Facebook Ads 101: Audience Creation

When it comes to running a successful Facebook Ad, half of the equation is knowing who to target.

A few weeks ago, I shared some tools for finding your audience.

Today, I'm going to show you two options for where to create your audiences once you've done your research. I typically recommend an audience size of around 500,000 – 1 Million to start testing with an ad budget of $10 per day. (But, if you can only do $5 per day you can make your audience smaller – under 250,000.)

Let's start with how to create an audience in the Audiences section of Ads Manager.

You're going to click on Tools -> Audiences.

Then, you're going to click Create Audience -> then Saved Audience.

Now, you can give your audience a name. Be descriptive so that when you see it in your list later you'll have some idea of the types of pages targeted in that audience.

This is the fun part. Now you're going to select your location, age, and interests (pages that might like, things they are interested in, job titles, etc). Keep in mind my recommendation of a 1 Million member audience and start plugging in your interests under Detailed Targeting.

If your audience gets larger than you want – or if you need to dial it in to be more targeted – you can use the option to EXCLUDE certain people from your audience or to NARROW your audience.

In the example below of excluding interests, you'd be targeting fans of Marie Forleo but excluding fans of Gabby Bernstein from the audience that will see your ad.

Another option to reduce your audience size is to NARROW your audience. So in this example, someone would have to be a fan of Marie AND Gabby in order to be targeted.

Once your potential audience size is where you want it (the size can be found in the upper right corner), you can save your audience. This audience will now be available for you to select in Power Editor and elsewhere when you are ready to create your ad.

OPTION NUMBER 2: If you are already in Power Editor creating an ad campaign, you can also create a saved audience right from within Power Editor in the Ad Set section.

To do that, when you are at the Ad Set level, click the edit button and scroll down to Audience. You'll see that you can either select an existing audience from the drop down arrow or create a new one.

Now it's just a matter of selecting targeting exactly like we covered above. There is a checkbox at the bottom to save and name the audience before hitting the blue save button.

Even if you're not ready to run ads just yet, you can go in and start creating and saving audiences as inspiration strikes to use later.

Have you saved any audiences yet? Share any questions around targeting in the comments!