The Ultimate Guide to Targeting: How to Find the Right Interests
Every day, in our Facebook Ads Rockstars group, we get many questions about how to target this or that specific audience – from University students to real estate groups.
Of course, every single product requires a unique testing approach through building up ‘winners’ and killing ‘losers’ and further scaling. However, how do you find what audience interest to start with while losing not significant budget?
In this post, we would like to review 3types of different frequently usedaudiences to give you an idea of how you can do your own targeting.
Let’s go!
1. Travelers – Tourism and Vacation.
Overall, this is one of the easiest and most flexible audiences for targeting that I would recommend for beginners. The targeted customers are usually engaged buyers who can afford pretty expensive vacations, hence can afford buying supplementary services.
When building up your targeting strategy, it is often worth it to start from the broad interests and go down to more specific criteria (behaviors, demographics).
Yet, an important factor to identify first is ONE INTEREST that identifies your target audience the best. Imagine a relationship diagram where your main interest is at its core.
In the case of traveling, obviously, that would be ‘travel’.
** Here, we go for the 3+3+3+3+3 formula, where we kill losers at the end of the day and substitute them with new interests until we have enough winners to scale.
Broad interests (over 100 ml of users):
– Travel (1bl);
– Tourism (700 ml);
– Holidays (300 ml).
Specific interests connected to broad ones (airlines, accommodation booking, trains, etc – ~100 ml users):
– Airbnb (100 ml);
– com (100 ml);
– Trip Advisor (120 ml);
Even more specific interests (1-100 ml users):
– Delta Airlines (40 ml);
– FlixBus (2 ml);
– com (20 ml).
Behaviors connected to travel:
– Frequent Travelers (950 ml);
– Returned from travelling 1 week ago (180 ml);
– Returned from travelling 2 weeks ago (17 ml);
Behaviors connected to travel:
– Frequent Travelers (950 ml);
– Returned from travelling 1 week ago (180 ml);
– Returned from travelling 2 weeks ago (17 ml);
Demographics connected to travel (honeymoon, Christmas, etc):
– Newlywed (3 months) (5 ml);
– Newly engaged (3 months) (2 ml);
– Long-distance relationships (10 ml).
So, this is it – concentrate on your buyers’ needs and build up your audience properly.
Usually, we get around 5-10 winners in our interests’ campaigns in 3-7 days and start scaling immediately!
2. Services for Dating.
This is another audience that spends significant amount of time on the Internet. All you need to do is to target them right.
Again, remember 2 MAIN PRINCIPLES:
3+3+3+3+3 for daily testing;
Keep winners – kill losers.
In this case though, the core audience to build your targeting around is ‘single’ people. Apply the same principle for targeting.
Broad interests (you can go below 100 ml, depending on your core audience):
– Dating (230ml);
– Romance (love) (120 ml);
– Happiness (520 ml);
Specific interests connected to single people (dating services, sexuality, etc):
– Online dating service (22 ml);
– tinder (17 ml);
– Badoo (33 ml);
Even more specific interests (the size should be based on the size of the audiences in the previous groups):
– com (3 ml);
– Blind date (2 ml);
– Speed dating (1 ml).
Here, you would not find behaviors that describe people interested in dating specifically, but you could go on with testing more interests on the first day:
EHarmony (1 ml);
– Flirting (11 ml);
PlentyofFish (1 ml).
Demographics connected to dating (relationship status, etc.):
– Single (320 ml);
– Separated (5 ml);
– Divorced (6 ml).
Overall, you go on and do the work until you got some data to analyze. Remember that interest targeting is not the only possible way to boost your sales.
Use your lookalike audiences, do retargeting, and create profitable upsell funnels.
3. Fitness & Personal Training.
Here, obviously, the keyword would be ‘Fitness’. While choosing the right interests, do not forget about the “Audience Insights” tool to get the most relevant audiences.
So here, broad interests would be:
– Physical fitness (550 ml);
– Physical exercise (550 ml);
– Running (230 ml).
Specific interests connected to fitness (personal training services, training apps, etc):
-Planet fitness (7 ml);
– Nike+ (17 ml);
– MyFitnessPal (10 ml);
Again, go on narrowing your audiences down based on the results that you get from broader campaigns:
– Runtastic (10 ml);
– Jillian Michaels (Personal trainer) (2 ml);
– Charlene Johnson (1 ml).
Again, if you cannot think of specific customer behaviors, build upon your interests:
– Garmin (11 ml);
– Jenny Craig, Inc. (11 ml);
– RunKeeper (3 ml).
For demographics, you can think of the events that made a person start doing sports or a new place to do training:
– New Job (400k);
– New Relationship (3 ml);
– Recently moved (4 ml).
Overall, do not forget to do your homework! Do not only look into Facebook data. We often even use Google to just get to know what people talk about on the subject, find out about competitors and best practices.
To wrap it up
So what you want to do when you start building interests for your new audience is:
1. Analyze external sources – Google, Audience Insigts, AdSpy, etc, to collect enough data.
2. Find the core interest to build your campaign around.
3. Use the 3+3+3+3+3 principle – narrow down interests until you find best matches.
4. Keep winners – kill losers.
5. Scale up.
Sounds simple, right? Actually, it is simple. Just plan everything beforehand and you are good to go!
So, what are your thoughts on these examples, guys? Is there anyone of you already working in these niches? If yes, are you using the same or different interests for your campaigns? We are always here for a fruitful discussion!
Let’s share our ideas and boost our sales together!
Every month I choose a few entrepreneurs to personally help them scale their Facebook ads and businesses.

Watch the free training and apply here: https://www.ecommercescalingsecrets.com/home