When you’re running ads on Facebook one of the most important things is targeting. As you probably already know there are many ways you can target on Facebook. In other words, one of the most and well-known ways of targeting Facebook is what’s called Facebook interest-based targeting. So this is the type of targeting where you go into your Facebook Ads account. And target Facebook ads to people who are interested in this subject. Unfortunately, everyone is making five major critical mistakes and this blog will discuss the same.
1.Misunderstanding who is inside an Interest
Facebook advertisers don’t fully understand how to phase with besides who is inside of an interest. So if you are targeting that interest then a lot of people will see the ad they think that if someone has liked a Facebook page. Then that is wider in that interest and that is part of it. However, if you compare any kind of interest with how many likes a sort of Facebook page has with the same name. You’ll notice that the interest is always bigger because Facebook uses a lot of different data to decide who is inside of a certain interest. So even if they’ve never liked that Facebook page before then chances are they may still be in that interest. As interest in Facebook ads and a Facebook page, they’re not the same thing.
A lot of advertisers are making mistakes as well because they think that they want to reach the fans of this particular Facebook page. But that’s not possible anymore it used to be possible in back in the day. But right now Facebook makes the interest way bigger than that even to people who’ve never liked a certain Facebook page.
2. Not All Interest is created Equally
In particular mistake number two is that a lot of advertisers sort of thing that every interest is equal. At least it seems that way well, in fact, there’s a big difference between them. For example, you were gonna target both the interested golf because you’re selling something golf-related. Now, who do you think is gonna see that are people gonna see who is just casually going on a Sunday, who watch it on TV or maybe the pros. No way how you can be certain so you’ll have to dial a bit deeper.
But even when you do that let’s say you’re gonna target Tiger Woods right. Now, do you think that everyone who’s into Tiger Woods is playing golf? I mean he’s so famous he’s even famous outside of golf. Even though he’s like probably the number one golfer around it’s not like it doesn’t mean it his audience. Facebook thinks that they’re following him they’re not necessarily into golf. Go a level deeper and you would target Bubba Watson. Then all of a sudden like you’ll get people who are actually like they’re more enthusiastic about golf because he’s not as famous and you’ll notice this often right. So as the more public you go the more well-known your target like.
Let’s say your target, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you’re not gonna target only bodybuilders right. So when you’re gonna target certain interest you want to make into taking into account how famous they are right because the more famous there are the chances are the audience is not as targeted.
Targeting the Obvious Interest
Now a third mistake that I see people making is that there are going for the most obvious interest. I just mentioned people would target golf because they don’t know what else to target. But that is the biggest mistake you can make if you go just for the obvious ones then you’re fighting against everyone else on the Facebook ad platform. As you know it’s a bidding war like you’re bidding against each other. So if you’re going for the same interest that everyone else is going after then you’re out of luck.
So you’ll need to be more clever and more sophisticated than that so there are three different ways how you can easily do that number.
1. Go for famous people and famous brands. Instead of just searching for Fishing go for like what are the biggest famous people in that market or like the biggest brands that are marketing towards the target audience that you want to read. So go for famous people and brands inside your market.
2. Secondly, ask yourself what else does your ideal customer buy because maybe you’re in there in the Gulf or maybe they’re into something but what else is interested in. I mean let’s say you’re targeting people who are into fishing they’re probably also interested in the outdoor stuff. So maybe instead of just going into fishing, you may want to look for like what are the famous people in the outside like their rough kind of things. Go deeper into your market try to like look sideways and see if there’s like related markets that serve the same customer.
3. Avoid the most obvious interest is to use clever tools to do it. I mean if you would go into your Facebook Ads Manager and you would enter a certain search keyword. Then probably gonna get like 20 results. Now if you would use a free tool where you can just enter your keyword and you’ll get more results compared to just the normal search. You can just copy-paste them right into your Facebook Ads manager. These kinds of tools help you to find more interests that you will not be able to find inside Facebook.
No Split Testing
A major issue that people making is they do not split test to see which interests are working. People just create a Facebook ad and they add five or ten or maybe even more different interests. And they’re just gonna hope that all of them are the same so may work for your Facebook ads. Some maybe not so maybe profitable, or losing money and because you don’t know your overall ads may be losing.
If you would have split tested your different ads to check which one is working well for my business. And people don’t do it and I understand. Using the normal Facebook Ads manager what you need to do is you’ll have to create a campaign first and create an ad set for each interest. So you will have to add an ad set and add one interest in there. Basically, create and then duplicate that ad said over and over again.
For every single one, you have to be spending money to get some results even if it’s just five dollars a day times 20 is still 100 dollars a day just for trying it out. So I understand why people don’t do it. But with the split test, you can see with certainty which ones are working or which ones are not. You can usually remove the ones that are not working. So that you can improve your campaign over time by targeting your Facebook Ads only to the actual interests that are working for you. So that’s a big mistake people are making they’re not split testing and you got a split test if you want to make Facebook Ads work.
Not Using Layering
Another mistake people make with Interest-Based Targeting Facebook is not using layering. On Facebook, you could target people who are for example interested in coca-cola. You could target everyone who’s into coca-cola or Pepsi. For example now what you can do using layering is target the overlapping segments. So instead of saying I want to target everyone who is into coca-cola or a Pepsi. I only want to show my Facebook ads to people who are inside of the Cola & Pepsi interest. And that way you will know that according to Facebook they’re interested in two of these things.
You can even go a level deeper where you add three layers where you can say I want to target everyone who is into Coca Cola & Pepsi and also Sprite. All the overlapping set between this tree and by doing that your audience size becomes something way more targeted. There are multiple ways you can do that you can do it manually inside the Facebook Ads manager.
So these are the five biggest mistakes business owners/Marketer are making when it’s about Facebook interest-based targeting using your Facebook Ads. Let me know in the comments down below if you have any other points.