Imagine your product is perfect, but the ad ends up in front of people who live in another country or who are never interested in your products. This is exactly what you prevent with a properly configured ad group. In this tutorial, I'll show you step by step how to define the target audience in Facebook, narrow down locations precisely, and set the placement of your ads.
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Introduction
This video follows on from the last lesson. There, you already defined who you want to reach: people in Germany between 18 and 30 years old, interested in fashion and with German as their language. Now it's about implementing these specifications in the ad group section of Facebook. You'll learn how to select locations precisely, include and exclude countries or cities, work with a pin and radius, and set age, gender, interests, and languages. Finally, you'll decide on which platforms and devices your advertising should appear.
Key Takeaways
- The target audience is defined by locations, age, gender, interests, and languages.
- Locations can be included or excluded, down to individual cities or a radius around a point.
- An audience that is too small or too large slows down the campaign, so you should always keep an eye on the displayed audience size.
- For placements, you can leave the selection to Facebook (Advantage placements) or decide yourself where your ad appears.
Step-by-Step Guide
Step 1: Navigate to the Target Audience and Locations
Scroll down a bit in the ad group form until you reach the "Audience" section. At the top you'll find the field for so-called Custom Audiences. This field isn't relevant for getting started, since it only comes into play when you work with a Facebook pixel. Leave this area untouched for now. Continue down to the "Locations" section and click "Edit" there. After that, you can explicitly specify where your target audience should live.
Step 2: Select Countries as Locations
In the location field, you can add as many countries as you like. For this example, you'll stick with Germany for now. However, you can also enter additional countries such as Austria or Switzerland if your offer is shipped there as well. Each country then appears as its own entry in the list. Make sure that only the locations you can actually serve are included, because otherwise people outside these regions would see advertising that is of no use to them.
Step 3: Exclude Individual Countries
Next to each location you'll find a small arrow. Clicking it opens the options for that entry. There you can specifically exclude a country. Suppose you want to target Austria and Switzerland, but not Germany; then you exclude Germany using this option. The decision can be reversed at any time: you click the arrow again and add the country back using the corresponding option.
Step 4: Include or Exclude Only Cities
Through the same menu, you can also consider individual cities instead of entire countries. If you select "Include only cities," Facebook shows you how many cities are available within the country. For Germany, in this example, that's 77 cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants. You can narrow the selection further, for example to large cities with a population between 500,000 and over 3 million. In this case, five cities remain. Alternatively, you can exclude exactly these large cities or have only the smaller cities under 100,000 inhabitants displayed. This way you can reach, for example, an audience from rural regions while big cities like Berlin are left out.
Step 5: Narrow Down Regionally with a Pin and Radius
If your customers live within a certain area, such as around your store or a city with many orders, then you work with the pin. Zoom in on the map to the desired location, click the pin, and place it on the map with a click. Then you set the radius. You can reduce it to one kilometer, for example, to target only the immediate surroundings, or expand it to 80 kilometers if you want to cover a larger area. The radius can be adjusted at any time by simply overwriting the value.
Step 6: Define the age of the target audience
In the next section, you define the age. The default range is 18 to 65+, and you can adjust it to your preferences. Personally, I generally don't run ads for children and teenagers under 18. In Germany, strict legal requirements apply to certain products, and minors often can't properly evaluate offers. This rule is my personal rule of thumb to stay on the safe side, even if you're only selling a T-shirt. For the example, we therefore enter 18 to 30 years, since this corresponds to our defined target audience.
Step 7: Define gender and select interests
For gender, you can choose between all, men only, or women only. For this example, the "All" option stays active. Next comes the detailed targeting, which offers you the most possibilities. Here you can search for interests, demographics, and behaviors. For example, enter the term "Fashion" and wait a moment until Facebook displays suggestions. Each suggestion shows you the approximate size of the group, for example 50 million people for "Fashion" or 74 million for "Fashion and Style". Select the interest that best fits your offer.
Step 8: Check audience size and select language
After selecting the interest, the estimated size of the target audience is displayed right away. In our example, it is around 1.8 to 2.1 million people. This is a good starting point, because the audience is large enough to deliver ads but still clearly narrowed down. In the next step, you define the language. Click on "Languages" below the interests section and then on "Edit". Enter "German". This shrinks the audience to about 1.5 to 1.7 million people, and exactly this size makes sense for the ad set.
Step 9: Consciously assess the expanded audience
Below that, you'll find the option to reach people outside your defined target audience if Facebook expects better performance from doing so. You only activate this checkbox if you are very sure about your target audience and want to give Facebook the freedom to address additional people. In many cases, I leave this option deactivated. Decide based on your experience and your data whether to use it, and then check the result in your campaign statistics.
Step 10: Put the audience size into sensible perspective
An audience should be neither too small nor too large. If it is too small, for example only 10,000 or 20,000 people, it quickly becomes problematic. You then hardly reach anyone, and your budget fizzles out with just a few impressions. If, on the other hand, the audience is unspecific and covers practically the entire world, you lose relevance, because your ads are shown to people who can't do anything with your offer. Targeting an entire country or an entire economic area can make sense in individual cases. For most projects, however, the following applies: a clearly defined, medium-sized audience delivers the best results.
Step 11: Understand Advantage placements
In the "Placements" section, you decide where your ad appears. The first option is called Advantage placements. With it, you allow Facebook to decide for itself on which platform and in which position the ad is delivered, for example on Facebook, Instagram, in Messenger, or in the Audience Network. For the beginning, this is a good choice as long as you have no particular reason to exclude certain platforms. Such a reason would be, for example, that you want to build a brand on Instagram and your ad text refers to Instagram. Then it seems odd on Facebook or in Messenger if an Instagram profile is being promoted there.
Step 12: Set manual placements deliberately
If you want to control delivery yourself, you choose manual placements. Here you define on which platforms and in which formats your ad should appear. For example, you can specify that your ad appears only in the feed, but not in Stories or Reels. Via the arrow next to a platform, you open the sub-options. If Stories are important to you but Reels are not, you can select only Instagram and Facebook Stories. The placement can be changed at any time. In the example, we stick with Advantage placements, as they form a solid basis for getting started.
Step 13: Select devices and complete the section
Finally, under "Edit devices" you can specify whether you only want to target mobile device users or only desktop users. This completes this part of the ad set. The next video covers the final step of the setup, in which you finish the ad set.
Summary ??? Setting up Facebook ad sets correctly
You have now learned about all the building blocks with which you can precisely define an audience on Facebook. You set locations, narrow them down by cities or radii, determine age, gender, interests and language, and keep an eye on the size of your audience while doing so. Then you decide on the placements, either with Advantage placements or with manual control. A balanced audience and deliberately chosen placements are the foundation for all further steps in your campaign.
FAQ
Can I remove individual countries from a location selection again?Yes, you can exclude or include any country again at any time by using the arrow next to the entry.
How many cities are available for selection in Germany?In the video's example, there are 77 cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants.
Why should children and teenagers be excluded from advertising?Minors often cannot properly assess financial decisions, and special legal requirements apply in Germany to advertising aimed at children.
What happens if the audience is too small?A very small audience of only a few thousand people hardly reaches anyone, so the budget is quickly spent without effect.
What is the difference between Advantage placements and manual placements?With Advantage placements, Facebook itself decides where the ad appears; with manual placements, you determine the platforms and formats yourself.
Can I expand the audience to include people outside my settings?Yes, there is a separate option for this, which you should only activate if you are very sure about your audience.
