How to Create Audience on Facebook Ads Manager in 2024

Let’s say you’re running ads on Facebook for your business. Your ads go through to all people, of all ages and demographics, to any place on the globe. Now this might not be necessarily a good thing, especially if you’re a local business, or you have a specific market. Thankfully, Facebook ads manager gives you the ability to narrow down the audience. And it will allow you to focus your ads only on the relevant groups of people.

In this article, we’re going to teach you how to create an audience on Facebook Ads Manager. This will ensure more successful ad campaigns and helps you reach your intended audience better. If you want a successful business, this is your key to success.

What is Audience on Facebook Ads Manager?

Facebook provides powerful tools for you to target your ads towards particular audiences. This can consist of audiences of different languages, nationalities, locales, preferences, etc. This is pretty important, because you don’t want your ads to be scattered throughout the whole world, especially to people who can’t even access your service. With the way that ad costs are calculated, not targeting your audience can be wasteful.

Why Should you Create an Audience

If you’re new to marketing, chances are you never even thought about narrowing down your ad campaign. It might seem counterintuitive at first. Why should you narrow down your ads? You’d want to get as many people to see your ads as possible, right? It doesn’t necessarily work like that. Sometimes, it’s better to not target a large group for your ads. Here are a couple reasons why.

• Pinpoint Your Audience, Hit Harder

Yes, you won’t be excluding a lot of people if you don’t narrow down your ad. But it doesn’t make sense to advertise to a large group of people that aren’t interested in your product. If you pinpoint a specific audience or niche, you’ll hit harder. Chances are, a lot of people you’re excluding wouldn’t be interested in your product or service anyway. This way, you will not only miss nothing, but there’s a higher chance for your intended audience to see your product.

• Not Everyone is Your Customer

Imagine you’ve just opened a bookstore in a small town, and you want to run Facebook ads to gather some audience. You don’t want to advertise your bookstore to everyone in the world, because they wouldn’t be able to come to your bookstore. Or what if you’re selling products that aren’t suitable for all demographics? You should keep in mind not everyone is your customer. This makes sense especially for more small, local businesses. Or if you’re starting your business in another country.

• It’s More Cost-Friendly

Running ads can be pretty expensive, and you want to take all the precautions to run better and more effective ads at a lesser cost. Failing to think in cost-friendly terms can spell the premature doom of your business. If you don’t narrow down your audience, your campaign will run out of ads in no time. And your ads have been seen by people who aren’t interested anyway, so that means no customers for you. If you narrow down your audience, however, you’ll have more hits than misses.

How to Create an Audience

First off you need to log in to your account on business.facebook.com. If you don’t already have an account, make sure to create one. You don’t need a special business account to use on Facebook, just your regular Facebook account works fine.

Now that you are on your business account, there are two methods you can create an audience on Facebook Ads Manager.

Method 1:

1. First of all, click this icon on the left sidebar, and then click on Audiences. This will open a new page for you, in which you can manage your audience.

1. Here, you should click on Create a Saved Audience. This will allow you to enter your intended audience’s settings and save it in advance for your ad campaigns.

2. On this page you can enter information about your audience. On the right Facebook tells the potential reach based on the information you enter, as well as some additional information on your audience and ad campaign. This part is pretty important as it tells you how big or wide of an audience your ads will be getting, and you want to make sure to narrow it down to a reasonable extent.

3. Now give your Audience a name here.

4. If you already have an Audience, you can add it under Custom Audience. If you already don’t have a custom audience set up, you can click on "Create New" on the top right to make a new one for yourself.

5. Under Location, you can put the name of a city, a country, or an area to advertise in. Facebook also accepts zip codes for the locations in the United States.

6. Next, you can choose the age group of your Audience. Do remember that this setting determines which accounts will see your ads. It does not ask you for the age of your audience.

7. Next, you can specify the gender you’re catering to.

8. Next up is the languages. This section is pretty important if your audience is non-English speaking. Just type in a language and click on it.

9. Under detailed targeting, you can get even more specific with who you want to cater to. This can be anything from interests and education level to relationship and family status. This is also the most powerful part of the Audience tool, allowing you to laser focus your ads on the exact demographic you have in mind.

10. You can also exclude specific audiences from your ad if you click on exclude.

11. Now you should be able to create your saved audience.

Method 2:

1. If you don’t want to jump through all these hoops, there’s a way to specify your audience directly through Facebook Ads Manager when you’re making a new ad. Just go to your Facebook Ads Manager, and create a new ad set.

2. Now after giving your ad set a name, if you scroll down to Audience you can put all the information directly into your ad set here. All the information in the Audience page can be entered here, without you needing to go to a different page.

Types of Audience on Facebook

Facebook Ads Manager provides you a lot of options to make sure you will reach the audience you want with your ads. The tools at your disposal at the Audience page are so diverse and effective, it’s important that you familiarize yourself with them. Here are the primary ways you can use the Audience page on Ads Manager.

1. Targeted Audience

With Targeted Audience, you can specify the sort of audience or niche you want to cater your product to. You might want to advertise your product or business to a certain age range, to a certain gender, or maybe more specific than that. If you’re not in the US, you definitely don’t want to show your ad to the whole world, or the people who don’t speak your language. Facebook Ad Manager’s Targeted Audience allows you to reliably send your ads over to the exact niche you want.

2. Custom Audience

If you already have an audience for your business, and you want to show your ads to (or not to) them, Custom Audience is the way to go. In this method, Facebook will run your ads based on outside input. This could be an email list, a list of phone numbers, or user activity collected by Facebook Pixel. Facebook Pixel is an add-on that can be added to your website, and gives Facebook information about the people who visit your website via cookies. This will allow you to advertise your ad to a really specific audience, or your own audience.

3. Lookalike Audience

If you want to cater your business or product to the audience of a similar product, you can use Lookalike Audience. If you offer the same service or produce to another brand that already has an audience, this might be a smart move to make. This way the audience you’re showing your ads to are guaranteed to already have an interest in similar products, making them the perfect target for your ad campaign.

Conclusion

This has been our tutorial on how to create an audience on Facebook Ads Manager. Now you know how to work one of the most important secrets to running a successful business campaign on Facebook. You should now be able to pinpoint the audience that needs your product or business better, and therefore run better ad campaigns on Facebook.