Detailed Targeting

Detailed Targeting is a Facebook feature that gives advertisers the ability to create a very specific audience. The targeting fields you can utilise include Demographics, Behaviours and Interests.

These detailed targeting options may be based on:

• Ads they click on
• Pages they engage with
• Activities that people engage in on Facebook related to things such as their device usage and travel preferences
• Demographics such as age, gender and location
• The mobile device they use and the speed of their network connection

Refine your audience

After choosing a campaign objective, go to your ad set and select your Audience preferences first by location, age, gender and language, then by Detailed Targeting.
With Detailed Targeting, you can refine your audience the following ways:
Include certain demographics, interests or behaviors in your audience: Use the default text box to enter at least one word or term to find suggestions, or select “Browse” to search options.
Note: The details you select aren’t mutually inclusive. This means that if you add three interests (for example, movies, books and TV), we’ll look for people who match the location, age, gender and language you selected, who also match with either “movies,” or “books” or “TV.”

If you want to narrow your intended audience more, select “Narrow Audience” after you add your initial choices. This will help us focus your audience makeup on people who must match at least one of your previously identified qualities and the additional details you add. For example, if you originally chose to include people who match with “movies,” or “books” or “TV,” and then you add “yoga,” we’ll now search for people who must match “yoga” and either “movies,” “books” or “TV.”

Exclude certain demographics, interests or behaviors from your audience: Leave the default text box empty and select “Exclude People.” In the new text box, enter your preferences or browse suggestions.

Include and exclude a mix of demographics, interests or behaviors: Use the default text box to enter at least one word or term to include in your audience, then select “Exclude People” and add the details you don’t want to include in your audience.

Use detailed targeting to refine your audience. Here are some factors to consider:

“Or” targeting versus “and” targeting

If you add criteria to the “Include people” or “Exclude people” fields, your audience will include or exclude people who meet at least one of the criteria – not all of them. Say you include people who:

• Are frequent travellers
• Are interested in cooking
• Are university graduates

A person who likes cooking but isn’t a frequent traveller and/or isn’t a university graduate would be in the audience. It might be useful to think of this as “‘or’ targeting”, as the audience would be made up of people who are frequent travellers or who like cooking or who are university graduates.

If you want to include or exclude only people who meet all of your criteria, you can use the audience-narrowing actions. Using the previous qualities, here’s an example of how this would work:

1. Include frequent travellers
2. Click Narrow audience.
3. Include people interested in cooking
4. Click Narrow further.
5. Include university graduates

This audience will only include people who are frequent travellers and are interested in cooking and are university graduates.

Combining “and” and “or” targeting

You can think of “Include/Exclude” > “Narrow audience” > “Narrow further” as targeting tiers. You can add multiple criteria to each tier to give yourself some flexibility, since only one parameter from each will be required for inclusion/exclusion.

To continue our example: You’ve got an audience with frequent travellers at the “Include/exclude” tier, people interested in cooking at the “Narrow audience” tier and university graduates in the “Narrow further” tier.

Note: You can have multiple “Narrow further” tiers that have the same relationship between them as the one between the “Include/Exclude” and “Narrow audience” tiers, they just won’t have a different name.

You could add people who are vegetarians to “Include/Exclude” and people who are interested in gardening to “Narrow audience”. This would leave you with the following set up:

• Include/Exclude: Frequent travellers or vegetarians
• Narrow audience: People interested in cooking or gardening
• Narrow further: University graduates

One criteria from each tier must be met for inclusion/exclusion. So a vegetarian interested in gardening who is a university graduate would be in the audience, but a frequent traveller interested in cooking who isn’t a university graduate wouldn’t be.Important: When narrowing your audience, try not to make it too specific. This can lead to an audience that’s too small to be effective. Remember that within any target audience you create, we automatically try to find the people likely to get you the result you told us to optimise for in ad set creation. Because of this, you don’t have to worry about refining too much. You can review your ad set’s estimated audience size while creating your audience. Adjust your targeting selections when your range is too specific or too broad.