Watch my video above on Facebook Flex Targeting if you want to see how it works. But like always if you are not in a good spot where you can watch my video then I have made a short blog post below to cover the main points.

Facebook Flex Targeting Explained

Facebook Flex Targeting is a way for you to get very specific on the audiences you want to target with Facebook.  Why is this important?

Because when you are running Facebook ads you really only have two components:

Your offer and your audience.

 

Even if you have a great offer, if you can’t get it in front of the right people you won’t get any leads or sales.  Facebook Flex Targeting helps us with this.

The example I use in the video and this blog post is for hockey equipment.  Let’s assume we are trying to sell hockey equipment to people on Facebook.  How can Facebook Flex Targeting help us?

To get started with Facebook Flex Targeting just head on over to the Facebook Ads Manager and choose the “power editor” button.

Create a simple campaign (clicks to website or website conversions work fine here).  Then create a sample ad set.  It is in the audience section of the adset that you will find  Flex targeting.  Just like the screen shot here:

In our hockey example if you want to target hockey people we would probably just enter the word “Hockey”:

 

Simple enough right?  But that’s not the whole picture.  I mean Hockey can mean a lot of different things.  There is “roller hockey”, “Ice hockey”, “floor Hockey”, “air Hockey”, etc…

Without Facebook Flex targeting that is just the best Facebook can do for us.  But with Flex Targeting we can get more specific.  We can tell Facebook to find people that like “Hockey” plus something else.

TIP:  A good tip is to find equipment or tool manufacturers in your niche.  For the Hockey niche I did a quick Google Search and found CCM, Bauer, and many more.

So with Flex Targeting we can find people who like “Hockey” and also like the CCM Hockey manufacturer.  You can just add it in like this:

But what if CCM makes roller hockey skates and sticks?  Now what can we do?

Well Facebook Flex Targeting takes it a step further.  We can exclude people we don’t want in our audience.  So we can exclude those other kinds of Hockey sports like the screen shot below:

So you can see we have a lot of levers we can pull to fine tune our audiences.  Now we are targeting people who like Hockey and the CCM Brand.  But we are excluding people who play the other kinds of hockey.

As you can see Facebook Flex Targeting is very powerful.  You will come across the need for it for sure when you are running Facebook ads.  Use Facebook Flex Targeting and you will craft a very refined audience for your Facebook ad campaigns.