys. I haven't gotten a chance to put this into action yet. I'm waiting on our dev to get a useable framework on our site so we can drop our landing pages on it before I can go live with the ad.

I found a couple of hits and interests that I think narrow down my audience well. Obviously, won't find out until I go live and test it.

As for Twitter, we plan on advertising on other social media like Twitter and IG, but for this campaign it makes sense to get it on Facebook. Will let y'all know what the numbers look like.
 
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3things

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Have you tried using the FB audience insight tool? Although again you can't just plug in a specific fb page you don't admin, you can change the demo and interests - then look at the 'page likes' tab for similar categories, pages liked etc with an affinity score [higher affinity the better]. Give it a try anyway, it's a pretty useful tool. Once you've got some sort of usable audience discovered, run some traffic, buy some data and learn. :)

https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights/people

You could also try using the AND targeting operator - so ok, you're not allowed to target specific fans of specific pages [to protect those pages from just having their audience stolen] - but you could use 'must like auto mechanics AND memes' for example.
 

Scot

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Have you tried using the FB audience insight tool? Although again you can't just plug in a specific fb page you don't admin, you can change the demo and interests - then look at the 'page likes' tab for similar categories, pages liked etc with an affinity score [higher affinity the better]. Give it a try anyway, it's a pretty useful tool. Once you've got some sort of usable audience discovered, run some traffic, buy some data and learn. :)

https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights/people

You could also try using the AND targeting operator - so ok, you're not allowed to target specific fans of specific pages [to protect those pages from just having their audience stolen] - but you could use 'must like auto mechanics AND memes' for example.

Definitely been using the "and" to narrow down my audience. I'll check out the insight tool.
 

Scot

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knpbj40wr


So I started running the campaign Friday. Here's the data from Saturday once the ball really got running.

So here's what I did. We had two tools to give away. I made an post, which was a link post of our landing page. I did a post vs an ad so that all of the ad sets would aggregate to one post. I wanted the most shareability.

I then created a campaign for each post. Then I created 3 ad sets for each campaign with a $5 budget. The ad sets looked something like this:

US only, men and women age 21-55, mechanic interest (again, mechanic is an example, I'm not targeting the auto industry) Manual placement, Facebook only.

US only, men only, 21-55, 2 major tool companies, manual placement, FB only.

US only, men and women, 21-55, mechanic as job title, manual ad placement, FB only.

I watched it all Friday, and shut down the ad sets that did the worse. One was $1.12 CPC and another was a $0.70 CPC with a 1.2% conversion rate.

Targeting the profession job title turned out the best, and now I'm down Sub $0.30. I attribute this to a better relevance score. And the amount of shares.


Here's the best part. We have 150 email addresses from our lead magnet! We're running the ad until Monday, so we're expecting to double that. I'll create a custom audience from those email addresses once we create our indiegogo campaign.


What I learned from this experiment is: create 1 campaign and create multiple ad sets with low budgets. Let them run and see which perform the best. You'll be surprised which do. Turn off the under performers and keep going.
 
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Scot

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Im trying to upload the screen shot of the campaign... but it's not showing up. Can y'all see it?
 

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Nam88

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Good Job Scot.
When you have about 300 hundreds on your custom audience ( view page , or view content) go for lookalike audience.

You're doing a very good job for your first time targeting this niche.
 

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Congratulations on all your leads!

I don't mean to intrude your thread, but this question doesn't warrant a thread of it's own in my opinion and is somewhat related. Whenever I try to create ads on Facebook on my computer, the ads manager doesn't load -- yet it works fine on my phone. I've tried clearing my cache and everything. Anyone else have this issue?
 
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Congratulations on all your leads!

I don't mean to intrude your thread, but this question doesn't warrant a thread of it's own in my opinion and is somewhat related. Whenever I try to create ads on Facebook on my computer, the ads manager doesn't load -- yet it works fine on my phone. I've tried clearing my cache and everything. Anyone else have this issue?


Maybe browser? Which browser are you using?
 

Scot

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Good Job Scot.
When you have about 300 hundreds on your custom audience ( view page , or view content) go for lookalike audience.

You're doing a very good job for your first time targeting this niche.

Definitely! The best part is, I've been Facebook stalking most of the people who's signed up and a lot of them are in the professions. Once we finish this ad, I'm definitely going to use this email list to create look alike audiences.

It'll also be great double up to get people to sign up on our indiegogo campaign, since I know the open rates on our emails will be horrible.
 
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Soleo

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And @TheGrind , sorry I use chrome, no problems. Try deleting the cache and see if that helps.
Chrome and Firefox work well. If I remember correctly ads managers required chrome to work properly. I know IE was horrible for me when I started.
 

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