How to target intent on Facebook Ads
Finding customers who are genuinely interested in your product offering can be a relentless task. Facebook users can understandably react badly when met with an unwanted ad. This isn’t only awkward to see, but it’s also probably hiking your overall CPMs and CPCs.
Targeting users with intent will help in solving this issue and it can also unlock many opportunities for both your paid social and organic activity.
Facebook’s smart ad targeting algorithm can help you reach customers who will genuinely benefit from your products whilst also cutting your overall marketing spend by increasing the efficiency of your ads. Meta gives you many ways to garner users interested in our marketing. Here are just a few from Rocketer for you.
- 1. Define/Build Your Target Audience
- 2. Audience Insights
- 3. Remarketing with Custom Audiences
- 4. Value-based Lookalike Audiences
Your aim is to resonate with a few, not moderately resonate with the masses
1. Define / Build Your Target Audience
Whether you’re an up-and-coming brand or a veteran in the field – all companies must ensure they’re on top of who is most interested in their products. Proactively segmenting your audience is great but keeping on top of which demographics or localities show high intent is key.
To maintain your inflow of high-intent users, you must first find them. Broaden your search by creating an upper-funnel campaign using the brand awareness objective on Ads Manager rather than a conversion-orientated campaign. Facebook is a data-driven platform so targeting your users more broadly will allow Facebook to collect more data. The platform will use this data to optimise its selection of users and accurately determine the best people to show your ads to.
Once this data is collected, you can use either Audience Insights or Ads Manager to view your user’s behaviour and create future audiences to target by intent.
Value-based audiences are a really efficient way to target intent!
2. Audience Insights
Some Facebook marketers will often forget the tools that Meta has to offer. Audience Insights collects all the data from your campaigns and cleverly allows you to maximise the potential of your targeting choices. At Rocketer, we use this feature to understand what pages our users are engaging with, who already exists in our custom audiences and all the small details that offer great insights for intent targeting.
The ability to create accurate user profiles is how a business stays above the curve. Search by multiple ‘Categories’ or ‘Page likes’ to unlock the platform’s potential. By clicking ‘Create Ad’ once you’ve refined your selection, Facebook will let you automatically populate your ad sets targeting fields. It’s as simple as that!
Our tip: Want to compete with the market heavyweights? Searching your competitors in the ‘Top Pages’ dropdown could give you insights into their audiences. Try it for yourself.
3. Remarketing with Custom Audiences
With Facebook’s remarketing tools, reconnecting with users who have already shown interest in your brand is easy. Creating custom audiences from this will guarantee users of high intent.
We recommend linking your website pixel to Ads Manager which will track your customer journey from the moment they enter your site. Even a customer who has only viewed your landing page is still a user with intent. Utilising pixel tracking on multiple pages can also show you customers who viewed specific product pages. In custom audiences, select your pixel in ‘Websites’ under the sources dropdown menu.
Our tip: Thirsty for more insights? Connecting your CRM platform will double up your data and help you target intent with more accuracy.
4. Value-based Lookalike Audiences
Custom audiences can become stale or completely dry up without any intervention. Often, activity plummets when we are unable to find like-minded users. Facebook has a solution for this.
Lookalike Audiences allow you to target potential customers that share similarities with your existing audiences. To optimise your targeting, create a ‘Value-based’ lookalike audience by using your existing customer list and attributing your desired characteristic in the value column. This will allow you to choose a lookalike audience based on your most valuable users.
Remarketing is a really simple feature that makes it easy to target users who have already shown an interest in your brand.”