K atie c ouric

Targeting Campaign Objectives
A part of targeting is choosing the type of ad that will reach your campaign
objectives. You can target the ad to gain video views, website traffic, lead
generation, post engagement, event responses, and the like. In my
experience, I have found that each objective gets weighed differently in
Facebook’s auction.
Let’s say you have a video you want to promote, but you choose the
lead generation objective. Your cost per view is going to be inflated because
Facebook won’t look at it from a cost-per-view perspective. It’ll try to drive
as many leads as possible. So on any video ad, whether it’s to build lead
generation or traffic, I typically recommend starting with the video view
objective. Doing so allows you to drive down the cost per view to as low as
possible to reach the largest audience. Reaching more people means gaining
more opportunities to get others to share your message for you. More
sharing means more earned lift, which brings down your overall cost per
lead. And, of course, this is also obviously great for those who want to

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generate brand awareness and large numbers. However, if people are not
sharing, you may be best suited with a lead generation or conversion if
you’re just interested in selling a direct product.
If I were to create a hierarchy, post engagement or video views would
be at the top of the list, if you have good content. If you have average to
below-average content with the main objective of just trying to sell a
product, then use lead generation or the website conversions objective. Test
and learn—as I’ve mentioned, it’s the only way you’ll figure out what
works best for your brand.
Retargeting and Look-Alike Audiences
After some testing and learning you’ll know the demographic and interests
of your core audience and you’ll start to observe the type of people who are
most likely to share your message. Once you’ve collected that data you’ll
want to be sure to retarget the people who 
engage
with your brand.
Erick Brownstein of Shareability explains that his team always retargets
to get new content in front of those who engaged with the first set of
content. He points out that if a person was willing to engage once, they’re
very likely to engage again. His team tests “a gazillion different target
groups” and then, based on the audience that converts or takes the desired
action, starts building look-alike audiences and tests those as well.
Tim Greenberg, chief community officer at the World Surf League, also
agrees that it’s smart to find look-alike audiences. First, he figures out who
visits the company’s website by using Facebook Pixel, an analytics tool that
helps you measure the effectiveness of your advertising, to track website
visitors (you can also use Pixel to examine the actions people take on your
website and better understand how to reach your intended audience
2
). Next,
Greenberg checks to see who’s registered for the World Surf League
mailing list. Then he analyzes the people who’ve visited the World Surf
League platform and those who’ve watched their live stream—these are the
core users, the core fans who take the initiative to come and watch their
content. Greenberg’s team simply needs to alert these people with an
awareness message that the content is there.

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When this process is complete, they focus on the second ring of viewers
—they extend out to 
look-alike audiences that mirror the original fans
. This
audience comprises people who have similar-looking demographics,
interests, and additional parameters. They may not yet be fans of surfing,
and may not have visited the website, but perhaps will be inclined to do so.
His team groups these people into a different targeting bucket and sends
them a similar campaign that’s adjacent to their core campaign.
Greenberg’s team has discovered that the further they go out from the
core and core-plus audiences (the audience that has similar interests and
characteristics to, but is not part of, the core audience), the less likely
people are to convert into watching a surf contest, even if they’ve liked a
piece of content. So his team tries to be really careful. They’ve discovered
that hitting audiences that either look like or are their core consumers are
the best people to target. Having more likes may look good, but when it
comes to actually converting to some form of action it’s important to stick
to the audience discovered through the data.
The Facebook platform has brought the World Surf League a lot of new
fans. Because of Facebook’s scale, the league has amassed an audience they
wouldn’t have been likely to reach otherwise. It’s allowed them to capture
data and test their product and content on new audiences—to drive new
fans to their owned and operated sites. Greenberg’s team has built an engine
to capture new fans and retarget them with either a merchandise message, a
tune-in message, or a download-app message. It’s been really beneficial for
their company.