Facebook Ad Targeting: Tips & Strategies for Conversions (2025)

Facebook ad targeting helps you reach specific audience groups by looking at things like age, interests, past purchases, or even if they’ve visited your site before. The better you understand your targeting options, the easier it is to reach the right people — whether you're going broad or getting super specific.

In this article, we’ll cover: 

• What Facebook ad targeting is, and how it actually works
• The different ways you can target audiences, from interests to behaviors
• Advanced strategies to stop wasting ad spend and boost results
• Simple tips to make your targeting smarter (without overcomplicating things)

Let’s start by talking about what Facebook ad targeting is.

What is Facebook Ad targeting?

Facebook ad targeting (now in the Meta Ad Manager) helps you define who you want to reach, so your ads are more likely to be shown to people who might actually care. 

Instead of broadcasting to everyone, you can focus on groups like potential customers, recent site visitors, or people who’ve interacted with your posts. While Facebook does its best to deliver your ads to the right audience, it’s not an exact science — there’s a bit of wiggle room in how it’s delivered.

Facebook uses a mix of data points to help you build your audiences. This includes details users share like age, gender, and location, as well as how they behave on Facebook and Instagram (such as the content they engage with or the pages they follow). 

It also looks at how people interact with your business on these platforms, like commenting on a post or watching a video. If you’ve set up the Facebook Pixel, activity on your website can also factor into how audiences are built.

Behind the scenes, Facebook’s algorithm uses machine learning to figure out which people within your target audience are most likely to take the action you care about, like clicking, watching a video, or making a purchase. 

During the learning phase, Facebook is still figuring out how to deliver your ad effectively, so the more quality data it receives early on, the better. With proper event tracking in place, ad delivery improves over time as your campaign gathers data, helping you reach the right people without wasting budget.

Why Facebook audience targeting matters

When you’re paying for every click or impression, the last thing you want is to waste money on the wrong audience. That’s where good targeting comes in — it helps you connect with people who are actually interested in what you’re offering.

The more relevant your audience, the better your ad tends to perform. That means higher click-through rates, lower costs, and more conversions. It also tells Facebook’s algorithm that your ad is working, which often results in better placement and cheaper delivery over time.

What’s the difference between broad targeting and precise targeting?

There’s a big difference between casting a wide net and speaking directly to the right people. Broad targeting can work if you're trying to scale fast, but precise targeting is where you'll usually find the best return, especially if you’re working with a smaller budget.

Your Facebook audience targeting toolbox: what you can use

Facebook gives you a variety of targeting tools to help you reach the right people. Some are ideal for building awareness, while others are better for re-engaging past visitors or loyal customers. Understanding how each one works and when to use them can help you build smarter campaigns from the ground up. Here’s how each method works:

Core audience targeting

Core targeting is ideal for finding new people who haven’t interacted with your brand, but match the kind of audience you’re trying to reach. It uses Facebook’s massive dataset to match your ads with users based on their profile info and behavior.

Facebook creates interest profiles based on how users behave across Facebook and Instagram. For example, someone who frequently watches cooking tutorials, follows food influencers, and joins meal prep groups may be tagged under interests like “home cooking” or “meal planning.” If you're a kitchenware brand or run a meal delivery service, this is exactly the kind of person you’d want your ad to reach.

You can use core targeting to define your audience by:

• Demographics: You can choose who sees your ad based on age, gender, location, language, relationship status, education level, and more.
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• Interests and lifestyle: You can target people based on what they engage with, like hobbies, TV shows, pages they follow, or even favorite foods.

This type of targeting is especially useful at the top of the sales funnel when you’re trying to introduce your brand to fresh eyes.

Custom audiences

Custom audiences let you target people who have already interacted with your brand in some way. These users are typically warmer leads — they’ve shown interest in your brand, visited your site, or engaged with your content. Instead of starting from scratch, you’re continuing a conversation.

You can build custom audiences from:

• Website visitors: Retarget people who visited your site, viewed a product, or started checkout but didn’t finish. For example, an e-commerce store could show a 10% off coupon ad to people who looked at a product twice but didn’t check out. Often, you can also use this type of audience to send “your cart is waiting” emails with coupons.
  
  
• Email lists: Upload your customer or lead list to Facebook, and it will match those email addresses to user accounts. You can then run a campaign targeting those specific accounts. For instance, a B2B SaaS company could run a campaign only for past demo signups who didn’t convert.
  
  
• In-app activity or platform engagement: You can also create custom audiences based on app usage or engagement with your content on Facebook or Instagram. A good example of this is an app ad targeting users who installed the app but haven’t opened it in over two weeks.

Lookalike audiences

Lookalikes are especially helpful when you're ready to grow your reach without totally guessing who to target. They help you reach new people  like your existing customers, based on behavior, interests, and demographics. Lookalikes work well for customer acquisition, especially when paired with tested creatives that already work with your original audience.

Here’s what you can do:

• Start with a source audience: This could be your best customers, your email list, or high-intent site visitors. For example, you can use your top 1,000 spenders as a good base for a lookalike audience.
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• Let Facebook do the matching: Facebook finds new users who closely resemble your source in behavior, demographics, and interests.
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• Control the similarity range: A 1% lookalike is the closest match, while 5% or 10% opens it up to a broader (but less precise) group. For example, a subscription box company might start with a 1% lookalike for conversions, then expand to 3–5% to reach more users after a while.

Behavioral targeting

Instead of just looking at who someone is, behavioral targeting focuses on what they do. Meta primarily uses on-platform activity like video views, shopping behavior, and app interactions to identify patterns and show your ads to people who are more likely to take action. 

While partner data played a bigger role in the past, privacy updates (like Apple’s iOS 14.5 changes) mean behavioral targeting now relies more heavily on consented, first-party data and what users do within Meta’s apps.

You can target based on:

• Purchase behavior: Target people who recently made purchases online or are likely to buy certain types of products. For example, a skincare brand could target users who’ve recently purchased beauty products online.
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• Device usage: You can reach users based on the device they use, like iPhones, Androids, or even people who mainly browse on desktops. A mobile gaming app might target ads at Android users if that’s where most conversions happen.
  
  
• Travel activity: Facebook can detect recent travel, frequent flyers, or people planning trips, which is handy for travel-related offers or timing-specific campaigns. For example, a luggage company could target users who recently searched for flights or tagged themselves at an airport.

Engagement-based targeting

These people already interacted with your content, so you’re not starting from scratch — they’ve already noticed you. This type of targeting is great for mid-funnel strategies, like building trust, answering objections, or encouraging the final conversion.

You can target:

• Video viewers: Consider showing follow-up ads to people who watched part of your video, whether it’s 3 seconds, 15 seconds, or 95% of the video.
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• Post engagers: Try to build an audience from people who liked, commented, or shared your Facebook or Instagram posts.
  
  
• Messenger and ad clickers: You can also show ads to people who messaged your page or clicked a past ad but didn’t convert.

Improving your targeting with advanced strategies

Once you’ve nailed the basics, it’s time to fine-tune to help you avoid wasted spend, improve conversions, and get more out of every ad. Here are some more advanced things you can do:

Refine audience segmentation: stop wasting ads on the wrong people

The more specific your audience segments, the better your ad performance tends to be. Instead of lumping everyone into one big group, break your audiences into smaller segments based on things like behavior, funnel stage, or purchase history.

For example, you can segment your audiences and:

• Run one set of ads for people who visited your homepage but didn’t explore deeper
• Run another set for people who added items to their cart
• And a third set for past customers with an upsell or referral offer

You can also use Audience Insights to learn more about who's engaging with your content, including what devices they use, their interests, and even their activity levels. These insights can guide your segmentation decisions and help you tailor ads that actually hit the mark.

Here’s a tip: Watch for audience overlap. If the same person is in multiple ad sets, your ads may compete against each other and drive up costs. You can use Facebook’s Audience Overlap tool to spot and fix this.

How do I avoid Facebook ad fatigue with targeting?

Ad fatigue is a real problem, but thankfully, avoiding it isn’t as hard as you might think. The first step is to rotate your creative often and make sure you’re not hammering the same people over and over. Then, keep your segments clean and refresh your ad copy regularly to keep things feeling new.

If you don’t have the resources to get new creatives regularly, don’t worry. There are ways for you to make new creatives (or refresh your current ones) without the need for a full team of designers or copywriters. You can try:

• Visual editing tools: Great for quickly tweaking existing graphics, changing colors, or swapping out headlines. You can even create ad templates and just update the content as needed. Canva has a free plan with limitations, or you can get a paid plan to unlock many of the pro features.
  
  
• AI ad generators: These tools can help you create new image, video, and audio ads based on your product or messaging. For example, AI tools like Bestever let you generate multiple versions from a single script or input, which is great for fast testing.
  
  
• Caption rewriting tools: If your visuals still work, just updating the headline or primary text can give your ad a fresh feel. Tools like Copy.ai or Jasper can help you brainstorm new variations quickly.
  
  
• User-generated content (UGC): You can reuse content from customers or influencers — just make sure it still fits your message. Even small edits like trimming, reordering, or adding a new voiceover can make it feel new.
  
  
• Dynamic templates: Platforms like Meta’s Creative Hub or third-party ad builders often let you plug in new product images or messaging into pre-built layouts. This way, you can refresh your creatives without starting from scratch.

Exclusion targeting: when not to show your ad

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is tell Facebook who not to target. These exclusions clean up your audience, save your ad budget, and help focus your efforts on people who are more likely to convert.

Use exclusion targeting to:

• Skip existing customers when running a lead-generation campaign
  
• Remove people who already purchased a product you’re promoting
  
• Avoid low-quality leads or users who bounced quickly from your site

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you’re running a discount ad for new customers. You’d want to exclude past purchasers so they don’t see an offer they can’t use. Or, if you’re promoting a high-end product, you might exclude people who didn’t stay on your site long enough to indicate interest.

Tip: You’ll need to set exclusions for each ad set manually. Just use custom audiences like people who already bought from you or are on your email list to tell Facebook who not to show the ad to.

Mix and match: stacking targeting methods for better results

Combining different types of targeting helps you zero in on exactly who you want to reach. 

This multi-layer approach is useful when you're running full-funnel campaigns. For example, a cold audience might get interest and demographic targeting. A middle-funnel group could get behavioral filters and a product demo. Then your warmest leads, people who visited your pricing page, get hit with a time-limited offer that might just urge them to take action.

Here’s how you can mix and match:

• Combine demographics + interests. For example, you can target women aged 25–34 who are interested in yoga and live in San Diego.
  
  
• Layer behavioral data on top — like targeting frequent online shoppers.
  
  
• Add engagement filters to make sure you only target people who engaged with your brand in the past 30 days.

You can also test progressive audience expansion, a smart way to scale your campaigns without losing relevance along the way. Instead of going broad from the start and hoping something works, begin with a narrow, well-defined audience. This could be a custom audience of people who visited your product page or a 1% lookalike built from your top customers.

Once you find a creative and audience combo that performs well, you can slowly expand. Try increasing your lookalike percentage to 3% or 5%, or layer in new interest or behavior groups that are similar to what’s already working.

Let Facebook do some of the work with dynamic ads and smart delivery

Facebook’s tools have gotten smarter, and sometimes the best strategy is letting the algorithm take the wheel (at least for part of the process).

Dynamic ads aim to show the right products to the right people, based on what they’ve already viewed or added to their cart. If someone browsed three pairs of shoes on your website, they’ll likely see those exact products (or similar and related ones) in your ad.

AI-powered delivery uses machine learning to figure out who’s most likely to take the action you want. When you select a goal like “purchase” or “add to cart,” Facebook adjusts who it shows your ads to based on your past ad performance data.

You can also use automated targeting, where Facebook tests different audience combinations for you and prioritizes the ones that perform best.

Letting Facebook take the wheel works especially well when:

• You have a large product catalog
  
• You’re running retargeting for e-commerce
  
• You don’t have time to manually segment every audience

Best practices for better targeting

Getting your targeting right is only half the job. To really make your ads work, you need to pair the right audience with the right creative, manage your budget wisely, and keep a close eye on performance. Here are some best practices you can follow:

Match your creative to your audience

The more specific your audience, the more tailored your message should be. You don’t want to talk to a first-time visitor the same way you’d talk to a loyal customer.

Here’s how to match things up:

• Speak their language: If you’re targeting new moms, you can lead with messaging like “Finally, baby gear that actually makes life easier.” Soft colors, simple visuals, and calm music might also perform better. If you’re going after frequent travelers, your ad might say, “Flight delayed again? Here’s how to make the wait bearable.”
  
  
• Use visuals that resonate: The images or videos in your ad should reflect your audience’s lifestyle, challenges, or goals. It might be good to do some competitor research to see what others are doing so you can get a better idea of what you can do. Alternatively, you can do some audience research and look at social media and other platforms as well.
  
  
• Test variations: A/B testing is how you figure out what actually works. Try different headlines, post sizes, images, or calls to action with each audience segment to see what resonates with them. Even small changes in wording or visuals can make a big difference in how your ad performs.

Budget smarter, not harder

It’s easy to throw money at ads and hope something sticks, but a little planning with your budget goes a long way. Here’s what to keep in mind:

• Split your spend by audience type: You might want to start with a higher budget for custom and lookalike audiences since these tend to convert better. Interest-based audiences are great for reach but may take longer to dial in.
  
  
• Watch how each group performs: If one audience is eating up your budget without converting, it’s time to pause or adjust ads for that segment. Look at metrics like cost per result, return on ad spend (ROAS), and click-through rate (CTR).
  
  
• Use Facebook’s built-in tools: Campaign budget optimization can help spread your budget across ad sets automatically based on performance. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good place to start if you’re managing multiple audiences.

Watch the numbers and track what actually matters

Data can be overwhelming, but a few key metrics will tell you most of what you need to know. You can track:

• Cost per result: Are you paying too much for each click, lead, or sale? If this number’s creeping up, your targeting or creative may need a refresh. For example, if your cost per lead jumped from $4 to $10 overnight, it might mean your audience is fatigued.
• CTR: A low click-through rate could mean your ad isn’t connecting with your audience. What counts as a “good” CTR really depends on your industry, goals, and audience. A 2% CTR might be great in one campaign and just okay in another. The key is to compare it to your past results and industry averages. If your CTR is consistently low, it could mean your ad isn’t grabbing attention — try tweaking the headline, visual, or call to action to see what clicks.
• Frequency: If people see your ad too many times, they’ll start tuning it out. That was what happened back in the day when people started ignoring ads on a web page. It became so common a term was even coined for it — banner blindness. Watch for performance drops when your frequency rises, especially for cold audiences. In some retargeting campaigns, a higher frequency (5–7) can still convert well if ad creatives rotate.
  
  
• Conversion rate: Getting clicks is nice, but are those clicks turning into sales or signups? If lots of people are clicking through but nobody’s buying, your landing page might not match your ad’s promise, or you might be targeting the wrong segment. Start making adjustments to see whether your conversion rate starts to improve.
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• Attribution: Use Meta’s Pixel and Conversions API to track which clicks or views lead to real results like purchases or signups. You can adjust the attribution window in Ads Manager (like 7-day click or 1-day view) to better understand what’s driving conversions. 

Frequently asked questions

What’s the best audience to target on Facebook?

If you're running a campaign to attract new customers, a lookalike audience based on your top buyers is a strong starting point. For example, if you upload a list of your past purchasers, Facebook can find people with similar behaviors and interests. There’s no single “best” audience, it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve. 

How big should a Facebook audience be?

Bigger isn’t always better. For brand awareness, a broad audience gives Facebook’s system more data to work with, which can lead to better delivery. But for retargeting, smaller and more focused audiences, like people who visited your product page or watched your video, are more likely to convert. 

What’s the difference between interest targeting and lookalike audiences?

Interest targeting is based on what people engage with across Facebook and Instagram — like favorite brands, TV shows, or hobbies. If someone follows a bunch of skincare influencers and beauty pages, you can reach them by selecting interests like "skincare" or "clean beauty." Lookalike audiences, however, are based on real data you provide.

How often should you refresh your targeting?

You don’t need to change your targeting constantly, but you should check in regularly. If your cost per result is climbing or your click-through rate is dropping, it might be time to refresh your audience or rotate in new creatives. For example, if you’ve been targeting the same interest group for a month and results are slowing down, try adding exclusions or layering in new behaviors to shake things up.

Can you target people who interacted with Instagram?

Yes, and it’s one of the easiest ways to retarget people who already know your brand. You can create a custom audience from people who viewed your stories, liked your posts, or visited your Instagram profile. For example, if someone watched 75% of your product demo reel but didn’t click through, you can follow up with an ad offering a limited-time discount or free shipping to bring them back.

Can I combine different targeting options in one campaign?

Yes, and doing so can actually make your ads more effective. You can layer interests, demographics, behaviors, and even exclusions to create more precise audience segments. Combining targeting options gives you more control and helps you reach the people who are most likely to take action.

How Bestever helps you improve your Facebook ad targeting

If your Facebook ads aren’t converting or you're seeing mixed results, your targeting might be off, or your creative just isn’t clicking. That’s where Bestever can help. 

We make ad optimization as simple as pressing a button to create an automatic campaign. Our platform uses computer vision algorithms to analyze creatives and machine learning to ensure your campaigns perform at their best. Here’s how:

• Quickly analyze ad performance instantly: Bestever’s Ad Analysis tool provides real-time feedback on your ads' Engagement, Conversion Potential, Budget Efficiency, and Creative Impact. Instead of guessing why an ad isn’t working, you’ll get a clear breakdown of what’s holding it back — whether it’s weak visuals, poor targeting, or budget misalignment.
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• Optimize your ads before you burn budget: Instead of waiting 7+ days and spending thousands to see if an ad works, Bestever pinpoints weaknesses before you waste ad spend. Our AI highlights underperforming elements and suggests improvements — so you can pivot your strategy early and avoid a never-ending learning phase.
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• Review your old ads and get ideas: Bestever can look at historical data in your ad manager accounts and make suggestions based on past performance results. You’ll be able to see the patterns in high-performing ads, whether it’s a carousel format that drove 30% more engagement or a headline variation that boosted CTR by 20%. Use these insights to refine your next campaign and double down on what converts.
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• Know who to target: Not sure if your audience is too broad or too niche? Bestever’s audience analysis tools go beyond basic demographics to uncover key insights. Just enter your website URL, and Bestever will analyze your existing traffic to suggest how to refine your ad targeting for higher conversion rates.
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• Generate high-converting ad creatives: Need fresh creatives without hiring a big team? Bestever can look at your site and generate creatives in large volumes. Pull stock images and video clips that fit your brand voice, then you can hand them to your team for finalization before launch.

Want to stop wasting budget on the wrong people — and finally see what high-performing targeting really looks like? Let our team walk you through how Bestever helps you get there.

 Try a demo of Bestever for free.