As I covered in my Facebook Advertising strategy, Facebook Ads allows the advertiser to get laser fine targeting to find their exact demographic in a lot of ways. It’s far more targeted than Google’s Adwords (see my Google Adwords tips for a complete overview) allows you to be, in large part because people are willingly giving away their personal info on Facebook, which is why a lot of advertisers have flocked to Facebook Ads to realize a better conversion rate.
One of the choices which they do not give you, likely because there isn’t a deliberate section for sharing your ethnicity, is the ability to target specific ethnicities. While you could say that it’s a bit taboo, the truth is that advertisers have targeted demographics by ethnicity for years. Some products obviously appeal to certain ethnicities over others, so you want to be able to do as much as you can to get your offer in front of the right audience and away from the wrong audiences as these will have a negative affect on how much you’re paying for your ads (see how much do Facebook Ads cost).
The key is to focus on the “interests” section of your ads to and switch it to “precise interests” rather than broad category targeting (I typically recommend this no matter who your audience is). Switching to precise interests, we can input keywords which people are specifically mentioning in their profiles so that we know that they are interested in whichever phrase we’re targeting.
It’s all about the phrases which you target, so you have to think of phrases which people would share in their profiles to represent their race. Here’s one you may not have thought of which is “proud to be” + ethnicity. For some reason when I put in proud to be asian it came back as “proud be asian”, so that’s apparently what people are putting in their profiles over the first example. That brings up 1,080 people on Facebook, not much of a start, but we can build on that.
Let’s put in an obvious one which will net a lot of profiles, “asian american”. There we go, that brings us up to 161,120 people. I noticed that once I put in Asian American as a keyword/interest, it brought up suggested likes and interests which include “japanese american” and “asian people”. Thank you very much, Facebook! Assuming these work for me I can click and add them to bring the total up to 361,320 people.
You can also click on a button below the suggested likes and interests which reads “refresh suggestions” and it will bring up other options which I have done in this last example to bring in “Japanese American”, “Taiwanese American”, plenty of more options to consider.
This gives you a few prefix and suffix word ideas which you can tack on to your ethnicity of choice to find even more examples; and there you have it ethnicity targeting in Facebook Ads to better identify and connect with our target market, thus increasing conversions and decreasing cost spent to do it.