#011 What Your Business Can And Can Not Target On Facebook.

There are a ton of crazy targeting combinations that you can unleash in your Facebook advertising marketing, but it gets complicated quickly! With Facebook changing the rules, introducing Special Ad Categories, and limiting interest/behavior targeting, the whole platform strategy can be overwhelming. There are some simple methods and tactics in reaching the right audience, and it all starts with who you know. Or... who you know that you CAN target and getting crafty with the ones you can't. Ad strategist, Bri Gorman shares her nerdy tricks-of-the-trade.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Boosting a post is not the same as the ads manager. Facebook is a pay to play platform so advertising is necessary. But when you do an ad, you have the opportunity run a lot of different types of objectives, with advanced targeting and a lot more ad creative types.
You can exclude different interests, groups, behaviors, etc., too!
Political disclaimers and social issues also have special rules! (Isn’t Facebook fun?)

Things I CAN Target On Facebook:

Age - non special ad categories
Gender - non special ad categories
Where a person lives
Designated Market Area
Interests (Broadly as “sports” and narrow as “Iowa Hawkeyes Football”)
Job Titles - depends on objective
Facebook Pages Liked
People Who Like Your Page
People Who Engage With Your Page
Similar Audiences To People Who Like Or Engage With your Page (Lookalike)
Customer Lead Lists (approved by CAN-SPAM)
People Who Are Similar To Your Lead List (Lookalike)
Web Traffic & Site Behavior
Places People Have Visited
So so so so many more things

Things I CAN NOT Target On Facebook:

There are restrictions based on ad categories. Special ad categories are if you’re running an ad with employment, housing or credit. These ad categories really limit what you can target.

Small Audience Sizes - Can’t Target Or Exclude Smaller Than 1,000 People
Name-based Targeting Ads
Home Addresses
Age
Gender
Limited Interest Targeting
Cultural Interests
Saved Audiences

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Transcript

This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

Hi, this is Emilee Longuski and I am a Customer Success Specialist at Chatterkick and I'm joined by Bri. Do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah. I'm Bri Gorman. I'm in Ad Strategist for Chatterkick. So I spend most of my day trying to figure out how to get inside people's brains in a very uncreepy way. I always say that like when people see as that they think their phone is listening to them, someone who does my job did their job. Right. So that's perfect. Cause today we're going to talk about who we can and cannot target on Facebook, which I'm in my role at Chatterkick. I spend a lot of time with clients and client facing relationships and I get a lot of questions as what can and can't we do as far as targeting my ad on Facebook. And I think the simplest way to start with that is I'm kind of differentiating between the ad running through like an ad manager.

And then clients asked me, you know, can I just boost my posts? So tell me what is the difference in those two different objectives? Yeah. boosted posts are that little button that people, that Facebook made available is kind of the bane of my existence because people want to just boost a post. They think it's, it's that simple and it is that simple. If you are a individual user who doesn't know very much about it, it's definitely your entry level of putting money behind any kind of thing that you put out on your social media page, whether it's a video or content or an event of any kind. But boosting a post just puts your post in front of more people that would see it already. It's entered into the same kind of algorithm that a regular post is. So it has a little bit of a extra incentive because we always say here at Chatterkick that Facebook is a pay to play platform.

So you have to give to get what you want. But when you do an ad, you take a post and you enter it into a different area of Facebook and it's like nerdy backend. So which is the ads manager. Yes. Which is the ads manager and the ads manager is where you can go in and start doing things that people talk about in like marketing classes. So you start doing things like targeting based on interests and age. And location and other kinds of demographics, like their job titles. And when you do that, you get more into the brain of the person you're trying to target as opposed to just putting it out for the masses. So you can do both things, both boost a post and use a post within the ads manager. You just have to take the time to set up in ads manager and pull the post into the backend and kind of get a little nerdy with it.

So, specifically speaking, when you're setting up an ad that runs through ads manager we can target things like what? We can target, things like age, gender most of the time. Things like where a person lives, we can target a wider, as in a geographical area, which is called a DMA. Which is a term that was coined by TV and radio. It was Facebook just adopted it so that you had similar verbiage when targeting. And then you can target by interests and job titles and Facebook pages that you've liked or Facebook pages that your friends have liked. Or you can do your audience on Facebook. So you can target based on the people who engage with your posts already, people who like your page already. And then you can take it a step further and target people who have similar characteristics on their page and similar interests as the people who already engaged with your page.

And that's called a lookalike. So are there any restrictions of some form of what you're advertising when it comes to like basically like is there categories or certain kind of restrictions depending on what you're advertising there didn't use to be and we're smiling because yes, there is. Especially right now we are seeing Facebook come out with a few different types of categories. So the main one is special ad categorizes, what Facebook calls it. And that is when you're trying to target anybody with an ad or a post with money behind it that has anything to do with employment, anything to do with housing. And anything to do with credit and those terms are super broad and anything that falls within those categories. And I mean maybe falls within those categories, even has the name in there. The title of their Facebook page has to be put through those scrubbers.

And we're also seeing considering the season we're in a lot of political ad restrictions as well in terms of what we can and can't not do with anything deemed a social issue. So anything that you have a public vote or has a political voice, those have where you have to set up what they call disclaimers. And that's information that is in public knowledge. So anything that runs as a political ad is ran with a disclaimer that shows who it's paid for and what information is included in that disclaimer as well. So the disclaimer is specifically for ads that are deemed as like super political. We've gotten some things through that were social issues, but Facebook let us know it was a social issue. Things like vaccines. But for political specifically disclaimers, you have to enter either a business name, an email address, a phone number, a brick and mortar address, and a website as the bare minimum.

So that's called a self-declared political disclaimer. And then you're not considered a confirmed entity. So at any point, if anyone kind of tries to discredit your disclaimer, you go through a secondary review process if you choose to self like self proclaim but then you can also do it based on things like your EIN number. And while your EIN number is not public knowledge, they do see the last four digits of it and what that entity is, but every one of those ads has paid for by, and then the entity you choose to enter. So if I saw on my newsfeed an ad for a politician and it will say paid for by with a disclaimer, I'd be able to click on that information and say who that businesses, what their addresses, what their public information, telephone number, all of that would be included.

And I think that kind of Facebook has stepped up their regulations recently. Going into a lot of the political seasons and just everything that had happened from the last election, they're trying to kind of hammer down on what is running as far as ads. So let's rewind a little bit and go back to the special ad categories. So again, these were the things that were classified as employment ads and credit. So within those categories, if you say, okay, I still, I can still run an ad advertising a job, but what am I restrictions as far as can I target? Can I say I want an 18 year old female to see this employment ad? Cause that is what I'm trying to employ. Short answer, no. Okay. Especially on categories for employment, housing and credit, you can't do gender, you can't do age and you can't do as targeted of interests as we're used to on Facebook.

So this is all can be a little frustrating for those people who are making Facebook ads. But it's really the intent of it is to help with discrimination. They've also taken out anything to do with like a race or culture as an interest entirely. Anything that they deemed could be a race or cultural Facebook group or interest, they've just continually removed. So you can't target 18 year old females because then you're discriminating against 25 year old males or 65 year old women as far as Facebook is concerned. And Facebook with all of these restrictions is, is kind of covering their butt. They've gotten burned a couple of times with information and especially with the last political season. And so even though these are not political, this is definitely something we're seeing come out of that and we've kind of worked, not around it because we also have to of course abide by the Facebook rules.

But there's certain ways we've kind of worked through these scenarios in this category as in terms of for example, we've gotten maybe a customer leads list and we want to run a employment ad or a mortgage ad based on customer leads. And we can still upload that list into Facebook to target. But it's kind of up to Facebook to determine if that list is going to be optimized or not. Right? So we can take a customer list and we can still do everything we did before, which most of the time when we use a customer list, we either are specifically targeting people who have used the brand before or are currently in this scenario employed by the brand. But then there's the other category that we do, which is when people are trying to recruit, they want people who are look like and are similar to those who are already employed, which is normally what we do with a customer list.

We create that lookalike audience to target those who are probably most likely to come and work for that company. And so what we've done currently is we've gone through the whole process. We would normally go through, make the list, make the audience, target it down as precisely as the customer wants. And then we pull it up and make it side by side with the Facebook special ad category audience. And then we make a special ad category audience that looks almost identical to that. And you have to do it this way because you can't save audiences in special ed categories and you can't use saved audiences. And that that's something that they're trying to make sure that you're not sneaking people by them that are within these categories categories though they don't want you to upload a list that is specifically 18 year old females and then make a look alike of that so that you're only targeting 18 year old females even though you can't do that.

So you have to kind of get a little creative and really hone in on those interests. And then your copy, your creative and the website you're directing to on these ads is really going to get you the kind of customers or the kind of employees that you're looking for. So making creative that would appeal to the target audience you're looking for is how you're going to have to target specifically that small group within this larger group that Facebook is going to offer to you. And we've seen these ads be flagged in categories. I'm in terms of what's written in the caption and even content which is a little bit surprising, but things such as video still get flagged if they are, are deemed as being anything relevant to these categories. They're flagged in. The Facebook platform tells you that it's a special category and you have to adjust accordingly.

Correct. So we have seen as far as anything from the word job or work or come work here in the copy. So like in the caption be flagged and we've also seen a word in a video talking about where they work or coming to work here and why it's great. So Facebook's doing double time on these and the way you upload Facebook ads, most of the time you submit an ad for review. So you make the whole thing, you put in your target audience, your copy, your creative, and then you submit it for review. And Facebook approves it or denies it based on their advertising policies with special ad categories. Because you have to like check a special box even before you submit it to deem it as a special ad category. You can't even submit it for review. It gets flagged before the review process and it tells you you can't even try.

So there's no way around it. There is no way around it. And Facebook is doing this for the better, but it's just a learning process for all of us to best serve our clients what they are trying to get out of their Facebook ads and therefore also their Instagram ads. And with that, we've had current clients that come to us and they have kind of a, a small target audience to where maybe that they're specifically trying to cater to a group of 10 people. And they've come to you and said "can I target these 10 people's home address?" Inside the special ad core categories and outside of it, what is your answer? Inside the special ad category? No, technically I could enter the address into the location, but I cannot narrow down the mileage radius close enough to target a specific home.

You can't go lower than 15 miles on certain ad categories and 25 on others. And that is to protect individuals from being specifically targeted or to only target certain areas of the country world from trying to employ people of any kind of gender, race or social class. So, but with outside, outside of the special ad categories, as creepy as it sounds, I can get within a one mile radius of someone's home. And I normally do not encourage people to get in that narrow with a target audience of 10 people in one mile radius of their homes. Because then you're not going to get your ads entered into what's called the Facebook auction in a way that's going to get your ad seen even by the people you are targeting. Because it's a formula, it's a formula. The algorithm is a formula of how much money you're spending, how good your ad looks.

So what does the copy look like? What does the creative look like? The URL you've put on there, when you click through it, is the website readable? Like it does, it doesn't load to one of those 404 page error problem sites. And then it's also relevancy. So, and that's kind of your weird third cousin of ads cause you can't really plan for relevancy other than really knowing your target audience. But those three things make up whether a person sees your ad or not. And so Facebook has written all over all of their blogs that their whole goal is to serve the right ad to the right person at the right time. And so if you target only 10 people within a one mile radius, you, you don't have enough people for Facebook to even enter that ad into the auction to go up against an ad that's trying to target that area, but with a much broader range of people.

It's willing to target. So I think a big thing that comes up on a daily basis when we're discussing at categories is not just the audience size. Cause it varies depending on the product that you're trying to promote or the service you're trying to promote, but also the quality versus quantity of it all. So I think it's easier to think that I want to have the biggest audience possible, but that doesn't necessarily give you the the good enough quantity of a user. So how do you determine when you're trying to sell a product that's you know, like a, a HelloFresh meal or something like that? How do you determine what your audience would be based on the product? Well, that's easy to just target you. So what you do is you look, you start thinking about your audience, like people instead of like a number ticker.

Facebook, when you enter in your audience, you enter their ages, you enter, if it's not a special ad category you enter what location you want to target and then you start entering interests. Facebook is going to let you know whether your audience is too broad or too narrow with this, what looks like almost a speedometer or like a credit karma dial of red, green and yellow. And it's too narrow, too broad or just right. And there's a lot of factors in there that weigh in on whether something is too broad or too narrow. So with HelloFresh you'd want to target people who stereotypically speaking of course are probably in there in that like 25 to 40 area people who have done, showed interest in things. I would do anything that has to do with a mom group or a dad group or single parents especially cause especially single parents cause they're, that'll save them time cooking dinner.

Things like I would target things like target people who like target probably like HelloFresh. Meal planning, meal planning, all of those kinds of things. And once you start entering those in, those interests are to overlap and you start to realize that you're talking about a person. And when I do it, I tend to realize I'm talking about a person I've either met or known. And so I know things about them. I know things that they like that correlate. And when you start realizing that you're talking about a mom who's going home at the end of the day and wants to make a meal, you start to realize that that mom probably also likes her vanilla latte in the morning. So she's probably gonna like certain Facebook pages that helped. Irrelevancies. So that's kind of a segue into let's talk about what we can and can't target.

So I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and I want you to tell me if we can and cannot target them on Facebook. So can we target somebody a person based on their names? No, no, no. You cannot target contrary to popular belief, you can't target like an individual person. I can and nowhere in Facebook ads can I type in Emilee Longuski and find out everything about you, nor is the big privacy violation, privacy violation. Also, your phone is not listening to you contrary to popular belief. Yes. And that's kind of a discussion that I hear from a lot of my clients and they're like, I Googled you know, a furniture piece. And I was looking at it on this website and the next thing I know it's in my timeline and I, it's saying that you know I should buy it because I'm getting served with an ad that says it's half off.

How does that happen? Web traffic, so you can target based on web traffic and also you can target based on geolocation in places people have visited. If your Facebook app is open, if your location is turned on and they've walked into a building, say I w I have my phone on and I've been on Facebook and I have my location tracking on and you know I shut my phone but didn't close it on the app and I walked into a target. I will see a target ad in my timeline guaranteed 100% also, the way I describe to people what I do for a living is have you ever thought about going to taco bell and then a taco bell ad is in your, in your Facebook feed and this, they get this look on their face and I was like, that's, that's me. I do that.

Bri is the ad Ninja. She is the one creeping on your phones. No, I'm just kidding. But also if you are a person who goes to, goes to Taco Bell once a week or has those habits or has those, that's what I'm saying for a month you go to Taco Bell once a week and it's all usually on Wednesday or Thursday. Heck yes. Am I going to target people who go to Taco Bell once a week and it's going to know, Oh you go to taco bell on Wednesdays that you probably want to go to Taco Bell today, don't you? Cause it's, it's part of people's daily routine. It tracks that. It knows that also if you probably visit a business that much, chances are you like them on Facebook. So can I target somebody that is interested in say sports? Yeah, absolutely. You can target somebody based on sports as broad as just sports and as narrow as Iowa Hawkeyes Football.

So those interests on Facebook are based on Facebook pages and Facebook groups and things you've shared and liked. So those are what we call interest groups. And so you are grouped with people who also liked those things. And so if you're a person who likes Iowa football, you probably also like I will basketball. So you start to find these correlations and trends between the different things, but you can, you can go as broad as you want and goes narrow as you want. As long as the Facebook interest group is over a thousand people that's kind of the threshold for whether the interest is deemed relevant. So some of smaller schools and stuff don't show up, but most of the Big 10, the Big Tens, the D1s sometimes even D2s show up. And that's a big to a big thing too. The audience has to be big enough for us to add it into a category to target.

Correct. We have many times been asked, can I target this specific group of people in my town because there's something going on that they want to bring them in or on the opposite side, because you can do this, exclude those people. And if the, if the group is not above a thousand people, we can't. That's kind of the threshold that we, we enter in the different variations because there's this little search bar that you're entering in every combination that could be this group of people. And if it doesn't hit that threshold, it's just not possible. But you can build an audience based on that interest to look like that made up of probably different things, different interests. So we'll look at that group maybe and say, okay, that, that's not, you know, enough people but that the people in that group have particular, you know, interests or likes, and we can kind of make a faux audience if you will, based on that.

The easiest way that I do this to get what a client wants without having that specific interest available is I take a look at what the category is they're really trying to look for. So they're looking for sports, right? But they're want to target a university that only has a thousand students total, so they can't target that university in general. I can change it to, I moved the geotargeting, the location of the ad to that university and narrow it down. And then have the interest be university, higher education, college sports and know what they look like. Exactly. The audience that you were trying to initially target but couldn't cause they weren't big enough. Correct. It's kind of the back way of getting the same people without targeting specifically that school or that sporting event. So this, since this is Generation Social Media Podcast one thing we look at is the user habits.

And we have a screenshot if a single mom in her early thirties. And I think what would be interesting is if we take her habits on her phone. So these, this is a screen capture of things that she her, her usage basically. And what I found interesting is that out of the complete week so this is a screen shot of the last seven days. Her total usage on her phone was 18 hours a day. And about three 18 hours a week. Sorry. Thank you. That would be, that'd be impressive. But 18 hours a week and about three hours a day. And I know this person specifically and I think that is probably a little bit lower. But what's surprising to me is for a woman in her early thirties, Facebook was not in any of the top five usage platforms.

What was though is Instagram. So how do we target her for a product? Say we want to sell her, you know, a certain furniture or, or an ad about laundry detergent. How would you go about knowing that? Say you know her, her most used platform is Instagram. She spends five hours a week on Instagram. How would you target her? Let's start with fun fact. Instagram is owned by Facebook. For anyone listening who doesn't know that. So when you're setting up an ad within Facebook Ads Manager, that's also where you set up ads. For Instagram, it's the same place. And so you have the option to target specifically through Facebook Ads Manager to the Instagram platform. However, I probably wouldn't target directly to Instagram. I would also, I would leave Facebook as an option because then you also get things like the Audience Network and Facebook's audience network takes an ad and disseminates it into all of the different places that Facebook has a friend.

These are different websites that your ad can go on that are not Facebook. So you never really want to rule out that. And you also don't want to rule out Facebook's like video platform cause everybody gets ends up seeing Facebook videos somewhere and then you can get in-stream. But I would probably make the creative and the copy and insert a hashtag in there for somebody of that age range anyway because women in their early thirties are one of those groups of people. They're the, I don't know what are they? They are millennials, but they're the like mid-level millennials. So they're not, they're straddling a lot of different social platforms. They went through the Facebook phase where Facebook was all we had. Yes. This was all we had people in, some of us only had it because we were the only people allowed on it in college.

But they also have Instagram because that's where they post pictures of their kids and that's where they follow the influencers in their area. And that's where their followings, fashion brands and different types of deals. But they're also on Pinterest because every woman's on Pinterest, I swear. So YouTube and YouTube and, but they're not on Twitter as much. We see mostly Instagram being a more female skewed platform, I would say. Correct in that tends to sometimes skew Facebook numbers actually because Instagram is part of the Facebook family. It does skew those Facebook gender percentages towards female. And that's why we see the platform as a whole lean female. But it's definitely more female leaving out that everyone in the Gen Z age group is on Instagram more than they're on anything else. Instagram is the place that you go to now to see individually, like photos. You're not going to Facebook anymore to like catch up. Yeah. You're not going to Facebook anymore to catch up on someone's life. You're going to Facebook almost to see the big milestones, but not the day to day.

Social Media, Digital Paid AdvertisingChatterkickDecember 18, 2019advertising, Facebook