Facebook has always offered a lot of different ways to target users with advertisements. You could set up your advertising campaigns to target only people of a certain age group, or from a specific country. While these were once very powerful and effective options, they have largely fallen behind the times. Other ad networks offered significantly more options, which is surprising given the fact that Facebook had so much specific user data that they could work with.
Facebook has updated their advertising features to allow marketers much more exact targeting. Their ‘core-audiences’ advertisement targeting will allow you to target people based on almost anything in their profile.
If you’re marketing a program to CEO’s, you can have your ad displayed only to Facebook users whose job title is “CEO.” If you’re pushing an online dating site, you can have Facebook display the ad only to people whose status recently went from “In a relationship” or “Married” to “Single.” There is almost no limit to how specific you can get with your ad targeting on Facebook due to this update. In addition to the profile targeting, they have also improved geographic ad targeting improvements. Now, you can limit your ads to only the specific zip codes that your customers are in.
These are some pretty significant updates that will allow marketers to get a much better return on their advertising dollars. As all marketers know, the more targeted the ads, the better they perform (assuming you choose your targeting wisely).
While these are great improvements, there are still some pretty big limitations. For one, if you’re targeting only ‘CEO’s’ you are relying on the people who are filling out their profile. A teenager who is “CEO” of his lawn mowing company, for example, will see your ad in addition to the CEO of a multi-national corporation. How big of a concern this is will depend on the niche you’re targeting, of course, but it is still something to keep in mind.
