How Facebook Targeting Works For Lead Generation
Decoding Facebook Lead Gen Advertising
Facebook lead generation is a powerful way to bring a consistent flow of new prospects into your sales funnel.
However, there are a few different things to consider when you’re setting up new campaigns. This guide will show you the 3 ways you can target sales prospects with Facebook and the KPI’s you should be shooting for when launching Facebook lead generation campaigns.
I've been media buying and overseeing Facebook lead generation campaigns for years. I've seen accounts that are just starting out scale to their first $10k, and I've seen accounts that are already spending $200k per month scale to $1.5M per month, profitably.
These 3 methods for targeting are used across the board and will help you refine who you show your ads to and get better return on your advertising spend.
Key Concepts:
- Facebook Interest Targeting - Finding certain interests inside of the Facebook ad manager
- Lookalike Audiences - Using a particular data set to find new audiences that look like other customer segments
- Targeting With Creative and Copy- going "broad" and letting your ad creative and copy find who best suits your offer.
Facebook Interest Targeting For Lead Generation
Interest targeting is the easiest way to find prospects to show your ads to.
Right now, as of Spring 2025, Facebook is really pushing Advantage+ audiences. Through all the tests that we’ve run, this is not an effective means to target your audience.
This is still in beta testing, in other words, Facebook wants to use your budget to test their new feature. It may still take another year or two to figure this out, so we recommend turning this feature off.
Click “Switch To Original Audience Options”.
Now it’s time to find some interests to target. The key is to start broad and then narrow your focus from there.
If you’re a B2B offering, start broad with interests like “Business Owner” or “Facebook page admins” these interests are more likely to find business owners, and you can narrow down your focus from there. Try anything and everything. Try any keywords that would make sense for your offering.
When finding interests to target, choose options that say "Interest" and avoid options like "Job Title", "Field of Study" and "Employer". This will lead to better results.
Keep stacking your interests until you’ve found an Estimated audience size of about 10M to 30M. Anything smaller than 10M and you’re too narrow and it’ll be expensive to convert, if you’re larger than 30M, your targeting is too broad and you need to narrow further.
Pro Tip: How to find "Little Known" Interests on Facebook Ad Targeting
Theres a low-key app that we use to find interests that other advertisers are not using. It can help you find interests that exist in Facebook’s database, but may not be shown to you right away. Check out Interest Explorer.
How to find the leads that are more financially qualified.
Now that we’ve found our stack of interests, let’s narrow our targeting even further…
There’s nothing worse than wasting your budget on broke people.
To put it nicer, let’s narrow our focus to people that are in the higher end of the tax bracket and show our ads to people who can actually afford to buy our services.
In all your interest targeting, click “Narrow Further” add these exclusions so that of the interests we targeted earlier, we now only show our ads to prospects with money.
Facebook Look Alike Audiences (LLA) Targeting
Look-alike audiences are a way to find new prospects that Look-like your current best prospects.
Facebook uses its vast database and network to find similarities between current prospects and new prospects. This method is not as easy to do and may take some time, but when you're using it effectively, it is even better than just interest targeting alone.If you’re an established company with thousands of customers and you have a .CSV with their names, phone numbers, email addresses, then this will be perfect for you.
Just take this list and upload it into the audience manager and create a lookalike audience from this.
But what if you dont have an existing list to create a LLA?
Then Create One.
First go into your Facebook ad manager and create an engagement campaign.
The goal of the engagement campaign is not to generate leads. It's considered an "Audience Building campaign". If you get a couple leads, that's great. But it's not the goal.
If you have a brand new ad account, doing a campaign like this is crucial to warm up your account.
Read more about warming up your account before starting Facebook lead gen campaigns.
Create an engagement campaign with the goal of Page Likes. Run this at a daily budget of $5-20 per day.
Run this for 2-3 weeks until you've built up more Pages Likes to your Facebook page.
Now you can turn around and build a look-alike audience around the people who liked your page.Spending $100 now to build a strong audience will pay off dividends in the future, especially if you're starting out. It'll take more time but it's worth it.
Target Your B2B Leads With Creative and Copy
Targeting with your creative and copy should be used in all campaigns. It's about creating photos, videos, and written words that call-out and resonate with your target audience. It's not something you do on it's own. It's used in conjunction with your other targeting methods, but it's crucial.
Targeting With Copy
Writing compelling copy that magnetically pulls people into your ecosystem is the foundation of a good campaign. When you write copy that resonates with your audience, it will get them to emotionally respond to your message and (hopefully) take action. Your copy is the final element to the targeting. If you write words that call out your Ideal Client Persona (ICP), you'll let them know that this ad is for them. If your words don't resonate with them, the viewer will know this ad isn't for them (and they'll keep scrolling).
Testing Facebook Lead Generation Campaigns
All B2B offers are built differently. Each account and service that you provide is different than the last. Testing is how you determine what works for YOU.
When testing, put each type of Facebook targeting into a different ad set. Give each ad set the SAME budget. Compare the results side by side for at least a week to see how each performs compared to the other. Look at cost-per-click, click-through-rate, cost-per-lead, and cost per booked sales meeting. The campaigns with the better performance you keep, and the ads that dont perform as well you delete and try with a new type of targeting.
