A few simple Facebook Ads targeting customization tips to help reduce the chance of incorrect audience selection by Facebook.
Facebook can make targeting mistakes, such as showing ads to people from Indonesia when you’ve set up targeting for the US only. This can happen because people are sharing and interacting with the ads, resulting in greater reach. As well as there can be errors in Meta.
Targeting tips
Use audience management to add hard boundaries such as age, gender, interests, etc.
Limit targeting
Advantage+ is a set of automated tools that can cover audiences not only under a specified country, age, gender but also extend the reach automatically. Going to the initial settings will help you to limit the audience under specific targeting parameters.
- On Adsets find the Advantage+ audience tab and choose “Switch to original audience options”.
- After that, specify all targeting settings: country, age, gender, interests, language, etc.
Location Settings
Now on Facebook, you can’t set up ads only for people who live/have recently been in a certain place. There were the following options for such targeting, but they were removed:
- People who live/have recently been in the location;
- People who live in this location;
- People who have recently traveled to this location;
- People traveling around this location.
Instead of the “People living in this location” option, when customizing targeting for a specific region, additionally use phrases like “only for residents of …” in the headline to filter out those who don’t live here.
Reach checking
How to check if your ads are being shown to the right people.
At the Adsets or Ads level, you can see a breakdown of the ad data in the “Breakdown” tab to determine: gender, age, country, etc.
For example for age:
This way we can determine what age category the ad belongs to, how many people of a certain age see the ad, etc.
