How to Save Audiences (and Time) in Facebook and LinkedIn

This week’s Metrics Monday is a tactical time-saver to ensure you are efficiently replicating targeting across all of your campaigns. In past posts, we have explored many aspects of social marketing, such as our guide to Facebook Insights. Saved audiences are valuable for both beginners and ad experts. It is a crucial step in ensuring that you’re targeting your ad set to the correct audience.

This functionality has recently been added to LinkedIn, while Facebook has had save audience capabilities for the last couple of years.

Why save targeted audiences? 

The most obvious answer is to save time when setting up ad sets and campaigns on both platforms. However, the answer goes deeper than just creating ads.

By saving audiences and replicating them in new campaigns, you ensure you are targeting the same audience. Especially if targeting a narrow or complicated audience, you can avoid the possibility of skipping a certain job title or interest.

Jon Loomer writes about the inaccuracy of creating an ad from scratch by stating that “it’s inexact. When advertisers wing it, they enter all of these things from memory. Is the ideal age group 35–44 or 25–49? Did the list of interests include ‘Facebook for Business’ or ‘Facebook for Local Business’?”

The point is minor discrepancies will make a major difference in your advertising performance.

Saving audiences is also crucial for ad testing and optimization. A/B testing requires that everything other than the test, such as creative or copy, remains exactly the same. By keeping targeting consistent, you can ensure that other aspects of your testing are being properly vetted.

Saving custom ad audiences in Facebook

Saving ad audiences is fairly simple. Within Facebook’s Ads Manager, you can save the audience.

To save your ad audience on Facebook:

1. Enter in targeting information such as location, age, gender, interests, and any other demographic or interest-related targeting.
2. Under “Add a Connection” and prior to reviewing placements, select “Save Audience. ”
3. Name your target audience and click “Save.”
4. To access this audience when creating your next ad, select “Use a Saved Audience” at the top of the Ads Manager.

Saving targeting tmplates in LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers rich targeting, but until this year, replicating ads was a manual process. This caused headaches, especially if you’re optimizing ads for a highly targeted audience.

LinkedIn introduced targeting templates across all of its ad products, including sponsored content, InMails, and text ads.

To save your ad audience on LinkedIn:

1. Enter in targeting information such as location, gender, job title, age, etc.
2. Click “Save audience as template.”
3. Name your audience and add a brief description. Click “Save.”
4. To access this audience when creating a new ad, click on the “Target by” dropdown menu and select “Applying previously saved template.”
5. Select your targeting template. You can also search by name or keyword if you’ve saved a number of templates.
6. As targeting changes over time, you can also update and edit any saved targeting template.

Additionally, LinkedIn has also added features beyond saving targeting templates to include restarting completed campaigns as well as archiving old ones.

Avoid wasting time manually inputting targeting criteria. Instead, save your targeting audiences and optimize your ad campaigns. Make your campaigns as effective as possible by spending time where it counts.

Related resources:

• How to install the new Facebook pixel: For any Facebook advertising campaign, the Facebook pixel is crucial to tracking success. This post goes through the steps to install the pixel on your website.
• We’re making LinkedIn advertising easier than ever with these new tools: LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions Blog provides a high-level overview of their newest features, including saving ad templates, archiving campaigns, and new targeting criteria.
• How can I save my ad’s audience?: This step-by-step guide from Facebook on how to save audiences includes saving audiences in Power Editor.