Marketer’s spend tons of time identifying audiences that will be targeted, useful, and successful for their Facebook Ads campaigns before they launch. With the wide array of targeting options, the possibilities seem almost endless. But it’s also important to make sure you’re excluding certain audiences as well. Depending on your campaign goals, specifically with lead gen clients, it doesn’t always make sense to target certain folks.
Typically for lead gen clients, the end goal is to generate leads. (Hence the name, “lead gen”.) But you don’t always want to pay for the same lead twice. Unless you’re running remarketing campaigns, your goal is most likely, more realistically, to generate net new leads. With that in mind, here are a couple audiences to exclude from your next Facebook campaign.
Employees of the Client
There’s almost no reason you would target your client’s customers in their lead gen campaign. But depending on their Facebook activity, or activity on the website, they might end up falling into your target audience. This is an easy one.
You’ll add these guys as an exclusion at the ad set level. Once you’ve selected your ad set, scroll to the targeting suggestions and click ‘Edit’.
In the Detailed Targeting section, click “Exclude”. This will pop out an option to “Exclude people who match”. Click Demographics > Work > Employers.
If there’s multiple variations of the company’s name, you might want to add all of them, just to cover all the bases. This will prevent your ads from showing to anyone that has your client listed as their employer on Facebook. While not everyone updates this information, you can at least exclude the few who do. This will save some ad spend that could potentially get spent on overly excited employees clicking on the ads.
People Who Are Connected to Your Page
If your goal is remarketing, this might not be a good choice for you. But if you’re trying to only target folks who haven’t engaged with your brand yet, it’s an easy call to make. Someone connected to your page is clearly already aware of you.
This is also done at the ad set level. In the Audience section (same previous directions as above), scroll to the Connections section. Click the Add a connection type dropdown and then “people who like or follow your Page”.
Then select your client’s page in the dropdown and click save. This will prevent the ads from showing repeatedly to people who already likely interact with your brand on a regular basis.
If you’re looking for additional suggestions on Facebook targeting, check out this post about separating locals from tourists. There’s an almost infinite supply of targeting options for Facebook out there – we’d love to hear about some of your favorite Facebook targeting or exclusion options in the comments!
