There are many reasons to use Facebook Ads to market your dealership—but one of the foremost reasons is that it allows you to precisely target the people to whom you’re advertising. Facebook’s targeting options are robust and effective, and worth going into in some detail.

Choosing the Right Facebook Audience

When you’re in Facebook Ads Manager, look for a section called Detailed Targeting, which is where you’ll get to start slicing and dicing your audience—segmenting the exact groups of people to whom you want to display ads. Be precise here, and make sure you’re only choosing folks who fit your buyer personas; when done right, audience targeting allows you to eliminate waste from your ad campaign by only reaching out to people who directly matter to your campaign—i.e., paying customers.

Facebook will allow you to target according to many different criteria; here’s just a partial list of them.

Demographics

–Education
–Ethnic affinity
–Financial
–Generation
–Home
–Life Events
–Parents
–Politics
–Relationships
–Work

Behaviors

–Automotive
–Behaviors
–Behaviors targeting
–Charitable donations
–Consumer classification
–Digital activities
–Expats
–Financial
–Mobile device user
–Network connection
–Purchase behavior
–Residential profiles
–Seasonal and events
–Travel

Again, this list is partial, though we’ve selected some of the options that make the most sense for auto dealerships. Many of these targeting categories are fairly self-explanatory; you might immediately see how they could relate to your dealership’s advertising endeavors. Others may not be relevant to your dealership, and that’s okay; you definitely don’t have to engage with all of these categories… just the ones where you see some benefit.

We recommend making your targeting decisions based on your buyer personas, of course, and we also endorse narrowing to an appropriate geographic area; there’s not much sense in marketing your Orange County car dealership to customers in New York, for example.

We’d also invite you to explore the options under Behaviors > Automotive, which is where you’ll be able to target individuals who like particular makes and models of cars and who may be in the market for a new one. This is where you’ll really find value and utility in Facebook’s targeting options!

More Considerations for Facebook Audience Targeting

Allow us to make a couple of additional notes about audience targeting. When you list the things you are looking for in your users, note that these things are not necessary requirements. If you put everything into the top box, then your ads will show to people who tick any of those boxes—so your targeting may not be quite as precise as you think it is.

However, if you click Filter and Narrow just below, then you get two more boxes. One says ‘and MUST ALSO match at least ONE of the following.’ This allows you to combine different targeting criteria, to narrow your search to people who fall into overlapping categories. This is where you can really hone in on your targeted buyers!

These tips show you some of the different ways to use Facebook audience targeting to your advantage—but if you need some additional help, we welcome you to contact Get My Auto today!