Social Media Marketing: Foundations to Practice · Paid Social Advertising
Targeting and Audience Building
The targeting options available to advertisers have shifted significantly as privacy regulations and platform policy changes have reduced granular third-party data availability. This chapter covers what's actually reliable now.
Paid social targeting generally falls into a few categories: demographic and interest-based targeting using platform-provided data, custom audiences built from a brand's own customer data (such as an email list uploaded and matched against platform users), and lookalike audiences, which use a platform's own modeling to find new users who resemble an existing high-value audience.
Key Takeaways
- Core targeting approaches are demographic/interest targeting, custom audiences from first-party data, and lookalike audiences.
- First-party data has become an increasingly valuable targeting foundation as privacy regulation restricts third-party targeting granularity.
- Lookalike audience quality depends heavily on the seed audience; building from highest-value customers outperforms building from any past purchaser.
- Excessively narrow targeting can shrink an audience below what the algorithm needs to optimize effectively, sometimes producing worse results than broader targeting.