The Most Profitable Audiences to Target for Event Ads
An explanation of which audiences are most profitable for event creators.
Most organizers only utilize one ad set. Why? When you do quick campaign creation in Facebook Ads Manager, you’re defaulted to a screen that prompts you to add interests.
If you’re a comedy venue in Canada and Facebook asks you to enter interests that you think would be relevant for your shows, you'll default to what you know: Dave Chappelle, Comedy Central, etc. Facebook makes it easy for event organizers to use interest-based targeting. And while this isn't an incorrect way to target, it has limitations: usually, this targeting only results in one interest-based audience.
What we’ve noticed over the years at ToneDen is that the profitability of audiences is consistent. By and large, the most profitable audiences are custom audiences.
How do the different custom audiences stack up? We’ll take a look, beginning with the most profitable audience and working down to the least profitable audience.
- 1.Web Traffic: This audience consists of individuals who visit your event website or your ticketing pages (i.e., Eventbrite or Ticketmaster.
- 2.Facebook Events Engagers: This audience consists of individuals who visit your Facebook event pages and RSVP and ‘Going’ or ‘Interested.’
- 3.Customer List: This audience consists of your mailing list. Oddly enough, your past buyers and people on your mailing list tend not to be repeat event goers.
- 4.Interest Audiences: This audience is the true workhorse of Facebook advertising. If you don't have the previous three data sources, this is your best shot of getting in front of new people.
- 5.Facebook Page Engagers: This audience consists of individuals who’ve liked your Facebook page or engaged with it (i.e., visited your page, commented or liked your posts).
- 6.Instagram Engagers: This audience consists of individuals who’ve liked your Instagram account or engaged with it (i.e., commented or liked your posts).
- 7.Other: This category consists of lookalike audiences, video engagers, and so forth.
Remember: All of these audiences can be incredibly valuable. But when you have lean budgets and tough choices need to be made, it’s important to prioritize. If you're trying to get your campaigns from zero to one, it's usually easier to utilize the top three audiences first meaning. The takeaway? Include different types of audiences in your campaigns—not just interest-based audiences.
Include different types of audiences in your campaigns—not just interest-based audiences.
To create different audiences, go to the All Audiences section in Facebook Ads Manager. Given how crowded Ads Manager real estate is, many marketers aren't even aware of this option. Too often, we see people stop after only building out a custom audience of past buyers or mailing lists contacts. The audiences we see leveraged the least are, oddly enough, the most profitable: Website traffic, Facebook page, Instagram profile, and Facebook events engagement audiences are all underutilized.
Fortunately, it’s simple to target the most profitable audiences. And by coupling more audiences with custom audiences, you'll see significantly better returns on your campaigns.
We highly recommend creating smaller campaigns that exclusively retarget event page visitors. You can learn how to do so by viewing this video:
Now that you've mastered the best practices of Facebook Advertising for Events, let's talk about how you should be planning out your campaigns: