Need a Facebook Ad Audience? Steal Mine
Need an Audience for Your FB Ads? Steal Mine.
Let’s talk about targeting. The prevailing theory I see regarding audiences these days is that broader is better. That certainly isn’t without merit – Meta is actively working on improving its AI targeting algorithm to do a lot of the hunting for you. But hunting doesn’t always mean catching, and while broad audiences might perform better in the short term (more on that later) it’s always good to test them. Even though audience expansion is a mandatory feature now for everyone, my audience tests have found that typically Traffic ads perform better if you can give FB’s algorithm an idea of where to start. So that being said, here are some audiences I use for various genres:
General Romance: The Big Six
Women 21+
Interests: EL James / Sylvia Day / Diana Gabaldon / Nora Roberts / Danielle Steel / Contemporary Romance
This is an excellent control audience. Books launching to this audience have hit #1 in the US and UK before. It works for a wide variety of Romance subgenres and since it is quite broad, can be narrowed to work more effectively with specific niches.
For Spicier Reads: The Big Six Spicy Edition
Women 21+
Interests: EL James / Sylvia Day / Diana Gabaldon / Nora Roberts / Danielle Steel / Contemporary Romance
Narrow by Interests: Desperate housewives / Gossip Girl / Love & Sex / Scandal / Sex and the City / Shameless / Skins / The Affair, The Tudors / Vampire Diaries / True Blood
Part of the challenge of marketing spicy romance on FB is the limited options for targeting. You can’t just target “SMUT” as an interest. In fact, a lot of the comparable media that you CAN target isn’t all that risqué and peaked in popularity years ago. But we have to work with what we’re given and that’s what this audience does. It takes the Big Six general romance audience and narrows it down to include only people who also have an interest in one of these shows. Shows like Gossip Girl and True Blood may seem practically chaste compared the stuff some of y’all write - but there’s a fair amount of bedroom activities that happen on and off the screen here. So it goes to follow that people who are in the Big Six audience who are ALSO into the spicier side of things would be into one or more of these shows as well. And so far the data has supported this.
In an audience test I ran to 500 clicks each for a spicier romance novel, the general Big Six had a Cost-Per-Unit of $4.94 while the Big Six: Spicier Edition had a CPU of just $2.15.
Spicy TV Shows
Women 21+
Interests: Interests: The Affair (TV series) / The Vampire Diaries / True Blood / The Tudors / Skins (UK TV series) / Weeds (TV series) / Sex and the City / Scandal (TV series) / Shameless (U.S. TV series) / Gossip Girl / Love & Sex / Desperate Housewives / Girls (TV series) or You're the Worst / Friends with Benefits (film) / The Proposal (film) / The Ugly Truth / How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days / Love & Other Drugs / Easy A / No Strings Attached (film) / Bad Teacher or Crazy , Stupid, Love)
For spicy stuff I've also had occasional success abandoning the Big Six entirely and casting a wide net over the smuttiest TV shows I could think to target.
Dark/Mafia Romance
Women 21+
Interests: Gossip Girl / Pretty Little Liars / Gothic Fiction / Stephanie Meyer / The Godfather / The Untouchables / True Blood / Goodfellas
Another slightly modified spicy audience that has performed well for particularly dark, mafia-themed, DubCon, etc. books.
Paranormal Romance 1
Women 21+
Interests: Nalini Singh / Ilona Andrews / Patricia Briggs, Laurell K. Hamilton / Kim Harrison / Paranormal Romance (genre)
This one is pretty self-explanatory.
Paranormal Romance 2
Women 21+
Paranormal Romance / Romance / Hallmark Channel / Danielle Steel / Nora Roberts / Laurell K Hamilton
If you write cuter, cozier paranormal romance this may perform well for you.
Sweet Romance
Women 21+
Interests: Debbie Macomber / Fern Michaels, then select other sweet / clean authors from the “suggested.”
Hopefully these help you hone in on an audience for your own ads! As always, it's best to test them against some audiences you're currently using as well as other audiences like 1% Lookalikes or general broad audiences.
But What About Advantage+ Audience?
In Facebooks most recent update, the UI will practically beg you to just hand over the reins to FB's targeting algo. So should you just do that instead of ignoring all targeting parameters? When I first tested this in January I found that it didn't perform particularly well.
A recent test, however, suggests that FB may have made significant improvements from four months ago. I'm currently running competing scaling campaigns for a contemporary romance against each other in an A/B test to prevent overlap, one using the Big Six audience and the other using Advantage+ for all women over 21 in the US.
At the moment the Advantage+ ads are hanging in with the Big Six ads, but it's too early to call. As soon as I have settled data I'll check back in and update this post if I find anything notable.