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Hack for Targeting to “Parents” on Facebook Ads
… I think I finally cracked a nut that I’ve been working on for a couple of months with a new client. I’m posting it here in case it helps anyone else.
**Here’s a little backstory on the ads:**
* Objective: Lead Generation, using Facebook’s lead form
* Target Audience (general description): Parents with kids 12 and under, higher income, highly educated, busy, and based in specific cities in the Bay Area (can’t go outside them).
* There’s no past customer or email list and no option for pixel data.Should be pretty straightforward. Right? Parents filters, interests, etc. Wrong. I’ve been testing audiences for two months using the “Parents” demographic filters so that we only advertise to people we know have kids. I’ve spent most of the time adjusting the other demographics like industry, interests, etc. This usually works with my other clients, but this time, the audience was just too small with the Parents filter to bring in the number of leads needed.
Fast forward to last week, frustrated, I did yet another brainstorm to expand the audience. I created two new Saved audiences with interests I knew the target audience had, then narrowed the audience further by “Must also include: Parenting, motherhood, fatherhood” (interests, not the Parents demographic filter). So I wasn’t targeting parents exactly, but targeting interests and filters that I knew mostly only parents would have.
IT WORKED. The new audience strategy gave us an audience size of 3-5 times larger than what I had before and in just three days had generated more leads than was generated in the entire previous month.
I don’t know if anyone else has thought of this (heck, I don’t know why I haven’t…) but seriously, I hope this helps you if your target audience is within the Parents category. Good luck!
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10 Replies
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We work with 3 different kids brands and consult on a few more brands targeting parents. Interest targeting “parent with kids x age” is the worst performing interest targeting on Facebook. Never works as well as targeting other interest and layering interests or just other interest that parents would have.
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Nice share
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may i ask for an example of one of the parent-related interests. am having this issue rn
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I’ve used this in the past before, but usually with the interest based audience, it’s suddenly too wide instead of too small ? so you need to fine tune it and narrow it down still, but it does work.
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May I ask what was the audience size of the new expanded audience size (parenting interest) relevant to the overall audience size with no interests or other targeting criteria?
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How many “interests” do you include in each audience?
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Thanks for this!
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Holy sheet. Just what I need.
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Literally launching a parent campaign today. Crazy.
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Thank you for this – I regularly target parents with my ads and the Parents demo filter is awful.
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