The Most Effective Target Audiences for Webshops on Facebook & Instagram

What can you actually target on Facebook & Instagram? What is most effective? And are you utilising it in your business?

‍

‍

‍

Of course, it primarily depends on what you want to get out of the platforms, but below you will find a number of practical suggestions that we find particularly relevant for companies with an associated webshop.

The following target groups give you a closer insight into what our customers have had the most success with in the different phases of the customer journey. Pay special attention to the "Prospecting stage," which is the phase where most webshops struggle to crack the code. The "Prospecting stage" referred to here can be defined as the phase in the customer journey where you try to reach users who are not already familiar with your business. The goal here is to grow your business by reaching out to entirely new customers.

Illustration of a typical customer journey for webshops:

‍

‍

Most Effective Target Groups in the "Prospecting Stage"

Lookalike audiences

• "Source quality is more important than source volume." This means that your chances of achieving good results with a lookalike audience, based on your last 100 customers, are better compared to a lookalike audience based on your last 5,000 visitors.

Broad Algorithm

• This type of audience is one we specifically find great success with for webshops. This is especially true when we narrow down to the most profitable segments in our target group. Here you can advantageously run a "Website Conversion Campaign," and tell Facebook that you want to optimise for "Purchase" or "Add2cart."
• If you already have usable data on your account, it would be beneficial for you to delve into what the most profitable segments have been so far (pay special attention to age and gender). Then you go out broadly, completely without interests, lookalike, or other targeting in your ad set.

Play with interests, behaviours, and demographic targeting

• What do you sell, and which interests relate directly (and indirectly) to your product? Investigate demographic targeting as well as behavioural targeting – We sometimes find hidden treasures here, which advantageously can be taken to the next level by adapting the ad messages to the targeting.

For example, target users who are close friends of people with a birthday within the next month, and create an ad with "Our 10 most popular gifts" or similar. (The conversion rate can also be increased with the help of a tailored landing page for these products).

Examples of demographic targeting options:

‍

‍

Find demographics, interests, and behavioural targeting at the ad set level under "detailed targeting."

‍

‍

Pro tip:
Use Facebook's "audience insights" to find out which pages and influencers the users connected to your page follow and are interested in. This can help you both with your targeting and also provide insight into what you should consider purchasing more of, as well as possible collabs with influencers.

‍

Top 3 Target Groups in the "Retargeting Stage"

Facebook & Instagram Engagers

• When you target Facebook & Instagram engagers, you can reach people who have had some form of interaction with your company on social media. With these users, your company is typically top-of-mind, and therefore the target group are more likely to react to your ads.
• To increase relevance, you can advantageously narrow down the target group to only include users who have interacted with your company on Facebook or Instagram within the last 7 days.
  ‍

Website visitors

• Website visitors are another target group that most webshops have success with. If it does not succeed in converting some of these users, then we often experience that advertising on Facebook & Instagram rarely becomes a profitable business for the respective company. Therefore, consider your customer journey, as well as how many days you should pursue the visitors with ads before you "let go."
• Did you know that you have the opportunity to target users who have visited specific subpages, explored a specific collection, or added a product to the cart? With this insight, you can make the ads even more relevant to the individual user, thereby increasing your return.

Previous Buyers

• Do you follow up on your existing customer base with ads on Facebook & Instagram? With the right structure in the ad account, you can ensure, by using exclusions, that only previous buyers see specific messages and ads. This gives you the opportunity to increase the lifetime value of your customers, as we often experience that this method leads to an increase in the percentage of returning customers.
• For example, if you sell protein powder through your webshop, and know that your customers typically run out after 2 months. Then you can actually ensure that customers who have bought protein powder are hit by new ads exactly 60 days after their last purchase.

To create custom audiences – You must go into Audiences > Choose "Create Audience" > From here you have the opportunity to create your desired custom audiences.

‍

‍

Important: Remember to use exclusions, as this way you can ensure that you do not hit the same audience multiple times. Thus, you avoid showing users the wrong ads and thereby create audience overlap, which potentially creates internal competition between your ads.