How to Use Facebook Ad Targeting

Your Facebook ad creative can be perfect, but if you're showing it to the wrong people, you're just wasting money. Mastering Facebook Ad targeting is the single most important skill for turning clicks into customers and getting a real return on your ad spend. This guide will walk you through the different targeting options, from simple demographics to powerful custom audiences, and show you how to use them effectively.

Why Is Facebook Ad Targeting So Important?

Gone are the days of cheap clicks and easy reach on Facebook. With rising ad costs and more competition for attention than ever before, slapping a budget on an ad and hoping for the best is a recipe for failure. Effective targeting is your advantage. It ensures your message lands in front of the people most likely to be interested in your product or service.

Think about it:

• A local coffee shop shouldn't be showing ads to people three states away.
• A company selling high-end retirement planning services shouldn't be targeting 19-year-olds.
• An e-commerce store with a big sale shouldn't forget to remind people who previously abandoned their shopping cart.

Good targeting solves these problems. It's the difference between shouting into a void and having a quiet, productive conversation with a potential customer.

The Three Pillars of Facebook Ads Targeting

Facebook’s targeting engine is incredibly powerful and can be broken down into three main categories: Core Audiences, Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences. Understanding how each of these works is foundational to building successful campaigns.

1. Core Audiences (or Saved Audiences)

This is where most advertisers start. Core Audiences let you define a new audience from scratch based on a wide range of criteria. It’s perfect for reaching new people who haven't heard of your business before.

Location Targeting

This is the most basic level of targeting. You can target people based on their physical location, but with a lot of flexibility:

• Countries, regions, or states: Useful for national e-commerce or brand awareness.
• Cities: Great for businesses serving a specific metropolitan area.
• ZIP codes or postal codes: Allows for hyper-local targeting down to the neighborhood level.
• Radius around a specific address: Perfect for brick-and-mortar stores trying to attract foot traffic from the surrounding area.

You can also choose to target people living in a location, recently in a location, or traveling to a location. The "living in" option is usually the safest bet to avoid showing ads to temporary visitors.

Demographic Targeting

This includes standard demographic information you might expect, plus some surprisingly specific details from user profiles:

• Age & Gender: The obvious starting point for many products.
• Language: Important for reaching specific linguistic communities.
• Education: Target by level of education, field of study, or even specific schools attended.
• Financial: In some regions (like the US), you can target based on household income brackets.
• Life Events: Target people who are recently engaged, just got married, celebrating an anniversary, or moved to a new city. This is gold for event planners, mortgage brokers, and furniture stores.
• Work: You can target by employer, industry, or job title.

Interest Targeting

This is where you target people based on what they're explicitly interested in, as indicated by the pages they've liked, groups they're in, and content they engage with. If someone likes the official pages for Nike, Adidas, and Runner's World, it's a safe bet they are interested in running.

For example, a business selling eco-friendly yoga mats could target interests like:

• Brands: Lululemon Athletica, Manduka, Athleta
• Magazines/Personalities: Yoga Journal, Adriene Mishler
• Broader Concepts: Yoga, Meditation, Mindfulness, Sustainability

Behavior Targeting

This targets users based on their on-platform and off-platform activities. Meta gathers this data from a variety of sources to understand user behavior patterns.

• Purchase Behavior: The most valuable option here is targeting "Engaged Shoppers," which is a group of people who have clicked the "Shop Now" call-to-action button in the past week.
• Device Usage: Target users by the type of mobile device they use, their operating system, or even if they're connected via cellular or Wi-Fi.
• Travel: Target people who are frequent travelers, business travelers, or have recently returned from a trip.

2. Custom Audiences

If Core Audiences are about finding new people, Custom Audiences are all about reconnecting with people who already know you. This is where remarketing happens, and it's typically where you'll see the highest return on investment (ROI). These are your "warmest" audiences.

• Website Visitors: Using the Meta Pixel (a snippet of code you place on your website), you can create audiences of people who have visited your site. You can get very specific, like targeting anyone who visited your pricing page in the last 30 days or anyone who viewed a product a week ago but didn't buy.
• Customer List: You can upload a list of customer data (like email addresses or phone numbers). Meta matches this information to user profiles in a secure, privacy-safe way so you can target your existing customer or lead database. This is great for promoting new products to loyal customers or re-engaging old leads.
• App Activity: If you have a mobile app, you can create audiences of people who took specific actions, like opening the app, reaching a certain level in a game, or adding an item to their cart.
• Engagement on Facebook/Instagram: This is a powerful and easy way to remarket. You can create audiences of people who have interacted with your profiles in various ways, such as watching one of your videos, liking a post, sending you a message, or visiting your Instagram profile.

3. Lookalike Audiences

This feature bridges the gap between Core and Custom Audiences. A Lookalike Audience lets you find new people who are statistically similar to an existing Custom Audience. Essentially, you give Facebook a "source audience," and its algorithm goes out and finds other users who share similar characteristics.

You can create a Lookalike from sources like:

• Your best customers (from a customer list).
• People who made purchases on your website (from your Pixel data).
• People who engaged heavily with your Instagram page.

When you create a Lookalike, you select a size, ranging from 1% to 10% of the population of your target country. A 1% Lookalike will be a smaller, more concentrated audience that is most similar to your source. A 10% Lookalike will give you broader reach but will be less precise. Starting with a 1% Lookalike is a proven strategy.

Putting It All Together: Practical Targeting Strategies

Understanding the types of audiences is just the first step. Here’s how to strategically combine them for better results.

Start with Layering to Narrow Your Focus

Within a single ad set, you can combine different targeting criteria to home in on your ideal customer. For instance, instead of just targeting an interest in "Real Estate," you can layer it:

• Interest: Real estate investing AND
• Behavior: Likely to move

This "AND" logic makes your audience more specific and relevant. You're no longer just targeting people who casually like real estate shows, you're targeting people interested in investing who are also showing signals that they may be moving soon.

Always Use Exclusions

Exclusions are just as important as inclusions. They stop you from wasting money and annoying your audience. For example:

• If you're running a campaign to attract new customers, exclude your existing customer list. There's no point in paying to show them an introductory offer they can't use.
• If you're running a remarketing campaign for abandoned carts, exclude people who completed a purchase in the last 7 days. There’s nothing more annoying than seeing ads for a product you just bought.

Don't Overlook Engagement Audiences

Your Facebook and Instagram engagagers are a gold mine. These people have raised their hands and shown interest in your content. Create a Custom Audience of everyone who has engaged with your profiles in the last 90 days. It's a fantastic warm audience for promoting offers, new blog posts, or new products.

Test What Works for You

There is no "one weird trick" for Facebook targeting. What works for a local bakery will be totally different from what works for a national SaaS company. The key is to test.

• Set up separate ad sets to test different audiences against each other.
• Test a broad interest audience against a 1% Lookalike audience from your customers.
• Test a website visitor remarketing audience against an Instagram engager audience.

Let the data tell you which audiences are driving the lowest cost-per-result. Double down on what's working and turn off what isn't.

Final Thoughts

Mastering Facebook ad targeting transforms your campaigns from a guessing game into a predictable system for growth. By moving beyond simple interests and leveraging the power of Custom and Lookalike audiences, you can put your message in front of the exact people who need to see it, dramatically improving your results and efficiency.

Of course, effective targeting creates mountains of performance data. It can be a real headache jumping between Ads Manager and your sales platform like Shopify or Salesforce just to figure out which audiences are actually profitable. We designed Graphed to solve exactly that. You can connect all your marketing and sales sources in seconds and ask simple, plain-English questions like, "Which Facebook ad campaign drove the most Shopify revenue last month?" to see real performance and get insights that help you make smarter decisions, faster.