Affiliate marketers I can not stress enough the stunning statistics of the massive size of Facebook’s 350 million users and 39 BILLION page views a month. That’s more page views then Google gets in a month. As most sophisticated marketers know by now, performance advertising on Facebook is significantly different from search engine marketing. In preformance ads you target people, it’s not just copy and paste from your Google AdWords campaign.

As more advertisers and marketers shift more of their attention and budget to Facebook Ads, Facebook’s performance advertising system, it’s crucial to understand the power of Facebook’s targeting capabilities. Here are details on the 10 ways to target Facebook Ads that every performance marketer should know:
1. Relationship Targeting

Relationship targeting lets advertisers target users based on whether they are single, in a relationship, engaged, or married. This is another stage-of-life targeting feature that is very powerful for marketers. For example, an HDTV retailer may want to target single males in their 20’s in one campaign, but married males in their 30’s in another. Dating companies spend a lot of money targeting single Facebook users, and companies in the wedding industry target engaged users. Advertisers can target ads based on the gender users choose in the “Interested In” field as well.

However, Facebook doesn’t allow advertisers to choose advertising copy that comes across as too negative. For example, ad copy that could be perceived to make users feel bad about being single (or any other relationship status) is likely to be rejected by Facebook’s ad reviews team.

2. Language Targeting

Language targeting is a powerful way for advertisers to reach all users who speak a certain language. This means advertisers wanting to reach all Facebook users who speak Spanish in the United States can now easily do so – an important tool for media companies and agencies working on behalf of language-specific brands.

3. Birthday Targeting

Birthdays are really special days on Facebook – users who have many friends can typically expect to receive dozens of “Happy Birthday” messages on their Wall, as well as a few Facebook virtual gifts. Now, advertisers can make special offers or promotions to Facebook users on their birthdays – with over 250 million active users, there are about 700,000 Facebook users with birthdays each and every day.
4. Location Targeting

Facebook gives advertisers the power to target ads down to the country, state, or city level. This is a powerful way for both national brands and local small businesses to make sure their ads are reaching customers in their target markets. Starting this month, advertisers can now choose multiple countries, states, or cities to target a single campaign against – eliminating the need to have multiple campaigns for multiple geographies. You can target each Facebook Ad to up to 25 countries.

In addition to pure location filters, Facebook also offers Radius Targeting – the ability to target users located within a certain distance from any given city. Radius Targeting makes it easier for local advertisers to reach people living in the greater vicinity of target markets. For example, an advertiser wanting to reach people over 18 in San Francisco could target Facebook users only in San Francisco proper – about 300,000 people. With Radius Targeting, that same advertiser could target people within 10, 25, or 50 miles of San Francisco, expanding the possible reach of the campaign 500% to nearly 1.8 million people.

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Facebook determines users’ locations based on IP address lookups. However, Facebook also says that “if a user has listed a current address on their profile, they may see ads targeted to that location, regardless of where they are currently located.” Ads are not targeted to a user’s geographic networks, which are being deprecated from the site.

5. Keyword Targeting

Keyword targeting is perhaps one of the most powerful ways to reach your target audience on Facebook. Say you wanted to promote a new sci-fi movie on Facebook – you could easily target your ad against all users who had placed “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” as interests in their profile.

Facebook targets keywords based on interests, activities, and favorite books, TV shows, movies, or job titles that users list in their Facebook profiles. Facebook also targets keywords based on the names of Pages users are fans of or Groups users belong to. Facebook also suggests keywords sometimes as well. “Our system looks for the keywords that are most common among the users your targeting already encompasses,” Facebook says.

Thus, keyword targeting offers the best opportunities for competitive advertisers to aggressively bid on users with related or rival interests to their own company or brand.

6. Connection Targeting

Connection targeting is perhaps the most robust of Facebook’s recently released targeting features. With connection targeting, advertisers can now target their ad to only reach users who are:

1. Fans of any of your Pages
2. Users of any of your Applications
3. Members of any of your Groups
4. Attendees of any of your Events

Basically, Facebook wants to make it easy for business and brands to increase engagement with any users they’re connected to on Facebook through Facebook Ads, using it as a paid notification or cross-promotion channel. You can also target users who are connected to one of your Pages/Groups/Apps/Events but not to another in order to do more specific cross-promotions.

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However, currently, advertisers are not able to use the new features to target members of any generic Page, App, Group, or Event. That would be very powerful, but would also encourage targeting behavior that Facebook may not want to enable. Nevertheless, as it currently stands Connection Targeting could be a very powerful tool for marketers and developers to re-engage certain segments of their Page’s fan base or application’s user base.

7. Age Targeting

Facebook gives advertisers the power to reach users within any age range, from 13 to 64. This is an important way for advertisers to make sure they’re reaching their target audience. Although you might think the vast majority of Facebook users are under 25, most are actually over 25 – and the number of older users on Facebook has been growing dramatically this year. This means new opportunities exist for advertisers wanting to reach older users, who on average have larger disposable incomes.

9. Education Targeting

Education targeting offers advertisers the opportunity to reach users based on whether they say they have graduated college, are in college, or are in high school. Obviously, this could be a powerful way to filter users based on stage of life.

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Power tip: Once you choose to target users “In College” or who are “College Grads,” Facebook gives advertisers the option to target by major and graduation year as well. This could be great for career-related services like jobs or moving.

8. Sex Targeting

Facebook has allowed advertisers to target users based on their sex since Facebook Ads launched. Keep in mind that Facebook’s population is about 55% female, and women over 55 are the fastest growing sub-segment of Facebook users.

While sex targeting may seem simple, it’s important to think about how men and women behave differently in social settings when crafting your ad creative!

10. Workplace Targeting

Workplace targeting lets advertisers only show their ads to Facebook users who are members of specific company networks. This is absolutely one of the most powerful ways for B2B marketers to reach their target audience on Facebook. For example, ad agencies may want to target ads at companies in their target verticals, or recruiters may want to target people who work at certain companies. Workplace targeting is fantastic for reaching an industry audience and headhunting.

Conclusion

Facebook Ads offers a powerful array of targeting features, with more still to come – for example, Facebook recently told us that full dayparting would be launching for advertisers in the next few months.

With 250 million active users and growing every day, the Facebook Ads platform is becoming an increasingly important way for performance advertisers to reach their target audience online.