There's a lot of audience research that goes into creating a new Meta Ads campaign, especially when it's a brand new account and you're starting from scratch.
Researching audiences, consumer behaviour and how users interact with your site is a fantastic way to find new potential customers on Meta Ads.
But once you have data flowing through your ad account you can start leveraging your own data which is much more reliable.
Today I will break down the types of audiences you can find in your account and how to find the most valuable ones.
You can see these breakdowns as totals for the account, campaigns, ad sets or individual ads.
I find the total for the account the most useful in general, but if you sell a wide range of products going after different demographics then going to a campaign and ad set level can be great as well.
To see that data you will firstly need to login to Facebook and go to your Meta Ads Manager account.
From there you will see all of your campaigns. If you look in the top navigation bar you will see an icon with 3 horizontal lines. Click that and you will see all of the different options you have for breakdowns.
From the options that pop up, hover over "By delivery". Now you will see another pop-up to the left of the original that includes all of the breakdowns I mentioned above.
For example, here I clicked on age. You can see that there's a breakdown in each campaign that shows the performance of the demographic by age.
Then if you click the dropdown next to the "Results from X campaigns" (the x will be however many campaigns you have in the account, it's 33 in this example), you can see that data for the entire account.
So in this example, you can see that targeting people in the 25-34 age range is really profitable and is giving us a ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) of 10.29.
Whereas people in the 35-44 demographic are giving us a ROAS of 4.79 and the 65+ demographic is only giving us a ROAS of 1.73.
An audience testing idea might be to target only people in the 25-34 age range, or to target everyone except for people in the poor-performing age ranges of 35-44 and 65+.
If we go back and click on breakdowns again and choose gender, we can see that our ROAS for men who see our ads is 6.97 which is way higher than for women who see our ads at 3.89.
A suggestion here would be test ad sets that only target men instead of targeting both men and women.
You can continue to do this for every other breakdown as well including country, region, placement, platform etc. The data changes over time so it will always be relevant.
I like to use this reliable demographic data mixed in with interest and lookalike audience targeting to maximise the results.
Using this method, you will never fly blind and will always have some data to back up new audience tests.
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Written by Christian Donovan, Director of Performance Marketing at 3B1.