Google Analytics Data for Facebook Ad Targeting

Google Analytics is the best tool to create custom Facebook Audience segments for your social media advertisement. This pairing is a match made in heaven. Often people start their journey into Facebook Advertising either targeting a wide audience or guessing at interest groups. However, using Google Analytics cuts out the guesswork and allows you to hyper target your customers based on your existing data. Here is a quick and easy way to discover your audience groups.

What dimensions are available to create custom Facebook Audience segments:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Language
• Demographics
• Interest
• Behavior
• Connection Type.

All of this data can be accessed on both platforms.   The right side you can see your Facebook Ad tool on the right is Google Analytics Audience section. These both can be used to create a custom Facebook audience.

Get familiar with the audience section in Google analytics that mirrors your Facebook Analytics.  The subsections will allow you to define your Facebook audience to attract a more profitable user base.

How to Find the Reports I need to Create Custom Facebook  Audience Segments? 

1.  Location/Demographics

Clicking the GEO report will allow you to segment your user base by location. You can discover which country or city is bringing you the most qualified traffic. You can sort this traffic by transaction and conversion rate. This will help you define your most profitable audience. See the image below. You can find this report by following.

Audience > GEO > Country > City

From the image you can see our target cities in America.  Our most profitable cities are New York  and Boca Raton.  However, taking into account the  conversion rate, we can determine what it will cost for us to acquire a customer based  Facebook CPC. We can use this information to define our campaigns.

2. Gender

This is always an area of contention. Often people feel that their product leans towards a certain gender; however,  being data driven will allow you to answer this question with the gender of the report. You should evaluate the conversion rate and revenue from these two segments.

Audience > Demographics > Gender

3. Interest

There are three categories in Google Analytics are Affinity Groups, In-Market and Others. The group that is further down the conversion cycle is in the In-Market Segments. This segment is closer to users who are actually searching for your product category which would be a better estimation of consumer interest. These can be added or even excluded from your Facebook Targeting list.

Audience > Interest > In Market

4. Layered Segments ( Age & Interest)

The last step is choosing an exact audience would be to layer different dimensions.  This can be added to a single ad. To see the effectiveness of this layers, we can use the secondary dimension of age for the top two profitable sections, we can see which is most profitable.

Audience > Interest > In Market > Secondary Dimension > Age

Which Device should I target?

I wouldn’t segment out any device due to the fact that users may use several screens in the buying cycle. They do research on your website while at the desk and work and then go home to purchase on their phones. However, your ad may have been the first introduction to the user on a phone or desktop. Excluding either will exclude part of the conversion funnel.  However you can find this report by following the steps below:

Audience > Mobile > Device