How do you determine the ideal size for your audience on Facebook?
Delving into the complexities of optimizing Facebook Ads, this article stresses the significance of efficiently defining your target audience. It emphasizes the critical role that selecting the right size for your Facebook audience plays in the success of a marketing endeavor. Various factors like budget, performance expectations, and the conversion funnel stage are discussed as crucial influencers when deciding on the audience scale.
The article furnishes guidance on leveraging Facebook indicators to strike a balance between a generic and overly specific audience. It sheds light on the correlation between audience size and budget distribution, as well as the importance of performance metrics in shaping audience magnitude. Furthermore, the significance of considering the conversion funnel stage in audience refinement is highlighted.
Echoing the call for a strategic outlook to audience targeting on Facebook Ads, the article underscores the need to harmonize elements such as audience size, financial limitations, campaign goals, and the conversion funnel stage. It also underscores the dynamic nature of Facebook’s platform and underlines the essence of ongoing testing and adjustments based on industry nuances and audience behaviors.
You can’t talk about Facebook Ads without talking about the audience, especially when it’s time to think about the best marketing strategy to carry out on the platform.
A Facebook audience is akin to keywords on Google—and is vital to the success of your campaign. However, opinions differ and there have been many discussions on the ideal size of a Facebook audience. Everyone has their own opinion and a secret recipe to determine what works best.
Obviously, since we’re talking about Facebook, testing would be the best approach, but sometimes we don’t have the time or the budget to carry it out. So what do you do in this case? Fortunately, there are still reliable indicators that predict whether an audience will be optimal or not.
Source : AdEspresso
Facebook audience size and auctions
First, let’s examine Facebook indicators. Before being relevant to your strategy, your audience must respond to what the platform achieves with a good audience, which is neither too generic nor too specific.
To do this, just look at the “Audience Size” gauge and make sure the needle is pointing vertically, in the green section. If the audience is in the yellow section (too generic), you need to refine your audience by adding interests or reducing demographic factors, such as age, gender or location. On the other hand, if the gauge points in the red sector, it is necessary to broaden your audience by reducing the number of interests or their connection between them, and increasing the demographics.
Unfortunately, this does little to tell you if your audience will be the right size for your strategy. No matter what, a Facebook audience should always be consistent with the goal you’re trying to achieve and your budget.
Facebook audience size and your budget
It goes without saying that the size of your audience is proportionate to your budget. Targeting a small area does not require a big budget, but targeting a large territory does.
Large audience and big budget: You have understood everything!
Be careful! An area is not just about geographic reach. The density of the population in a given area must be taken into account. Targeting Montreal compared to Trois-Rivières will not require the same means. Montreal has 12 times the population of Trois-Rivières.
It would therefore take 12 times more of a budget for the same campaign in Montreal, just as targeting a 5 km radius around Toronto does not require the same budget as a 50 km radius in the heart of the Yukon.
Although the Toronto area is technically smaller than the Yukon area, it is significantly more populated. You can rely on census data or demographic studies to best evaluate the size of the real audience (and know if your target is in the area you’re trying to reach).
Facebook audience size and expected performance
Another criterion to take into account: your objectives. To help you with this, you will need to know the campaign’s expected KPIs and refer to Facebook’s predictions.
Obviously, these are only predictions. Even though Facebook has powerful algorithms, always keep a critical eye on these predictions—especially when you don’t know the calculation that led to the results. However, they are sometimes useful. As you build your audience, daily reach predictions and results will appear.
Pay attention and ask yourself if your audience size will be able to get you where you want to be. For example, if you want to get 5000 clicks per month and your predictions estimate around 75 clicks per day, you will only be able to reach half of your goal. Make sure you get an estimate of around 165 clicks per day to reach the desired volume.
Facebook audience size and the conversion funnel
Finally, you should also be aware of which stage of the funnel your campaign fits into. A campaign in the Awareness phase will require a lot of work to explore its market.
Your audience should therefore be large and not necessarily very refined. The closer you get to the bottom of the conversion funnel, the more your audience qualifies.
Like a gold prospector, you sift your audience through filters. And the more you filter your audience, the smaller it becomes. In fact, retargeting or loyalty campaigns are very effective with fairly small audiences.
Source: netoffensive
One last thing: keep in mind that Facebook operates on the basis of an adaptive algorithm. In doing so, the more data it is given, the more it can refine and actually target better profiles. But nothing can replace experience and testing. Each industry responds to its own characteristics and behaviours.
What works for one industry may not work for another. If an audience seems perfect on paper, it can still have surprises in store for you when it comes to practice. With Facebook, it’s always a balancing act!
For some help in the field or simply to hire a certified agency, contact us!