How to Target Audiences On Facebook Using Behaviors

Targeting Audience On Facebook Using Their Behaviors

Facebook’s biggest advantage when it comes to marketing prospects is its audience and audience targeting opportunities. The term “targeting” might sound pretty simple, but it is mighty in terms of its action spotlights. Facebook is well known for its granularity in segmenting the audience with unique opportunities.

The main premise of this blog article revolves around the major section of audience targeting on Facebook, which is nothing but the “behavioral targeting”. We are about to dive deep into the understanding of how to get the best out of targeting your ads Facebook. Also, in what significant ways could the behavioral targeting help marketers achieve greater outputs through the Facebook campaigns.

What is audience targeting on Facebook?

Audience targeting is a process of showing something(ads/posts/images/etc) to the audience/people who really care about the same. When you consider the same for running campaigns on Facebook, it means to show the ads to relevant people who can engage with them and perform an action after having a look at it. The action could be anything starting from a landing page visit to a sign-up conversion.

Behavioral Targeting On Facebook 

As the name holds, when you target the users depending on their nature of online and offline behaviors across various activities is called as behavioral targeting. It could be any list of activities that the users perform online and offline off Facebook, purchase intents, travel places, check-ins and much more! When I meant offline, Facebook gets the offline activities of users through third-party data providers and they’re considered to be pretty much-trusted sources. Though other marketing platforms such as Google and Bing provide other audience targeting opportunities, Facebook stands out with its granularity in data and audience segments, which enables the users to prefer Facebook for marketing. But Facebook has limited some of the behavioral targeting opportunities to U.S. only. Still, some users are struggling with this issue.

Behavioral Targeting Benefits:

Before getting into the types of behavioral targeting and opportunities that lies behind it, let us understand the best uses of it:

1. Think about the audience you’re planning to target; they are going to be the exact match kind of folks for whom you’ll be showing the ads. Hence the ad relevance score will be good.
2. Moving on to the next level of having exact match audience, you’ll get a good score of The audience will help you to greatly engage with the ads and convert.
3. When you concentrate on showing the relevant content to the audience, you needn’t have too many creatives put under a single ad and hence you get to play with a minimal Ad frequency score.
4. When the ad relevance and CTR rates are high enough, you’ll end up receiving a lot of engagement from the users.
5. When the engagement rates are high, it can be proactively used for increasing the traffic and conversions.
6. When you target the exact audience, you end up saving a lot of $$ through your targeted campaign. Behavior targeting helps you eliminate the chances of wasting a lot of money.

Behavioral Targeting

Now that we have seen the benefits of behavioral targeting, let us understand the ways to put them in action. Just like all the regular campaigns, you just have to start with the Facebook’s advertising manager and choose your objective for the Facebook campaign. Once you’re done with the objective, go ahead and select your audience and location preferences. For setting up behavioral targeting according to the campaign adjective, you can create a new audience set and better save it to the existing list.

Move ahead to the detailed targeting section, where you can see the Browse option. Once you click on browse option, you’ll be shown with 4 choices:

• Demographics
• Interests
• Behaviors
• More Categories

Since we are about to get into Behavior targeting for our audiences, please go ahead and select Behaviors. You’ll be shown with a number of opportunities under behavior drop down:

• Anniversary
• Consumer Classification
• Digital Activities
• Expats
• Mobile Device User
• Seasonal & Events
• Travel

PS: The opportunities may vary according to the location. This is the list shown for India region. If you’re trying it with a U.S. account, you might see different set of options

Behavioral Targeting: Anniversary

If you’re a company, selling gifts and accessories, you can prefer this behavior for the target audience. Once you click on the behavior, it will show you the sub option underneath Anniversary. In my case, it is displayed as Anniversary in 61 – 90 days. It means that the target audience will have their anniversary happening in 61 – 90 days.

This will be suitable for a short term campaign if you have any good offers to promote for your audience. The ad and the landing page can be well targeted and must be designed a way to produce lot of conversions/sales. Always remember, short term campaigns must provide some good value to customers and users, to have good engagement and conversion rate.

Behavioral Targeting: Consumer Classification

The second type of behavioral targeting is consumer classification. Once you choose this option, you’ll be shown with the region and the respective classification underneath it. For my case, I’ve been provided with:

1. Affinity high-value goods – India
2. Affinity mid-high value goods – India

This particularly targets the users who are predicted to prefer the high-value goods if you select option A. The goods could be anything depending upon your activities on various websites, purchase behaviors and intents. The second option provides an opportunity for the users to target the users who could be potentials buyers of mid-high end valued goods in the market. This could be a suitable action plan for the e-commerce sites running Facebook campaigns for its users.

Behavioral Targeting: Digital Activities

This is the biggest deal for several marketers and companies. It has a handful of options to target the users with. Such as,

• Console Gamers
• Canvas Gaming
• Early Technology Adopters
• Event Creators
• FB Payments(All)
• FB Payments (Higher Than Average Spend)
• FB Payments(Recent)
• Facebook Page Admins
• Internet Browser Used
• Late Technology Adopters
• Operating System Used
• Photo Uploaders
• Primary Email Domain
• Small Business Owners

Console Gamers

This option provides an opportunity for the companies that promotes games and gaming accessories, to target the core console gamers. But, again purely depends on the requirement of the company.

Canvas Gaming 

Quite similar to the previous option of console gamers. This targeting opportunity targets the users under the canvas gaming section.

Early Technology Adopters

These are the people who are under the circle of trying out the Beta version of several products. They’ll be the good to go audience set who’ll be eager to try out your product at the first place. A definitely not to be missed kind of audience set if you’re launching a new product in the market.

Event Creators

We would have come across several business-level corporate events and activities and there would be a team to organize everything at the back end. They are known as event creators on Facebook. You can target them if you’re planning to promote if any!

FB Payments

The introduction of Facebook Shop Section within the Facebook Business Page has opened doors for many e-commerce and local business people who can take up online orders and purchases via shop section on Facebook. You can target the FB payment category depending on the payment done using the Facebook platform.

Facebook Page Admins

As the name says, this is the group of an audience filled with the administrators of different pages and locations. But, if you think of it from a different standpoint, these are the people who create the company’s business page and run it. This provides a valuable set of audience who could be your potential customers if you’re a B2C kind of company!

Internet Browser Used

This option opens up the entire section of primary browser users. Depending on the type of browsers that the users use, you can target them with ads. This could be helpful for the browser plugin promotions.

Late Technology Adopters

These are the audience sets who leave out the products at the beginning. You can promote your product along with branding to help them understand your product as well as try to convert them as your users/customers. You can target them by showing some real numbers your business has achieved.

Operating Systems Used

Target the users depending on the operating systems used by them. If you have a product that can be installed depending on the operating system, you can set up an audience using this split.

Photo Uploaders

Using this targeting option, you can target the users who have been uploading photos on Facebook quite often. Photo based product can be promoted using this set of audience.

Primary Email Domain

This can drill down the users according to their respective primary email domain of their email addresses using which they had registered for Facebook.

Small Business Owners

If you have a go-to-market product that relatively fits in Small Businesses, this category of the audience might be the best fit for your product. You can immediately target this category and get good traffic and signups/conversions.

Behavior Targeting: Expats

When you choose this option, this will open up a wide number of options for you. You can particularly choose the expats from the respective regions whom you plan to target through your ads. Expats are the people who live in a different region and not in their native ones.

Behavior Targeting : Mobile Device Users

Mobile device users section holds the same level of importance as the Digital Activities section, considering the level of mobile traffic you can route to your website. Almost everything has become mobile driven these days. Starting from emails to using support tools for your daily work. And this category works best for the companies that heavily depend on mobile apps.

You can target the users according to their mobile brands, the operating system installed on their devices, the network supported on their mobile, featured phones and tablet ranges. This shows the unique granularity of Facebook targeting. You can eliminate the users whose mobile devices doesn’t support a 4G network! Isn’t it awesome?

Behavior Targeting : Seasonal & Events

Again, this section provides a different list for different users according to the region. For now, I can see three major options listed under seasonal and events section for India region. They are:

• Summer Games 2016
• Autumn American Games
• Ramadan 2016

These audiences can be chosen according to the seasons and events as well. They play a vital role in driving traffic for specific event-related offers and sales. If your company plans for a season based offer push, this is the best category to target the audience.

Behavior Targeting: Travel

Remember Facebook introducing Check-ins and location based taggings? This category of the audience is picked with the help of those two options to identify the users. Facebook provides several sub-targeting options such as Frequent travelers, business travelers, commuters and much more. Holiday planning based companies, cab companies, and similar ones can target these audiences to get the most out of this audience category. This range can vary from B2C to B2B and either way, depends on the targeting preference that you choose to run the campaign.

To sum up, this is a small glimpse of Facebook’s Behavioral Targeting online marketing opportunities to run the campaigns. Please let us know if you have used these opportunities for any of your campaigns. Please feel free to share them in the comments section.

Author Bio: Gautham is an ardent Digital Marketer, Social Media Specialist and a Growth hacking expert from India. He is running a website – DigitalMarketingQuest, which helps marketers to strategize various channels and campaigns. He has great passion for photography and dates his D810 at times. And of course a GOT fan!