Hello Facebook Advertisers 🙋♂️
Robert Collier, said to be one of the old pioneers of copywriting, once said:
“Always enter the conversation already occurring in the prospect’s mind.”
I am different to you and you are different to me, durrr.
The communication content, types, style etc l like will, of course, be different to what you like and vice-versa.
Nothing new.
But, I have to start this off with some obvious truths to setup the punch line later on….
There are 7.6 billion humans and the marketing industry has tried to pigeonhole those 7.6 billion people on things like:
• Geographic’s;
• Demographics
• Psychographics; and
• Behaviours.
Humans are vastly complex and complicated, far more than we currently understand, and attempting to describe 7.6 billion people based on those criteria is so rudimentary, it’s laughable.
There is no way those 4 categories can ever accurately encapsulate a human.
And even when you combine those segmentation criteria (and the sub-segmentation criteria, such as problem awareness, buying temperature and so on) with the need for multiple sales communications , in different modalities and lengths, you could end up with hundreds-of-billions of combinations of segments.
How could one ever list that many segments, practically?!
One way, with the help of machine learning, will get us closer: we’ll be able to track every behaviour and thought that occurred before a purchase happened and extrapolate that back in time to predict purchase behaviour and deliver the perfect sales communications at the perfect times. I think we will be able to do that for the entire human population at some point.
Artificial intelligence will likely be able to then create specific sales communications to match those billions of combinations of segments and deliver multiple specific sales communications customized to billions of individuals via distribution channels (of the future) at the snap-of-our-fingers/click of a button (or whatever the future equivalent is).
But, we are not there yet!
Regardless, what do virtually all brands do?
They create one sales message and distribute it to every segment that is somewhat related.
That is so far away from what Robert Collier wanted from us.
And it shows many brands have made no progress over the last 100 years from John Wanamaker’s dilemma:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted: the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
The wise brands:
1. Create communication around different awarenesses of problem, solution and product;
2. Translate it to different modalities and lengths;
3. Retrofit specific targeting messaging such as callouts; and
4. Distribute each version to the corresponding segment.
Now, recall, currently you only really have access to criteria such as geographic’s, demographics, psychographics and behaviours, so you may only have 100-or-so relevant segments in total, not billions, which ultimately is limited by the sophistication of current distribution channels.
As you know, when you are setting up Ads, you can target you Audience based on Geographic’s (location), Demographics (age, gender etc) and also “Detailed Targeting”:
- More Demographic’s;
- Interests (psychographics); and
- Behaviours.
Ya know, the standard marketing segmentation categories!
Now, with Facebook Ads, under “Detailed Targeting” you can either:
- Browse those three categories (you can download the full list as of February 2020 here for free (no email opt-in required): or
- Start typing a keyword and get suggestions.
This is nothing new.
“Browse” (as of writing), gives you 323 categories (including related breadcrumb categories).
“Suggestions” displays the top 25 results for the keyword(s) you entered: for example, the top 25 results for the keywords “ice hockey”.
Now, this is not ALL the “detailed” demographics, interests or behaviours you can target on Facebook!
I am not sure if that is obvious to everyone?
Maybe, maybe not..
There are 2,380,000,000 Facebook users and Facebook has thousands if not hundreds-of-thousands of data points on every single user.
“Suggestions” displays the top 25 keyword results because the drop-down menu would be miles long (more on this shortly) and would be a horrible user-experience!
It would be utter overwhelming for the Ad user so, they only display the top 25 to make it manageable.
If you type three keywords (not like the two before) for example “ice hockey club”, into “Detailed Targeting”, “Suggestions” displays the top 25 keyword results for that combination (which gives another 25 different keywords or lack thereof).
The problem with this method of finding “Detailed Targeting” criteria is that these 25 suggestions have audiences of millions of people — meaning they are not very targeted or relevant.
That, and Facebook shows the same 25 results to all 7 million advertisers on its platform.
The more competition for the same targeting criteria means the ad price go up.
You need to hunt there no one else is hunting.
Doing this means Ad prices go down and your ads also become more relevant to your audience.
Yet, this highlight the other major problem with Facebook showing the same 25 targeting results — you don’t know exactly what keywords you can target on Facebook or not.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem!
You don’t know what you don’t know!
For example, I cannot target “ice hockey lovers” on Facebook Ads.
That seems like a relevant and useful targeting criteria prospects who likes ice hockey.
The only way I would know that is typing it in the Suggestions and it returning no results.
I can however target “Penn State Nittany Lions men’s ice hockey” on Facebook.
My guess is that anyone interested in “Penn State Nittany Lions men’s ice hockey” likes (or even loves) ice hockey!
But how would I know that?!
It’s a matter of typing in keywords, one-at-a-time and patiently waiting for Facebook Ads Manager to populate possible results.
That is a lot of wasted time.
Facebook’s Ad Manager interface for targeting research is broken.
So how do you find all the thousands of targetable “detailed” demographics, interests or behaviours that are hidden from the “public” and are still available in Facebook Ads Manager interface WITHOUT wasting time?
- Go here: https://developers.facebook.com/apps;
- Click “Add a New App”;
- Enter “Display Name” as anything you choose;
- Click “Create App ID”;
- Go here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer;
- Under “Facebook App” drop-down, select the “Display Name” you created before;
- Click “Get Access Token”;
- Copy the long string of numbers;
- Replace “your-access-token” below by pasting the long string of numbers from before;
- https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adinterest&q=[Query]&limit=10000&locale=en_US&access_token=your-access-token;
- Replace “Query” with the keyword you want to search;
- Copy/paste this new URL into your browser and hit enter; and
- Repeat 11-12.
That is a lot of effort and take a lot of time and can’t easily read or export:
- Total audience size;
- The keyword(s) category (if applicable); and
- The keyword(s) topic.
For further analysis or copy/paste into “Detailed Targeting” in Facebook Ads Manager.
It is also exactly how I found you and how you landed on this page!
How meta.
Nor does the above method allow you to:
- Search for interest suggestions based on the original keyword;
- Search for employers (and employees of employers);
- Browse demographics;
- Browse interests;
- Browse behaviors;
- Browse languages;
- Browse countries; and
- Browse regions.
There is a way to do all of this, and I have written about it here.
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