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Facebook Adsense Creating Personas

In this episode, we explore how you can use Facebook Adsense to better understand our market and apply it to our personas.

Transcript

So what I want to talk about two tools, and these are my sort of go to tools. The first one is Facebook's ad manager. Now this involves a little bit of set up. Like, you have to get an account on Facebook and get into the ad screen. And it shouldn't be that complicated, but they've made it seem pretty complicated with all the different screens and the formatting of things. It seems like it could go with a sort of better UI. There's just so much, and I don't even have any ads set om this account that I have running right now. They have folders and all of this, anyways. But, you don't actually have to run any ads, you've essentially just getting an ad account. And by doing that, you can start to identify what people identify themselves as, right? So you're going to interview people, still.

You got to go and talk to people, talk to your market. But in addition to that, you want to be able to get, sort of, mass data. And both of these tools allow you to get to that space. One of the most common things to do for advertisement nowadays is to do Facebook ads, as they're really effective, and they're affordable. Now that's, of course, going to depend on your marketing and the copy and the people you market to, to determine how effective that really is. But in general, from a tool perspective, we can go in here and identify some of this. So I made a sample ad called Entitled Ad Set, and I'm over here and I'm creating a new audience.

So the very first thing that I might go and do, if I have custom audiences, I don't have them set up. But over here in locations, I can identify where are these people living? So right now, as of this potential reach, which I have barely anything selected or filtered down further, for United States, we have roughly 230 million people. So, that's not a very specific segment of a market. We need to go in and create that. So if we interviewed a couple of users, and we kind of get a better sense of who our market is now, we can start to define some of these fields. So, I can go and say something like United States, or I can go into United States, I'll show you this.

I can exclude, again, by individual things. So, if we go in a little bit closer here. I can do that, or I can close this altogether and say, "Oh, I don't have an audience at all." I can say, "Identify people living recently in this location, people living in this location, people recently in this location and people traveling in this location." That's crazy how many options you have, just in that. So I'm going to go search and I'm going to type in Pasadena, and Pasadena, California, that's the city. So I'll search that. And that just took our 215 million people down to eight million potential reach. Again, this is potential, in a 25 mile radius. That's a huge radius, like that's all of Los Angeles, Inglewood, a little bit of Anaheim. I'm bringing Disneyland into that, too. So, I want to reduce this value, maybe down to a three mile radius.

At three miles now, that's still bringing in Glendale, maybe a little bit of Burbank, La Cańada, still Los Angeles in that space. I'm still going to hit roughly two million people. And that, again, defaulted to a 10 plus mile radius. They don't want to get you too specific, where you're giving away people's locations in that. And of course, you can add multiple markets to multiple cities. Maybe I just want to market to just men in that space. I now have it down to 950,000. That's still really big.

So I could say, what age do I want to market to? I'm going to say between 30 and maybe 40. I'll go by that rules of 10 to start out with. So, narrowed that down to 300,000 people, the estimated daily results of how many, essentially, views I would be looking at, it'd be 20,000. And the link clicks, the average link clicks for this would be 103 to 297, which is pretty good in that space. Now I can start to filter this down by languages and I could identify detailed targeting. I could also so set up connection types, so I can start to specify specific behaviors and things like that.

So, you see you have a lot of this. So if I click on this Browse Under Detailed Targeting, I can browse by demographic interests and behaviors. This is where this stuff really becomes very fascinating. In general, I don't really like the concept of the social media and people sharing all of this data out there. But, if they are sharing that data, you can use that data. You can leverage that data to better understand your market, and create these segments of your market, and understand how many people would fit into that. Now, with this in general, you don't want to be too specific, and you don't want to be too broad. So they give you this range here. Now when using this tool just to create personas, I think you can be a little bit more specific, to get a general sense of what's going to limit you in that area.

Now, this is estimated just on Facebook users. If they're not Facebook users, Facebook doesn't have data about that. I mean, if they had a Facebook account at some point, and there was a cookie that was tracking them, sure. Maybe there's something there, but in general, this is just that data. So, I get in here and I can see behaviors, digital activities, or politics, soccer, travel, all of that. I can click on an interest, business industry, entertainment. If I click on entertainment, I could go down further into games, movies, music, reading, TV, families and relationships, all these different things. So if I go into games, I can say action games. This now took me at 36,000. So if I'm looking for men between 30 to 40, that are in Pasadena's general area, that are interested in action games, I have 36,000 people to market to, right?

Which is roughly, that's still quite a bit of a reach to go and do that. So I might want to add some more stuff into that. They're into that, but they're also into, maybe, food and drink. Maybe, we'll say that they like beer. So I now have, with those options, with beer, because I've added that spectrum, those values have gone up now. I see 140,000 people who potentially are interested in action games and beer. And if I hover over it, you can see that total size of that. Now where's that action games coming from? That's a user who has expressed some sort of interest or likes action games. So there might be a game that came out on Facebook, and they showed interest in that game, and that game might have been an action game, and that's where it's creating that data.

So by starting to fill this out, you can start to get a sense of actually how you would market to this person, and how much reach that type of person will attract. So, definitely some cool insights that you can develop inside this Facebook ad manager, to be able to just grab data. At some point, whether this is a class project, or you're actually applying this to a business, this would be the real thing, now. You would really make an ad and you would click publish and that would start running, and you would actually be able to affectively target those people, and understand if your user persona is actually working. Does it match up? Do the users who you have identified as that segment, actually want your product? It's very interesting in that space.