In one of my last posts, I spoke about how to get cheap ads on Facebook. Now the premise behind this was narrowing down your target audience so that your Facebook ads were only shown specifically to your target market. For example, if you are in the retail niche selling handbags online then you would narrow down your target audience to females and those that have an interest in handbags. Facebook determines this by looking at whether they have listed this term in their profile such as a person’s activities, education, pages they like or groups that they belong to.
Now today I wanted to go into this in much more detail and how you can really target your Facebook ads. Using this method can also help if you want to know more about your target audience and not just with Facebook. It can also help if you’re an affiliate marketer, have an ecommerce website or you’re running a campaign using pay per click advertising.
So let’s use the handbag niche as our example niche. The first thing to do is to load up the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Then enter your search term. In our case, I will use the term “buy handbags” as this is a buyer keyword as compared to a very generic keyword such as “handbags”. If you’re selling handbags, then you will want to target a buyer keyword as someone searching “handbags” may just want to look at handbags for their design but not buy. In a future post, I’ll talk about keyword research. So as I type that search term, I get the following:
Now hover over next to the keyword and you will see a magnifying class as such. This is Google Insights which will give you even more search data.
Now viewing the Google Insights data we can see worldwide, over the last 12 months, which countries this search term came from the most. As you can see, Australia came out as number one as the country where the most searches for “buy handbags” came from. We can do more data analysis and filter by the last 3 years if we wanted to see the trends of different countries. This information is invaluable because now we can use these countries as the target countries in our Facebook ads.
Next we want to drill down even more into our target market. What we are now going to do is go back into Google and search for our keyword. Searching in Google US for “buy handbags” we get the following results:
We’re going to take the first or second website and grab its URL. In this case, I’ll go for the second result http://www.ebags.com because it looks like more of an authority type ecommerce site since the meta description for the first site is very keyword stuffed. Now head over to a website called Quantcast and type in the URL into the search box. You will now get a huge amount of US demographic data such as gender, age, college gradudate etc. This data is invaluable because we can now narrow down our target audience in our Facebook ads even more. Using our example above, we can clearly see the majority of visitors to the website ebags are female, aged between 25 and 64 and who have finished college or grad school. Perfect! We can now plug this data into our Facebook ad campaign and use CPM (cost per thousand impressions). As the ad will be displayed to a super targetted demographic, the click through rate (CTR) of our ads will be higher and in turn, this will reduce the CPC (cost per click). See my blog post here for more information about this.
Well there you have it. That’s how we can drill down further into our target demographic even more and tailor our Facebook ads to match this data. Also you could use this information if you’re an affiliate marketer or have an ecommerce website.
