Create or select an audience

1. Detailed Targeting Expansion

If you had to remove some of your business’ preferred interest-based targeting options, then you might find that your updated audiences are smaller than ideal. Over time, your campaigns may encounter ad fatigue or costs could increase as you run out of people to reach efficiently.

Ads Manager’s detailed targeting expansion option can help. When you switch on this option, you essentially allow Facebook to deliver your ad to people outside of your targeting parameters if the algorithm determines that doing so will improve performance.

If you use the conversions campaign objective, detailed targeting expansion turns on by default. If you use most other objectives, you can turn it on at the ad set level by checking the Detailed Targeting Expansion box (shown above). Note that this option isn’t available for reach or brand awareness objectives.

2. Engagement-Based Custom Audiences

If you want to get much more specific, you have several options for narrower targeting with no need for interest-based parameters. Ads Manager’s engagement-based custom audiences let you target people who’ve already interacted with your business.

Instagram Account Engagement

If your page has a linked Instagram account, you can use similar targeting parameters. To create the largest possible audience, you can target people who’ve engaged with your account in any way. To build an audience that’s shown a higher level of interest, you can target people who’ve messaged your account or saved a post or ad.

Event Engagement

Does your business host in-person or virtual events? With event-based custom audiences, you can retarget people who have engaged with any or all of your events.

Choose the event(s) you want to use for retargeting. Then choose the interaction level that aligns best with the funnel stage you want to reach. You can target anyone from people who visited the event page to people who purchased tickets.

You can also use demographic targeting to improve your custom and lookalike audiences. After choosing a custom or lookalike audience (see below), add location, gender, and age targeting at the ad set level.

Are you curious which demographic groups responded best to your ads? You can use Ads Manager breakdowns to find which generated the best results or lowest cost per result.