How to Choose Facebook Ad Audience

A brilliant ad creative shown to the wrong people is just a wasted budget. Mastering Facebook ad targeting is what separates campaigns that drain your bank account from those that deliver a consistent stream of customers. This guide breaks down exactly how to find, build, and refine the right audience for your Facebook ads, moving from the foundational concepts to actionable strategies you can use today.

The Three Flavors of Facebook Audiences

Before you touch a single setting in Ads Manager, you need to understand the three primary types of audiences you can build. All successful targeting strategies are a mix of these three categories.

1. Core Audiences

This is the starting point for most advertisers. Core Audiences allow you to target people based on criteria you manually select. Think of this as building an audience from scratch using Facebook's massive user data pool.

Your primary targeting options include:

• Demographics: This covers the basics like age, gender, location (down to a specific zip code), and language. You can also target based on life events (newly engaged, new parents) or education level.
• Interests: This is what most people think of when they imagine Facebook targeting. You can target people based on the pages they’ve liked, topics they engage with, and related keywords. Examples include interests like “hiking,” “digital marketing,” “Whole Foods Market,” or even specific competitors.
• Behaviors: This category is based on user activities tracked by Facebook both on and off the platform. This includes purchase behavior (e.g., “Engaged Shoppers”), device usage (iPhone 14 Pro users), or travel habits (frequent travelers).

Core Audiences are best for reaching new people who have never heard of you before. We'll use this for what are often called "cold traffic" campaigns.

2. Custom Audiences

This is where targeting gets powerful. Custom Audiences let you show ads to people who have already interacted with your business in some way. These are your "warm" audiences because they have some familiarity with your brand. They are, by far, your most valuable (and highest-converting) audiences.

You can create Custom Audiences from several sources:

• Your Website Traffic: Using the Meta Pixel (a small snippet of code on your website), you can create audiences of people who visited your site, visited specific pages (like a pricing or product page), or spent a certain amount of time there.
• Customer List: You can securely upload a list of customer emails or phone numbers. Facebook will match this data to user profiles to create an audience of your existing customers.
• App Activity: If you have a mobile app, you can build audiences of people who have taken specific actions within your app.
• Facebook & Instagram Engagement: Create lists of people who have engaged with your content recently. This includes actions like watching your videos, liking your page, visiting your profile, or saving a post.

3. Lookalike Audiences

Once you have a high-quality Custom Audience, you can ask Facebook to build a Lookalike Audience. Facebook analyzes the common traits and characteristics (demographics, interests, behaviors) of the people in your source audience and then finds millions of other people on the platform who are remarkably similar.

For example, you could take your Custom Audience of "past purchasers" and create a Lookalike Audience. Facebook will then deliver your ads to a brand new group of people who are statistically very likely to be interested in your products because they look like your existing best customers. This is the single most powerful way to scale your ad campaigns and find new customers efficiently.

A Step-By-Step Guide to Choosing Your Audience

Knowing the audience types is one thing, applying them is another. Here’s a strategic approach to structure your campaigns for the best results, starting with your most valuable prospects first.

Step 1: Start with Your "Low-Hanging Fruit" (Custom Audiences)

Don’t start your advertising journey by targeting complete strangers. Begin with retargeting campaigns aimed at the warm audiences who already know you exist. They are the most likely to convert, giving you early wins and positive performance data.

Build these essential Custom Audiences first:

• Website Visitors (Last 30 Days): This is a great, all-purpose retargeting audience. Show them ads that remind them of your brand and what you offer.
• Specific Page Visitors (e.g., Pricing Page, Checkout Page): People who visit these pages show strong buying intent. Create a specific Custom Audience for them (e.g., "Visited Pricing Page but Didn't Sign Up - Last 14 Days") and show them a targeted ad addressing potential objections or offering a special discount.
• Your Customer List: Upload your email list to either exclude them from new customer campaigns (saving money) or to upsell them on a new product or service. This is your "VIP list."
• Instagram & Facebook Engagers (Last 90 Days): This group actively likes, comments, and saves your posts. They're clearly interested in what you do, even if they haven't visited your site yet. Target them with content that encourages the next step, like visiting a specific landing page.

Step 2: Find New Customers By Cloning Your Best Ones (Lookalike Audiences)

After setting up your retargeting campaigns, your next focus should be on finding new, high-quality prospects. This is where Lookalikes come in.

The quality of your Lookalike Audience is directly tied to the quality of your source (Custom) audience. A Lookalike based on your apathetic website visitors won't perform as well as one based on your absolute best customers.

The best source audiences for creating Lookalikes are:

• Your Customer List/Purchasers: This is the gold standard. Create a Lookalike based on people who have actually given you money.
• High-Value Website Visitors: An audience of people who visited your checkout or confirmation page is an excellent source.
• High-Engagement Users: A Lookalike created from people who watch 75% or more of your video ads can also be highly effective.

When you create a Lookalike, start with a 1% audience size in your target countries. This means Facebook finds the top 1% of users who are most similar to your source audience. As you scale, you can test broader audiences like 2%, 3%, or even 5%.

Step 3: Test New Waters Incrementally (Core Audiences)

While Custom and Lookalike audiences will provide your best ROI, you also need to find completely new pockets of customers. You’ll use Core Audiences (interest-based targeting) for this, but do it strategically.

Avoid the common mistake of throwing dozens of unrelated interests into one campaign. This prevents you from ever knowing which interest is actually driving results.

A structured approach to interest targeting:

1. Brainstorm Your Customer Persona: Don't just guess. Who are they? What do they read? What tools do they use? Which influencers do they follow? What other brands do they buy from?
2. Group Similar Interests: Instead of one giant audience set, create small, themed groups of interests. For example:
3. Run Separate Ad Sets: Dedicate a separate ad set (and budget) for each interest group. Let them run for a few days.
4. Analyze and Refine: After getting enough data, review which ad set performed best (e.g., lowest cost-per-click, highest conversion rate). From there, you can turn off the underperformers and reallocate your budget to the winners.

This testing method moves you from guessing to making data-driven decisions about who your ideal cold audience really is.

Best Practices for Audience Targeting

Finally, a few key pointers will help you improve your results and avoid common pitfalls.

• Use Detailed Targeting Expansion Sparingly: At the ad set level, there's a checkbox for "Advantage detailed targeting." This allows Facebook to dynamically expand your reach beyond the interests you've chosen if its algorithm thinks it will get you better results. Leave this unchecked when you are explicitly testing specific interests. Turn it on for campaigns where you trust Facebook's algorithm to find customers for you based on its learning.
• Layer Your Targeting to Get Specific: You can narrow your audience by layering interests. For example, for a luxury real estate agency, you might target people who are interested in "Zillow" AND an interest like "Luxury goods". This ensures your audience isn't too broad.
• Always Use Exclusions: This is a pro move that beginners often overlook. In your cold traffic campaigns (for new customers), be sure to exclude your Custom Audiences of recent website visitors and existing customers. Why show acquisition ads to people who have already bought from you?
• Pay Attention to Audience Size: An audience that is too narrow (e.g., less than 50,000 people) can lead to high costs and ad fatigue. One that is too broad (many millions) may not be specific enough. Aim for a healthy defined audience in the hundreds of thousands to a few million for most campaigns to start.
• Remember Your Audience isn't Static: What works today may not work next month. Continuously test new interests, build new Lookalikes from fresh customer data, and refine your retargeting windows to keep your campaigns performing at their best.

Final Thoughts

Choosing your Facebook ad audience is an exercise in structured testing, not a search for a secret targeting option. The process is a logical flow: start by retargeting the warm leads who already know you, use that data to create Lookalikes to find new customers, and then systematically test cold interests to expand your reach. With this methodical approach, you'll move from spending money to investing it intelligently.

Of course, identifying the winning audiences inside Facebook Ads Manager often means wading through endless columns of data for hours. To understand which audiences and campaigns are truly driving revenue, we built Graphed to connect your ad platforms and e-commerce stores. You can use plain English to build real-time dashboards that show you exactly what’s working. You can simply ask, "show me my Facebook campaign performance broken down by audience this month," and get an instant, clear report without ever building a spreadsheet.