How to Automate Audience Research in Facebook with Make

One of the best things about advertising on Facebook lies within its targeting and audience creation features. 

The Facebook Ads Manager allows you to define who will be exposed to your ads by letting you create audiences based on key demographic markers like location, age, gender, language, relationship status, and household income, among others.

Anyone who’s run a Facebook campaign knows how important it is to target the right audience, and how targeting influences everything from reach to return on investment.

Running a campaign every once in a while is pretty straightforward, but if you’re a marketing agency, a paid ads specialist - or simply someone who runs multiple ad sets and campaigns - you probably know how much time goes into this task. 

Plus, the amount of time spent only increases as you start playing with the variables (such as location) to see what works best for your campaign.  

Surprisingly, this has been a lingering problem with no easy or affordable end in sight - until now, which leads to the question: How to run successful campaigns without dedicating all those long hours? 

Here’s a hint: Every Facebook campaign starts by defining the right audience, and Make is here to speed up the process. Let’s see how!

Interest-based targeting and audience sizes: Automation begins here

Interest-based targeting is a great method to reach your ideal audience, as it allows you to create audiences based on what they like (according to Facebook). 

However, there’s another factor to consider when targeting by interests: Audience size. 

If you want to run a well-targeted campaign, you need to know how big your audience is. It’s not the same to target a 1,000-people audience than a 250,000 one, and you can’t really move forward with a campaign without knowing the size of your audiences. 

At this point is where most marketers get stuck: Looking for audiences, and comparing their sizes. When you’re running multiple ad sets and campaigns, this task takes hours. 

But it doesn’t have to. 

Instead of creating one audience after another to see the potential reach of your campaigns, you can rely on Make to take care of this in a matter of seconds, and then choose the best audiences based on the results. 

How? Simple: We have recently released the Facebook Ads Campaign Management app, which features modules that allow you to automatically get reach estimates for your interest-based keywords: The “Search Ad Interests” module, and the “Get Reach Estimate” module”.

Now, let’s take a quick look at how these modules can help you prepare your Facebook Ads campaigns faster than ever before by taking care of the hard work for you.

List down your keywords, get audience sizes on the spot

So, what exactly does Make allow you to do?

Simple: It lets you research and plan audiences for your Facebook Ads automatically, and by the bulk. 

All you need is a Facebook business account (which you probably already have), a Make account, a list of keywords, and a spreadsheet (Google Sheets will do). 

With these, you’ll be able to bring up tens of detailed audiences in a matter of seconds, and decide which ones are a good fit for your up-and-coming campaigns. 

How can you set it up?

Once you have a Make account, simply create a Google Sheets spreadsheet, and insert all your interest-based keywords in the first column (one keyword per row). 

For example, if you’re selling sneakers, you will want to add keywords like “sports”, “sneakers”, “shoes”, “running shoes”, “basketball shoes”, and so on. 

Next, you’ll have to create a Make scenario using the following modules: 

• Google Sheets - Search Rows

• Facebook Ads Campaign - Search Ad Interest (based on the keywords you provide in your input spreadsheet)

• Facebook Ads Campaign - Get a Reach Estimate (by providing ad interest IDs retrieved in the previous module)

• Google Sheets - Add a Row (containing the audience reach information to a new sheet within your spreadsheet)

Once you have the scenario ready, Make will push that information to Facebook and add the estimated reach for each of your keywords to your Google Sheets spreadsheet, as you can see below:

Bear in mind that you can narrow down your target audiences in your Make scenario by selecting demographic markers like location, language, household income - the exact same ones you’d use in Facebook when creating a single audience for your campaign.

And that’s it! 

You can now have an automatic audience research and planning system that requires almost none of your time. 

This way, you can make sure that you never run out of fresh audiences to test, and you don’t make sizing mistakes in your campaigns that will cost you your ROI.

Facebook Ads automation: This is where it starts, not where it ends

Automated audience research is a great way to start improving your campaigns. At the end of the day, it’s always better to spend more time on tasks that require creativity and intelligence rather than on those that are repetitive and easy to automate. 

On top of the modules that let you automate audience research, Make features a series of Facebook Ads endpoints to manage campaign management at large - from automatically updating ad sets and campaigns, to retrieving ads, ad sets, and campaign data to fast-track reporting tasks. 

All it takes is a Make account, a couple of hours to learn the ropes, and the desire to level up without compromising your schedule.