Custom audience targeting is incredibly powerful for Facebook Ads, surpassing all other targeting methods.

However, many advertisers fail to fully utilize the potential of Custom Audiences. I’m going to share my top three strategies to help you get significantly more value from your custom audience targeting.

Boosting Performance with Facebook Custom Audiences: Top 3 Hacks

When analyzing Facebook custom audiences, I often find a mix of high-performing and low-performing segments. I refer to these as unicorns and donkeys, respectively. Unicorns represent the top 1-3% of campaigns, while donkeys are average or below-average performers. To enhance ad performance, we need to eliminate the donkeys that drag down the overall average. We can do this using Facebook’s ad and audience insight tools, which help us identify these underperforming segments.

For example, consider the audience insights from a productivity software advertiser:

Here’s what we can learn:

• Women aged 35-54 are significantly more likely to engage with ads compared to other age/gender groups, making them the unicorn audience.
• Men, while accounting for 57.94% of impressions, only generate 46.6% of engagement, with men aged 25-34 being the least likely to engage (the donkey audience).

Based on this, we should remove men from the ad targeting. This may seem extreme, but it ensures that every dollar spent on ads yields the best possible results. If the budget is limited, consider excluding women outside the 35-54 age range as well. Prioritizing unicorn audiences over donkeys is crucial when ad budgets are smaller than the targetable audience size. (However, this advice may not apply to those with large budgets or those focused on maximizing conversions regardless of cost).

Transforming Ad Performance: Turning Donkeys into Unicorns

Instead of eliminating donkeys, we can try to convert them into unicorns by adjusting the ad creative.

Let’s look at an example from a high-end electronics advertiser:

Key observations:

• 89% of purchases are from men.
• 85% of male purchases are from those aged 35-64.
• The remaining 12% of purchases (made by women) are more evenly distributed across age groups.

Here’s the recommended approach:

• Exclude men aged 18-34, 65+, and women aged 18-24 from targeting.
• Create a separate ad set with a different ad for the remaining female audience.

Since this product is mostly purchased by men, we changed the ad targeting women to emphasize its suitability as a gift for husbands or fathers, rather than focusing on technical specifications. This single adjustment doubled the ROI!

Maximizing Insights: Replicating Success Across Platforms

Another effective strategy is to use the valuable audience insights gained from Facebook analytics for other marketing initiatives. This is called “unicorn cloning,” as unicorn and donkey audiences on Facebook tend to perform similarly on other platforms.

Consider this custom audience insight for a B2C advertiser with a customer base that leans liberal politically:

This information can be used in various ways:

• Target Google Display Network remarketing ads to appear on liberal-leaning websites.
• Exclude conservative news and opinion sites from Google Display Network managed placements.
• Target travel and comedy websites.
• Utilize Google Display Network’s “Topic targeting” to overlay “outdoor” interests like camping or hiking.
• Employ the “inverted unicorn” technique to leverage unrelated interests for content or ad copy creation.
• The possibilities are extensive!

The Power of Understanding Your Audience

Ultimately, businesses sell to people, not keywords or pixels. The more you understand your target audience, the better your Facebook ads (and all marketing efforts) will perform. Thankfully, Facebook’s insights make it easier than ever to build a data-driven customer persona.

Dive deep into your customer audiences – analyze their demographics, interests, and behaviors. Start leveraging this invaluable information across all your marketing campaigns today!