3 highly secret Facebook marketing hacks!
If you are doing paid media marketing, chances are you must be heavily relying on Facebook to fuel your marketing ROI. While ads and landing pages are a good place to start optimising your Return On Ad Spends (ROAS), nothing is more important than targeting the right audience.
You can’t expect to sell dog food to someone who doesn’t even have a pet no matter how compelling your proposition is.
Over the 5 years of my career, I have spent countless money on Facebook marketing precisely because of the ROI it brings me every time. While the ad dashboard might seem to be very easy to get the hang of, there are some mostly unknown techniques that I have learnt working on 100+ projects that I want to share with all of you.
With over 6 million advertisers on Facebook, you can have a competitive edge over others, if you implement these simple tricks and guarantee a lower CPC.
Techniques that will go beyond the normal use cases that facebook wants every advertiser to use.
Unlock hidden targeting
Understanding your target audience is a crucial step in any targeting. Once you have identified their interests and affinities, you can go beyond the suggested ad targeting (25 categories) that Facebook provides you with.
We will be using the Facebook Marketing API for the same.
Step 1: Sign up for Facebook for developers at https://developers.facebook.com/apps
Step 2: Create an App
Step 3: Click on Manage Pages, Ads or Groups
Step 4: Fill in any name you like and leave everything as it is and create the App ID.
Step 5: Now under the setting tab go to basic and get your AppID and the App secret by filling in your password. Once you have that with you, plug those in the following URL;
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id={your-app-id} &client_secret={your-app-secret}&grant_type=client_credentials”
Step 6: Now you will receive your access token
Once you have that you are almost done. Now figure out the keyword (say Tennis) then plug your secret key and the keyword in the following URL
Step 7: Additionally if you need to find additional interests you can use the following interest Suggestions API at
This might seem a little fishy but it's not. We are using Facebook’s own API and utilising it to get the other available targeting. Try searching for affinities on google and Facebook to get a holistic list of suggested interests to target.
Retargeting after 45 sec:
Retargeting is one of the cheapest sources for conversions for a lot of businesses but you could take a step further to refine the audience that have spent at least 45 seconds on your website. This way you will get rid of people who might have accidentally clicked on your ad or casual surfers.
You can simply append your Facebook or Adwords script in the following script and this will make sure that the pixel fires after 45 seconds. This simple trick can result in a ~10% increase in conversion rates for retargeting campaigns.
Negative location for precise targeting
In the ads manager, you can only target locations within 10 miles radius but if you wish to make your targeting more precise, you can use negative locations. The screenshot below shows how you could place excluded locations to make your targeting more precise.
This could be particularly helpful in case you need to target people who come to a particular market or even your office.
Applying the tricks above can be helpful to maximise your ROI on Facebook campaigns and would give you a competitive edge over your competitors. If you need help designing your sales funnel, make sure to check out my post on the sales funnel to take your advertisements to the next level.
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