The Reason Your Facebook Ads Are Failing, and How to Change It

You may be paying for Facebook ads and feel frustrated that they’re not working. You get a few likes, a few clicks, but no real return on your investment. No new customers.

Today we’re going to talk about how to use Facebook’s new Audience Insights tool to advertise only to your perfect customer.

This tool was rolled out a couple months ago and is great for anyone trying to find new customers, no matter how much experience you have with Facebook marketing. It’s one of the most efficient ways to fill your live events, have people sign up for your newsletter or free offer, get people on a one-on-one call with you, etc.
So how do you target and find your exact customers in order to advertise to them only?

STEP ONE
In the upper left-hand corner of your Facebook profile, click on the Facebook Ads Manager. Then click on “Audience Insights”.

STEP TWO
Choose your starting point. You can select “Everyone” on Facebook, “People Connected” to Your Page, or a custom audience. Depending on your business and your audience, you select which one is the most targeted.

For example, if you have a small following on your Facebook page, you’ll want to select the first choice. This is the least targeted choice. If you have a large, dedicated following, the second choice is going to be better. The third choice is the most targeted, and will allow you to import your own email list.

STEP THREE
When you’re starting with the broadest choice, everyone on Facebook, you can still effectively narrow it down to a very specifically targeted audience. Facebook breaks it down for you based on six different tabs that span across the top.

These are: Demographics, Page Likes, Location, Activity, Household, and Purchase.

Remember, there are 1.3 billion users on Facebook and you don’t want to advertise to all of them. You only want to advertise to people who actually have a need to buy your product.

So, using these different tabs, Facebook helps you to refine your audience. It suggests pages that are among people’s top interests, or “top categories”. It also shows you people’s frequency of use on Facebook and whether they’re more active on a mobile device or computer. It breaks down their household income, whether they own a home or rent a home, etc.

STEP FOUR
When you’re all done setting your custom targeted audience, you click “Save” at the top of the page. This opens a new box where you give this target audience a name, then click “Save” again. From here, you can go to the top right corner and click “Create Ad”, to create an ad for this audience.

Watch the video below to get further details on this process…

Exercise: Create Your Custom Audience

Let’s say you’re a health coach and you’re looking for your customers on Facebook. We’re going to say that you do not have a large number of Facebook followers on your page, or a lot of followers who are relevant. So we’ll start with “Everyone” on FB (Facebook).

Demographics

We begin under the “Demographics” tab. Let’s say you can work virtually, therefore, you can choose people in multiple countries. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll select the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. We’re going to narrow down your audience to women who are over 40, looking to lose some weight and get in shape. We select that age group and gender demographic. This gives us an audience of 50 to 60 million people, which is still way too large.

We go to the “Interests” box on the left-hand side and type in the word “wellness”. Facebook gives us some suggestions. One of them is “Alternative Medicine”, another is “Holistic Health”. Let’s select both of those. This gives us an audience of 700 to 800 thousand people, which is a little bit more manageable.

Page Likes

Here we can see the top categories. “Health and Wellness” is one of them. “Mind Body Green” is another one. Click on the latter to find it’s totally the type of page that your customers would like. We add “Mind Body Green” into the interests section. We do the same thing with the pages “Beyond Diet” and “12 Tomatoes”, which are also top categories.

Location

We can further refine the location, but we’ll skip that for now.

Activity

We’re not terribly worried about the activity because you already know most of your clients use both a mobile device and a computer. So whenever you create a landing page on your website, you always make sure it is mobile device responsive.

Household

You need to advertise to people who have enough disposable income that they’ll hire you. So you need to advertise to people who make at least $75,000 per year.

Purchase

By adding “Vitamins and Supplements” to “purchase behavior”, we get our audience down to only 9 to 10 thousand people. This might cost you as much as a dollar per click, but the person clicking has been laser targeted and is much more likely to become a potential customer.

Watch the video to see the process in action, step by step…