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Facebook Ad Targeting Options 2025 USA

AFFHUB is on the line! We continue to discuss advertising on Facebook.

The topic of targeting is always relevant, as it is the basis for promoting any business.

We have already written an article on how to become a targeting specialist.

Today, we will talk in more detail about the facebook ad targeting options. What are the main types of audiences that Facebook divides into, how to set up your own audience, and more — find out in this article.

Facebook ad targeting options

Let’s take a look at the audience settings that Facebook offers. There are many options here, as the goal is to set up the most relevant audience for a specific ad.

Audiences

First, you need to create a new audience or select a saved one. (You can read facebook custom audiences guide later in this article).

Once you have selected an audience, Facebook will offer you the Advantage of extension.

This will help you find similar people based on specific criteria. However, this is not always effective, so it is worth paying attention to other settings as well.

Locations

This option helps you reach the audience closest to you. For example, if you are advertising your coffee shop, you need to select your city as the location. It is unlikely that people from other cities will travel to your city for their morning coffee.

To set the location, click the “Edit” button. Select the desired locations or delete the “outdated” ones that are no longer relevant to you.

Then click the “Review” button. This will allow you to select locations by country, region, or previously saved locations. Alternatively, you can use a different format — place a marker on the map using Drop pin.

You can choose:

Countries
States/regions
Cities
Postal codes
Addresses
The whole world or specific regions

Age

This is also an important point. Offers vary, so you need to be careful with this. Facebook allows advertising to people aged 18 to 65+. For example, if you are advertising gardening tools, you should select an audience aged 40+. It is unlikely that 18-year-olds are interested in tidying up their yards. The same applies to offers for younger people. We doubt that anything “youthful,” so to speak, will be of interest to people aged 65+.

Gender

Here you can choose: women, men, or everyone.

For example, if you have a nail salon, you should focus mainly on a female audience (although men also visit them for hygiene purposes, but their percentage is slightly lower).

Detailed targeting

Now, this is really interesting and useful 🤩

You’ve set up the “basic” stuff. Now you can expand this picture by adding three more parameters: demographics, behavior, and interests.

Here, Facebook also offers Advantage, which can help you with more detailed settings.

To view the list of suggested options, click the “Review” button.

Once you have reviewed everything and selected the most suitable option for you, you can add facebook ad demographics targeting, behavior targeting, and interest-based targeting facebook.

Next, you can click the “Suggestions” button. You will then see a list of options similar to the ones you have already selected.

Language

You can select “All languages” or narrow down the list.

You can play around with this in different ways. If you need a specific regional language, select it. But if you want to attract a specific foreign audience, feel free to choose a language for them (even if it is unusual in your region).

Placement

It can be automatic or manual.

Automatic: Facebook places ads using Advantage+. Then the best option is automatically selected to help attract more users.

But, as we have already said, automatic settings do not always work perfectly.

So you can try manual placement. Here you can configure “devices.” Select: smartphones, computers, all devices.

Next, select the placement platform.

You can also find the “Show more settings” button at the bottom. Here you can tweak a few more things and you’re done 😃.

Audience targeting facebook ads 2025

Now let’s take a closer look at audience targeting facebook ads 2025.

There are three main types of audiences that FB distinguishes: Core Audiences; Custom Audiences; Lookalike Audiences.

Core Audiences

This is the selection of an audience based on general criteria:

Location — countries, regions, cities, etc.
Facebook ad demographics targeting — age, gender, education, etc.
Interest-based targeting facebook.
Behavior — how a user behaves online, what purchases they make, etc.

Here you can edit everything so that the general criteria best suit your ads. You can exclude categories of people that are not suitable for you, etc.

The main audiences are a kind of base from which you can start setting up a “targeting web” to get more effective results.

Custom Audiences

This is a slightly narrower audience. From here, you can start making your targeting more effective. Custom audiences are those who interact with your profile or have interacted with it in the past.

But there are also two types of sources for this audience. These are your own sources and Facebook sources.

Who are the representatives of a “custom audience”:

Your customer list
Visitors to your website
Users of your app
People who have been to your physical stores, called your hotline, and had some interaction with your business.

If we consider creating a custom audience using Facebook sources, then these are:

People who viewed the instant experience in your ad.
Users who viewed your post.
People who interacted with your ad.
Those who interacted with your products in the Facebook store.
People who interacted with your Instagram profile.
etc.

The only thing is that custom audiences have certain time limits. The history of visitors to your site is displayed for 180 days.

Lookalike audiences facebook

In this case, you have the opportunity to create audiences that are similar to your already configured one. This way, you will reach a significantly larger number of users.

When creating similar audiences, you can select the source audience. For example, from 1,000 to 50,000 people.

Facebook custom audiences guide

We promised that we would take a closer look at setting up custom audiences on Facebook later.

Go to Facebook Ads Manager

Log in to your Facebook Ads Manager account.
In the menu, click “Audiences” (or find it through the search in Business Manager).

We have already written about how to work with FAM in another article.

Create a new custom audience

Click “Create Audience” → “Custom Audience.”
Select the data source for creating the audience.

Select the audience source type

Facebook offers several options:

Data from your website (via Facebook Pixel) — website visitors, those who added a product to their cart but did not buy it, etc.
Customer list — upload a file with email addresses, phone numbers, or other identifiers.
App activity — users who interacted with your mobile app.
Facebook or Instagram activity — people who watched videos, liked posts, or wrote messages.
Offline activity — users who interacted with you offline (for example, in a store).

Configure settings

Specify the interaction period (for example, the last 30, 60, or 180 days).
Add or exclude certain user groups.
Give the audience a clear name (for example, “Website visitors — 30 days”).

Save the audience

Click “Create audience.”
It will appear in the audience list and will be available for targeting in new campaigns.

Using your own audience

When creating an ad campaign, select the desired custom audience in the “Audience” section.
You can also create a Lookalike Audience based on your customers.

Summary

When setting up targeted advertising on Facebook, it is important to carefully work out the audience to ensure high-quality user engagement.

More is not always better. Sometimes it is much more effective to specify a narrower audience but attract more interested people than to target half the world, spend huge amounts of money on this number, and then be surprised that the results are not what you expected.