How to Research Interests to Create Granularly Targeted Facebook Ads

Learning to do granular research for your Facebook ads, organizing your information well, and then implementing your ads can make a big difference in your campaign success.

Here are some tips for e-commerce for using Facebook Insights.

Using an Excel spreadsheet, create a column for each of these categories: website information, magazine/subscriptions, stores, public figures.

Category 1: Website Information
This category includes any site that is an information source and gives free value/ content such as blogs and guides.

Category 2: Magazines/ Subscriptions
Magazines or subscriptions that people are spending money on to pay for a service, such as a monthly cooking magazine. Since they are already spending money in the niche, they have a stronger buyer’s intent than people interested in sites with only free information. If someone is already spending money in the niche, they are more likely to buy from you.

Category 3: Stores
People in this group also already have a buyer’s intent but the magazines/ subscriptions category can sometimes be better than stores because, with stores, people don’t necessarily buy.

Category 4: Public Figures
Public figures such as celebrities in your niche. In this category, people are more likely to engage such as comment, share, and like your posts because they are into the trends and media. They might watch a lot of T.V. or read a lot of information on the net. They are the raving fans. They do not have as strong of a buyer’s intent as the magazines or stores categories but they are good to use if you are starting to build your audiences since they are more likely to engage with what you send them.

Use Facebook Audience Insights to find good interests for each category in your Excel sheet. For example, let’s say your niche is kayaking.

Go into Facebook insights and in the interests section, start by doing a broad search by typing in “kayaking.” Each time you search for an interest, under the “page likes” section, open up the page links for the first 10 categories. The pages that these links lead to should be closely related to your niche. The audience size for an interest should be at least 20k.

Search Google
You can find more interests by using Google search. For example, you can find magazines related to kayaking and then put their names into the interest section of Facebook insights.

Affinity Score
To check if your interest is strong enough, you can also look at the affinity score in Facebook Insights. If the first thing listed on the page like affinity section is the same as what you had typed into the interest section, that is very good. It is also good if it is one of the first 3 listed, but sometimes it is further down. The affinity score indicates how likely a person is on Facebook to like the page versus other pages. Anything over 100 affinity is good.