How to Target Competitor Audiences on Facebook Ads
Introduction
If you’re in a business that competes with others, using Facebook ads to target your competitors’ customers can be an effective way to grow your audience and generate sales. This guide will show you how to create a Facebook ad campaign targeting competitor audiences so that you can reach people who may have never heard of your brand before.
How do I find my target competitor audiences on Facebook?
Use Facebook Insights to find your competitors’ audiences
Use the Facebook ad manager to find your competitors’ audiences
Use the search bar on Facebook to find your competitors’ audiences
Use the audience tool on Facebook to find your competitors’ audiences
How do I target my competitor’s audience on Facebook in 2023?
In this article, we’ll show you how to target your competitors’ audience on Facebook and why it might be worth the effort.
Find your competitors’ Facebook business pages.
You’ll need to find your competitors’ Facebook business pages to start. This can be done by searching for their company name in Facebook’s Search field or by searching for their brand name in the “Pages” section of your Facebook Ads Manager account.
Now that you’ve found your competitors’ business pages, it’s time to explore their audiences!
Find the ad campaigns that competitors have been running on Facebook
Once you know what competitors have been running on Facebook, you can use that information to your advantage. A competitor’s ad campaign is one of the best ways to learn about what performs well for them and which audiences are most receptive to their messages. You can find these ads by searching for them — both on Google and in Facebook’s search bar — and then copying their targeting methods onto your own ads.
Create a lookalike audience for your closest competitors
Create a lookalike audience based on a certain percentage of your competitor’s audience
To start, you will want to look at how many people your competitor has in their Facebook ad account. In the example below, we are looking at the Facebook page of one of our competitors, and they have 1,000 followers:
Now that we know how many people are following them (1,000), we can use that information as a benchmark for creating our own lookalike audiences. You can also create a lookalike audience based on the same gender and age range as your competitor
Define your audiences based on interests and behaviors
Now that you’ve got your list of audiences, it’s time to define what data you’ll use to target them. For example, if you’re in the travel industry and want to target people in a specific country or city, fill in their location or interest. If your product is for millennials who like sports and travel, add those interests and behaviors.
Traditionally, Facebook will have one main audience for each ad set (the people who see your ads). However, as an advertiser with multiple products or services available at once — and as long as they’re separated — you can create multiple audiences within one ad set (and thus show different ads).
It’s also important to note that while targeting might seem straightforward at first glance (i.e., “I’m going after Spanish-speaking males”), don’t forget about some other factors that could affect performance: frequency cap limits on how many times someone sees an ad; competition between advertisers; how well certain ads perform over others; etcetera!
Use partner categories to define your target audience
Partner categories are one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal when targeting competitors’ audiences on Facebook. Partner categories help you define and refine your target audience by allowing you to target users who have interacted with a partner brand (and thus share similar interests).
So how do you use partner categories?
Simply select “Partner Categories” from the Target Audience menu and select a specific partner category from the drop-down menu. Then, choose whether or not you want to include all users associated with that category (which will likely be quite broad) or just people who’ve interacted with a specific brand within it. In this case, we’ll target people who’ve interacted with our own pages and those from other brands in our company’s network of partners.
Whether you’re trying to win over new clients or get more people on your website and into your sales to funnel, advertising on Facebook is the best way to do that.
Facebook’s targeting options are second-to-none in terms of their ability to reach exactly who you want. And one of the most powerful ways to use these tools is with competitor audiences.
These are people who have shown interest in your competitors’ products, services, and content — as well as those who have interacted with them on social media sites like Facebook (likes, comments, etc.).
Conclusion
Once you’ve defined your target audience, you can start creating Facebook ads that will appeal to them. It’s important to remember the differences between your own business and the competition — but also the similarities! After all, if you don’t know who else is out there trying to accomplish the same thing as you are, how will you ever get ahead?
