By Interests

Social listening and monitoring tools offer that kind of insight. With this technology, you can discover some incredible insights that can help you find more answers to questions about your audiences. This is where brands and agencies have a largely untapped opportunity to learn about the people they want to reach and connect with. Social listening tools, which are artificial intelligence-driven intuitive platforms, can analyze the entire web, from social media sites, to blogs, review sites and forums, and identify specific audience segments, then pinpoint other topics these people talk about and are passionate about.

By correlating this information to your (or your clients’) brand or business, you can get a better understanding of your target consumers and what drives their behavior.

This could be especially helpful for:

• Building audience personas and customer profiles
• Helping shape your message around relevant topics for your audiences
• Targeting your digital ads
• Placing your ads and media in the right place to reach the right people
• Building personal connections with relevant people at scale

Social listening tools allow you to research your audiences and analyze the topics and categorical terms they are interested in, enabling you to formulate the right strategies and approaches to campaigns, messaging, product improvement and digital content.

Why is interest targeting important?

Without location, demographics, behavior, and interest targeting, all advertising spend would yield below satisfying results. You’re showing your ads to millions of people on the platform, but how many of those people are interested in your business?

Interest targeting feature allows you to deliver your ads to your target people. These people have shown interest in your industry in the past, for example, by engaging with one of your competitors. Therefore, they are more likely to engage with your ads.

Ways to research your target audience’s interests.

1. Google search

A free-for-all tool you can leverage is Google. Use it to look for niche-related keywords and focus on results that link to the following online entities, which you can later look up for targeting availability:

• Public figures
• Associations
• Websites
• Brands
• Products
• Magazines
• Blogs

Let’s say you have a jewelry eCommerce business. If you sell birthstone necklaces, it’d be great to find people who are interested in this product. When scrolling through Google’s first page results, you can find Etsy’s product page. The next step would be to check out this company’s website. You can easily understand that this is a jewelry brand, and its popularity was already proven by its high ranking on Google. Then, you can look for the brand’s Facebook page, which will be used as a potential keyword to check for targeting availability.

2. Fan page suggestions

When you click “Like” on a related fan page, the action will give you suggestions of related pages. You can continue going deeper by checking the similar pages of the ones suggested after you click like the first time.

3. Suggestions in Detailed Targeting

After gathering several interest keywords, you can use them to look for related interests in the Detailed Targeting section in Facebook Ads Manager. You might get some results that seem far from what you were aiming for, but they may be worth the shot. All you need to do is type in each interest in the free search bar, scroll down, and find what’s relevant to your niche.

4. Similarweb

Similarweb is a tool you can use to get information about the audience on a particular site. Let’s use Etsy’s website as our example. It shows you the audience interest categories of people who frequent the website. There’s also a section for other websites Etsy’s visitors frequent, along with topics relevant to their site visitors. Aside from audience interests, Similarweb also shows you websites similar to your query. In this example, we’re still using Etsy’s website. You can either choose to view based on website similarity or competitors’ ranks.

5. Wikipedia

Because millions of people use Wikipedia, the information it contains can be useful for your interest targeting research. In the wealth of information within the website’s over 6 million articles, some articles can give you related keywords. In this example, we’ll be using “necklace” as our query. We searched the page for the “See also” section that contains links that can help us determine categories that are potentially relevant to our niche. Now, we can check these niche-related keywords for their targeting availability and add them to our list of keywords to use for interest targeting.

6. Madgicx’s Audience Studio

Marketing tech company Madgicx came up with the Audience Studio for hyper-targeting. Using this tool, you can automatically explore profitable hidden interests that will be beneficial to your ad performance. The same tool can also be used to unify performance data for every audience you’ve created, even if you use them in different ad sets. This feature gives you insight into your best audiences, which is extremely useful for future ad campaigns. Here’s an example of an apparel eComm business using Madgicx. As you can see, the Audience Studio offers relevant interests to the apparel industry – mostly competing clothing brands and retailers.