Facebook Ad Targeting In 2025: Techniques That Work Right Now!

One of the most important things that has changed in meta ads is targeting the audience or your potential customers.

I have been into Meta ads for the past six years, and targeting has been the most dynamic change I have seen in the dashboard.

After spending lakhs of rupees in meta advertising, one thing is pretty clear, If you are not targeting the correct audience, your ad failures will always remain constant.

Now, you might be wondering if there have been many changes in the way we target and how we will figure out what will work in the coming years.

You don’t have to worry anymore! because I am always there to make your problems go away. Let’s talk about the ways you can target your audience through meta ads.

Facebook Ad Targeting In 2025

1. Detailed Targeting

Detailed targeting has always been an important part of running ads on Facebook.

Detail targeting helps you target your audience in the most precise way possible. One thing I like the most about Facebook ads is that it allows you to target your exact audience and turn them into potential customers.

To give you a clear overview, first of all you need to understand that Facebook ads give you four different ways to do detailed targeting. Let’s talk about them in a detailed manner:

Targeting Based On Age & Gender

Let’s take an example here, suppose I have a business of artificial jewellery, and I sell my jewellery through an e-commerce store.
Now, if I go down deep and think about the nature of my business, I will have a clear understanding that artificial jewelry is not meant for everyone.

Certain age criteria need to be set so that I can target my correct audience. Suppose I want to run ads only in India and I am pretty sure that women above 50 years old are not going to shop for artificial jewellery through my ad and they are much more interested, in gold and diamond jewelry.

So to target my correct audience, I need to set age criteria, for example, for the above-mentioned business, I can target an age from 18 years old to 40 years old because they will be the most interested audience.

Now let’s think this from a different perspective, the jewellery business I own only makes products for women. This clears it up that my potential customers are only women and not men, so I also need to select women as my target audience. This feature is also available in Facebook ads where you can decide whether you want to target women, men, or both of them.

READ: What Is The Average ROAS Of Facebook Ads?

Targeting Based On Location

If you are a Facebook ad geek you might have heard from a lot of beginners that they want people from a specific location, but they are not able to make these changes.

On Facebook ads, you also have an option to target on the basis of demography. let’s understand this with an example. Suppose I have a small bakery in Mumbai, and I want more people to visit my bakery and become my customers.

So it’s obvious that I want my ad to be shown to the people only living in the city. If I run ads in India, I won’t be getting actual and convertible customers. There are lot of times when you have to select a specific location where you want to run your ads , and this you can do with the help of setting the demography.

This way, you will not waste your money in running ad at a location where people are not even interested.

Targeting With Demography

Suppose you have an app that you want to promote through Facebook ads. The app basically helps 9 to 5 working employees to manage their time.

So if you think about this business, a little bit, you will understand that their target audience is people who do 9 to 5 or are employed at some company.

You can use the demographic targeting option where you can target people based on their educational qualifications, their work status, their parental status, etc.

And the craziest thing, you can even target people based on their financial status. You might be wondering, how does Facebook know all of these things?

It’s pretty straightforward, if someone is using Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, they either visit some pages, interact with similar kinds of content, or give Facebook some kind of hint on what category they fall into.

And that is how Facebook allows advertisers to target those exact same people, why do you think platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are free?

Targeting Based On Interest

This is one of the most used targeting option when it comes to Facebook ads. Whenever you think about your business and your target audience, you always want to know what their interest are?

For example, if I have a clothing wear brand, where I make clothes for women aged from 18 to 30, and is interested in modern fashion .

If I dig it a little deeper, I know my target audience is interested in fashion, it’s mostly Genz’s and millennial audience, and I can figure out what their interests are accordingly.

Now I can use Facebook ads, interest feature where I can target the similar interest I thought of my target audience.

Every business is different, your audience might be interested in fitness or in entertainment or in fashion or in technology etc. You can easily select the interest of your audience so that you reach to them correctly.

If you see the interest section in Facebook, you will see a lot of categories, and it’s pretty exhausting to find which audience relates to you most. Instead, you can just type the interest you know about your audience and Facebook will automatically show what kind of interest they have in store.

I would suggest not to just depended upon the categories, because when you start searching on the search box, you will discover a lot more creative interest related to your business. For example, if I want to target women interested in fashion, I can also target women who love to watch fashion shows.

Targeting Based on Behaviour

You can also target your audience based on how their behaviour is online. Targeting based on behaviour, basically means you can target, what intent they have, how do they behave online, device usage etc.

For example, I want to target people who are interested in purchasing high-value goods through ads, so I can target them accordingly. If you want to target people, whose anniversary is coming near, you can definitely do it.

If you want to target people who heavily shop online, you can easily do it. I would suggest don’t just depend on the categories. You see under be behavior section, be creative with it.

Start searching everything, you know about your target audience on the search box, and you will see the results accordingly.

2. Custom Audience

This targeting feature on Facebook ad is literally a gold mine. custom audience basically means creating an audience according to yourself.

Let’s take multiple examples here for your better understanding:

Suppose I have a clothing business, offline or a sell on market places. I already have a lot of data of my existing customers. What I can do is feed this data to Facebook and tell its AI to find the audience which exactly matches with them. This is possible through custom audience.

Now suppose I have a really good following on my Instagram account, and I am willing to target people who like, comment, share or save my videos and post, because I know they are my exact target audience. This is also possible through custom audience.

One more, suppose I have an e-commerce website where I do sales. Now every visitor who goes to my website doesn’t convert into a customer, there will be a lot of people who just visit the website, add products to the cart, or initiate checkout.

I can create a custom audience, targeting these warm audience and convert them into my customers. You might have heard about the re-targeting strategy on Facebook ads, this is possible through custom audience only.

Now I won’t be teaching how to create a custom audience. If you are fan of reading and learning, you can click the link to get a detailed tutorial of how to create a custom audience.

And worry, not, if you want to learn it through a video tutorial, you can watch the video below.

I have just mentioned a few of examples through which you can create a custom audience. You can see below in how many multiple ways you can create a custom audience for yourself.

3. Lookalike Audience

Once you know how to create a custom audience, creating a lookalike audience will become so much easier for you.

Let me explain the concept: suppose I created a custom audience where I told Facebook by giving it a list that these are my pre-existing customers, you can find people like them and show them my ad. This is lookalike audience.

Here, Facebook feeds your pre-existing data and tries to find people who are exactly related to them, they can behave like your existing audience, might have similar interest or might live in the same location.

When you go to your targeting section, you will see add new option. You just have to click on look like audience and create one for yourself.

For creating a lookalike, you need to 1st select one of the customer audiences you created you want a lookalike of.

You will also see an option of 1%, or 2%: this is basically how broad do you want your lookalike audience to be. For example, if you select one percent, it will target people exactly related to your custom audience, if you select 2%, it will slightly go broader.

I suggest you test the percentages and see what kind of audience is working for you, the most. By creating lookalike audiences, you spend less in testing your ads because you already give Facebook a data of what your audience is, and what Facebook has to target.

If you want to learn how to create a lookalike audience, you can watch the video below:

Until then, Happy Digital Learning 😍

DAMINI TRIPATHI