Picture it: It’s the summer of 2016. The Warriors have blown a 3-1 lead to the LeBron James and the Cavs. Nobody wants to talk about anything that doesn’t involve Alexander Hamilton rapping about taxes. Two bros just dropped a song called “Closer,” and it’s starting to get on Allen Finn’s nerves.
Oh, and WordStream published the OG Facebook targeting options infographic.
There’s a reason behind that brief pop culture recap: the world was a different place when we first released that infographic, and that includes the world of online advertising.
Fast forward to August 2018. Facebook has just removed over 5,000 targeting options from its advertising platform with the intent of “protecting people from discriminatory advertising.” How? Principally by stopping advertisers from “excluding audiences that relate to attributes such as ethnicity or religion.”
An admirable decision? Of course. A big enough shake-up to warrant a new infographic? Yup.
Look—we don’t make infographics about stuff that doesn’t matter. And we certainly don’t make two infographics about stuff that doesn’t matter.
Whereas Google Ads allows you to capitalize on search intent—thus delivering your ads only when it’s relevant to what’s being searched—Facebook Ads allows you to build specific audiences to which your product or service is appealing.
That’s why the targeting options are so crucial. They’re foundational to your ability to deliver creative, specialized ads to the groups of people most likely to become your customers.
If that ability is a sandwich, Facebook’s targeting options are the roast beef, the peanut butter, the mustard, AND the sour cream.
Allow us to address the elephant in the room: this is a tad overwhelming. Across demographics, behaviors, interests, and connections, there are a ton of Facebook targeting options. If you look over our infographic and feel as if you have no idea where to begin, you’re not alone.
The antidote to that anxiety lay in a single word: strategy. If you dive headlong into Facebook audience targeting without concrete goals in mind, you won’t see anything close to ROI.
Going too broad yields meaningless impressions. Going too granular means excluding good prospects. You’ll find the happy medium if you do the necessary planning.
We hope you’ll use this infographic—created by the wildly talented design duo of Kate Lindsay and Maria Zavleta—as a guide to help you through the creation of stellar Facebook advertising campaigns.
Get to it! (Click here, or on the image, to enlarge the graphic.)
