Facebook advertising is a highly effective marketing strategy, but it can be daunting for beginners due to its complexity. With numerous targeting options, finding the right strategy can be challenging.

While some established Facebook advertising strategies deliver good results, the platform’s competitiveness requires businesses to explore unconventional approaches for their campaigns to stand out. This article will examine three unique Facebook advertising strategies that you can use in your campaigns. NEW: Discover if Facebook ads would be a good fit for your business with the new Facebook ad tool.

1. Leverage the Universal Tracking Pixel to Build Highly Exclusionary Audiences

Although commonly used for conversion tracking and bid optimization, Facebook’s tracking pixel can also create highly exclusionary audiences, making your campaigns more accurate and saving you time and effort.

This strategy is highly effective. Brett McHale, a paid social media expert at nexus-security, uses this strategy to save time and ensure campaigns precisely target the right audience. “The universal tracking pixel allows seamless remarketing to people who visit pages where it’s implemented," Brett says. “However, there are nuances that users might not immediately grasp. Visibility is crucial when running ads. Knowing who you’re targeting is important, but knowing who you’re excluding is equally valuable.” By creating exclusionary audiences with Facebook’s tracking pixel, Brett saves significant time and effort while targeting users who display specific behaviors indicating strong purchase intent.

“I utilize the universal pixel to create dynamic exclusionary audiences, eliminating the need to constantly upload Excel sheets of emails that might not even be a perfect match,” Brett explains. “Excluding existing customers allows you to create a custom audience of site visitors who visit your login page or even a confirmation page URL, ultimately saving you money.” This method also allows for campaign customization and refinement based on a prospect’s stage in the sales funnel. “You essentially create a funnel by targeting users at different interest or readiness levels with specific promotions,” Brett clarifies. “This enables tailored promotions, resulting in a more relevant ad experience while guiding prospects through the funnel.” If you’re using Facebook’s tracking pixel only for conversion tracking, consider implementing this technique in your next campaign for greater effectiveness.

2. Target Niche Interests and Common User Behaviors

Facebook’s ability to target users based on interests and online behavior makes it a powerful advertising platform. However, combining these two targeting strategies is often overlooked despite its potential for impressive results.

Many advertisers mistakenly assume their target audience is larger than it actually is, casting too wide a net and resulting in weak targeting and overly broad ad messaging. However, you also don’t want to limit yourself to very specific niche interest groups. Combining highly specific interest targeting with common user behaviors helps reach prospects interested in your services or industry who also exhibit behaviors suggesting strong buying intent. This tactic works both ways. You can target niche interests and common behaviors or target users with broad interests and very specific behaviors. For example, you could target small business owners—a broad audience—who are interested in digital marketing conferences, free software trials, or have downloaded specific content.

3. Optimize Your Forms to Target High-Quality Leads

Even seasoned Facebook advertisers might waste clicks and impressions on users unlikely to convert, regardless of their targeting efforts. Our next unconventional Facebook advertising strategy involves using tracking pixels on your forms to help Facebook identify your most valuable leads.

To achieve this, embed a pixel into your forms that activates when users enter specific information about themselves. If you use form data to qualify leads, you likely employ metrics like monthly AdWords expenditure to gauge their value. Use this data to create refined lead lists for future targeting. For instance, if a user spending over $1,000 on AdWords qualifies as a viable lead, you can set the pixel to “fire” when they enter an amount exceeding $1,000 in the “Monthly AdWords Spend” field on your form. This signals to Facebook that this user is a qualified lead based on their ad spend and the ad set that led them to convert. This allows you to tailor your copy and creative within the ad sets attracting the highest-quality leads based on your qualifying data, shifting your focus from CPA as the primary success metric to investing more in campaigns that generate better leads. After accumulating enough data, you can create custom audiences of these leads using the “Event” selection and then generate lookalike, exclusionary, and remarketing audiences based on these criteria to meet your campaign objectives. These strategies provide insights into how you can utilize Facebook’s advanced advertising tools to effectively target qualified users and maximize your advertising budget. See also: The Complete Guide to Facebook Video Ads