Facebook Advertising: Targeting Options
Google is so popular and dominates is because when you search you get what you want. It’s not perfect but most of the time the organic search results and the paid search results are relevant to my search and I find what I’m looking for.
Advertisers are also able to take advantage of Google’s ability to serve results matching user search enquiries. If you run an Italian restaurant in San Fransisco, you can select the appropriate search terms to make sure that your ad only appears for people searching on the terms you nominate. This ability to bid on terms matching the user search provides an enormously effective targeted advertising solution for businesses and has resulted in the phenomenal growth of Google over the past 10 years.
On this theme of targeted advertising small business tools, Facebook have been working on similar principles of giving advertisers the ability to target potential customers and this week they added three new factors to assist advertisers with targeted promotions:
- Location – Advertisers can target ads by location with filters for country, state/provice, city, and even metropolitan areas.
- Age – For advertisers with age defined target markets this is ideal in narrowing your advertising reach.
- Birthday – Target people on their birthday.
- Sex – By filtering for male, female or both.
- Keywords – Marketers who understand their customers can enter in relevant keywords. Keywords are based on interests, activities, and favorite books, TV shows, movies, or job titles that users list in their Facebook profiles.
- Education – Promotions targeting school or college.
- Workplaces – Great for business-to-business promotion if you are targeting individuals at specific target-market companies.
- Relationship – You can target singles or perhaps people who are about to get married.
- Relationship Interests - This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences.
- Languages – If your ad is in English you can specify that the ad should only appear to English speakers.
- Connections – Connections targeting enables you as an admin of a Facebook Group to target your ads to users who have become a fan of your page, a member of your Group, RSVP’d to your Event or authorized your Application.
I found this YouTube post that gives a great example for putting the Facebook targeting options to use.
If you haven’t already used Facebook Ads I highly recommend you do. I also welcome any feedback from those advertisers using Facebook.
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Hey Slade, I checked this out and it is has the potential to be very powerful. At this stage Facebook is not able to provide targeted marketing to local suburbs within Australia, but according to an email I received from them they are working on it.
Thanks for the post – always interesting
Cheers
Gazza