Online advertising is everywhere, and if you want to make the most out of your campaigns, you need to use every trick in the book to make it work! For the best results, you need to know who your audience is and how to reach them properly.
As an example, we have all searched for something that we wanted to buy, just to get ads for the exact thing or competing brands pop up left and right. That is not magic or luck, it's behavioral microtargeting. In short, it's a way for Meta (or other platforms) to try and understand what you want and need and give it to you, increasing the chances of conversion.
For advertisers and especially affiliates, just understanding this is not enough. If you are not using behavioral microtargeting in your campaigns, you are already behind the curve. For the best results, you need to use this as a tool and work with it to get conversions.
Of course, this is way easier said than done, but there are things you can do to reach your target audience better, and we will cover some of the ways you can do that!
What Is Behavioral Microtargeting?
To keep it simple, behavioral microtargeting is the practice of showing specific ads for small, defined groups of people based on their past actions, interests, and behaviors. Instead of going broad and trying to target anyone that might have any interest at all in your products or services, your goal is to target specific pockets of audiences that you know are interested, they just need some convincing.
Let’s say you are advertising fitness equipment for women. Instead of going “Women aged 25-40” you should target “Women aged 25-40, who are interested in fitness apparel, engage with yoga, fitness, and health pages, and have visited a specific landing page in the last 30 days”.
Instead of getting millions of audience members, you will get just a few hundred or thousand, but all of the people you reach will be much more likely to convert. Which, in the end, is the point of it all.
The Micro in microtargeting refers to specific behaviors or interests that you target. That means you also focus on what they do, not just what they are interested in. This is why it's important to also track people who visit your website or specific pages that might be relevant to your offer.
How Does Meta Know So Much?
Being so precise with targeting might fire some alarms in your head, the most obvious one being, how does Meta even know so much about their users? Well, if you don't already know, all social media platforms are personal data farms. They track everything you do, engage with, and click on, make a custom profile with your data, and use that information to give you targeted ads, or worse, sell your data off to third-party companies.
Social media platforms track you both on their platform and outside of it with custom pixels, tracking profiles, and advanced tech that makes sure they know exactly what you visited, when, and for how long. This might sound creepy, but it's reality!
Even with new privacy policies like the one from Apple, where iPhone users don’t get tracked as easily online, this is still a massive issue. Instead of Meta tracking you, now Apple does it, and it uses your data for its benefit. For users, there is no way to avoid this, but for advertisers, this just means you can target super-specific things and use it for your benefit!
Here are the general ways Meta tracks:
- On-Platform
Metra tracks likes, shares, visits, groups, videos you watched, and everything else to determine your interests and what engages you the most.
- Off-Platform Activity
Here it gets a bit more advanced.
- Meta Pixel: A Small piece of code that people put in their landing pages, and it tells Meta what the user did on the page.
- Conversion API (CAPI): similar in concept, but more robust and server-side. With the new privacy updates, pixels are less reliable, and CAPI is the way to go.
- App Activity
If your app has a “login with Facebook” option, then Meta can track users and their decisions through the Meta SDK (Software Development Kit).
- Partner Data & Offline Activity
Sometimes they also work with third-party data providers to get info on users they just can’t reach or track properly. This is usually done through data brokers and businesses that upload their customer data for better targeting.
Why Is Microtargeting Important?
The competition for ads is insane. Everyone is trying to target everyone, and running ads without clear goals and targeting can be like shouting into the void. If you want to drive clicks and conversions, you need to at least match what everyone else is doing, and exceed them if possible.
Microtargeting can help with:
- Relevance and Personalization
Showing dog supplements to cat owners is a waste of time and money. When running ads, you need to make sure they are relevant to the audience. This is also useful at scale. Even if you can't dial down every single interest, if you just narrow it down to a few key ones, you can reach way more engaged people and get more bang for your buck.
- Better ROI
With better relevance comes customers who are interested in what you have to offer, and they are way more likely to engage with you and convert. You can also reduce wasting money on targeting people who are irrelevant or have no interest in your products and services.
- Finding New Customers
If you know your ideal audience, then Meta can find people who are just like it. With lookalike audiences, you can find people who are similar to the ones that already convert and target them specifically.
How To Optimize For It?
Here is what you should do to get the best results!
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Know Your Audience
Before you touch Ads Manager, you need to know who your audience is and what their interest are. If you have already run ads in the past, try researching through the data and see common patterns. Interests, demographics, and location.
You can even use the help of AI to get a better idea of who your target audience is. Once you know who to target, things get a lot easier!
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Master Audience Tools
While it might be attractive to just run everything as Advantage+, if you know what you are doing, you will have better results by doing things manually.
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Detailed Targeting
This is the most basic level. You can target based on:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location, education, job title, life events (like 'newly engaged').
- Interests: Pages they like, topics they engage with
- Behaviors: Purchase behavior, device usage, travel habits (e.g., "Engaged Shoppers," "Small Business Owners").
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Custom Audiences
This is where it gets powerful. You can create audiences based on:
- Your Website Visitors: Using the Pixel/CAPI, target people who visited specific pages, spent a certain amount of time, or added items to their cart but didn't buy
- Your Customer List: Upload your email list or phone numbers.
- App Activity: Users who took specific actions in your app.
- Meta Engagement: People who interacted with your Facebook Page or Instagram profile, watched your videos, etc.
- Lookalike Audiences
As mentioned, create audiences based on your best Custom Audiences to find new, similar people.
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Make Sure the Pixel and CAPI are Working
With the new Andromeda AI update on Meta and every company trying to restrict third-party tracking, it's more important than ever to make sure your tracking works. See what your CAPI score is, see what you can improve, track events that are being tracked through your funnel, and take note of which ones are not tracked. You need to fix all of this and make it work flawlessly if you want to make money from this.
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Make Better Ads
With all of this info, the only thing left is to make better ads that reflect your audience and the targeting. Make sure your creatives are engaging but also cover pain points and common issues that your target audience might experience. Also, try analyzing those that are engaged but don’t convert, and what's stopping them.
Analyze where in the funnel they decide to call it quits, and optimize that part or address those points with your creatives more. The more time you spend on this, the better results you will see!
Conclusion
Behavioral microtargeting is nothing new. It has been the gold standard for marketers for a while now, but even now, most affiliates don’t properly utilize it. Meta and other social media platforms are incredibly powerful and have so much data on all of us that it's insane not to use it to your advantage.
Mastering this takes time and effort, but once you do, the ROI and results should speak for themselves!
Have you run behavioral microtargeting ads? What were your results with it? Share your experience with us in the comments below!
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