One of the best ways to maximize your results on Facebook is to set up and save highly converting Facebook ad targeting audiences. Once you set up your targeting audiences, you can use them for future boosted posts or ad campaigns. This allows you to reach people you know to be more receptive to your ads.
The Three Main Types of Facebook Targeting Audiences
Although there are many options within each type, there are only three main types of Facebook targeting audiences: custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and saved audiences. Here’s what each of those are and how they can help you get better results from your Facebook ads.
Custom Audiences
The first main type of targeting audience is the “custom audience.” A custom audience is an audience you set up based on their interaction with you, such as your patient list, email subscribers, website traffic, or people who watched your videos or engaged with your Facebook page. Essentially, this is an audience Facebook customizes for you.
Lookalike Audiences
The second main type of targeting audience is the “lookalike audience.” Lookalike audiences are audiences Facebook creates to match users to your custom audiences. The people in your lookalike audiences are people Facebook believes share important characteristics with the corresponding custom audience.
Although the people in lookalike audiences won’t be warm leads because they won’t know you already, Facebook thinks they share important-enough characteristics to be more likely to like your page, engage with your posts, and take you up on your offers compared to other users.
Saved Audiences
The third main type of targeting audience is the “saved audience.” Saved audiences are audiences you customize based on a number of factors you can choose. You can combine audiences to form a new saved audience. You can narrow down audiences by location, age, or any number of other factors, and save them as a new audience. Or you can add additional targeting features.
For example, if you wanted to get more page likes, you might create an audience of people who have visited your website and a lookalike audience of web visitors who do not like your Facebook page.
This way, you’re showing your page to an audience of people who will be familiar with your practice and people who Facebook believes are similar to your web visitors in a significant way, but you won’t pay to reach people who already like your page.
To build this audience, you will first need to create a custom audience of web visitors and a lookalike audience to your web visitors.
You would then create a saved audience that includes your custom web visitor audience and your lookalike audience, but exclude people who like your page already by selecting the “connections” option and choosing “exclude people who like your page.”
If you wanted to limit your audience even more, you could do that when you set up your saved audience. For example, if you wanted to promote a special for kids’ cleanings to current patients, email subscribers, and lookalike audiences, you could create a saved audience that combines those lists but limits the list to parents of young kids in the detailed targeting section.
Create Key Targeting Audiences Ahead of Time
By setting up key targeting audiences, you’ll lower your costs and get better results from your boosted posts and ads. Moreover, if you set up audiences you know you will be using ahead of time, you’ll also save time because you will have several groups of warm audiences waiting when you’re looking to boost a post or create an offer.
To start, I suggest setting up custom audiences of patients, email subscribers, and web visitors, plus lookalike audiences of those groups. If you know you’re going to be targeting groups within those, such as parents, you can set up a saved audience, too.
For more help using Facebook ads to grow your practice, sign up for your 14-day trial to Delivering Wow U and check out my Facebook Mastery course or join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group, where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices.