Master Targeting Audiences on Facebook in the UK

Forget boosting posts and hoping for the best. If you really want to make your Facebook advertising budget work for you, you need to think like a strategist, not just a marketer. It’s about meticulously building your audiences, not just picking them from a list. Master targeting audiences on Facebook and stop guessing—start building campaigns that truly convert.

This means shifting your mindset away from simply selecting a basic age range and location. True success comes from understanding the three core pillars of audience creation: Core, Custom, and Lookalike. Once you get your head around these, you can start layering them to create highly specific, motivated segments of potential customers who are much more likely to convert.

Getting this foundation right is non-negotiable. It’s the difference between a campaign that drains your budget and one that delivers a serious return.

The Three Pillars of Audience Building

Think of these as your essential toolkit inside Facebook Ads Manager. Each one has a distinct job to do at different points in your customer’s journey, from first contact to final sale.

• Core Audiences: This is your starting block for finding new people. You build these audiences from the ground up using criteria like demographics, location, and—most importantly—detailed interests and behaviours. Think ‘fans of The Great British Bake Off‘ or people tagged as ‘Engaged Shoppers’. This is top-of-funnel targeting.
• Custom Audiences: This is where you get personal by using your own data. Custom Audiences allow you to reconnect with people who already know you. We’re talking about website visitors, people who have used your app, or contacts from your customer email list. It’s all about retargeting and nurturing warm leads.
• Lookalike Audiences: Ready to scale up? This is how you do it. Facebook takes a ‘source’ audience—like your list of best customers or most engaged website visitors—and builds a brand new audience of people who share similar traits and behaviours. It’s an incredibly powerful way to find more people like your existing fans.

Here’s a look at where you’ll make these initial, crucial choices within the Ads Manager interface.

This screenshot shows that first step in Ads Manager where you can create new Custom, Lookalike, or Saved (Core) audiences. Mastering this screen is the basis of any sophisticated targeting strategy.

To give you a better sense of how these audience types fit into a real campaign strategy, here’s a quick summary.

Core Facebook Audience Types At a Glance

This table breaks down the three primary audience types, showing you exactly where they shine and at what stage of your campaign you should be using them. It’s a handy cheat sheet for planning your next move.

As you can see, each audience has its place. The real magic, though, isn’t in using just one of these types. It’s in how you combine and layer them.

Imagine a UK-based ecommerce brand. They could create a campaign that targets a Custom Audience of recent website visitors, but then add a Core Audience layer to only show ads to those visitors who live in affluent postcodes. The potential for precision is huge.

A layered approach is absolutely critical for maximising your budget. The UK market is buzzing with activity; Facebook’s advertising reach grew by 1.2 million users between early 2024 and 2025, hitting a massive 38.3 million people. That’s over half the entire population! With so many potential customers, smart targeting is essential to cut through the noise.

By understanding how to blend these pillars, you create a system that doesn’t just find new customers but also nurtures leads and drives repeat business. For some real-world inspiration on how this looks when it’s done right, check out these powerful Facebook Ads examples from other successful campaigns.

 Targeting Audiences on Facebook: Building Your Foundation with Core Audiences

Before you even think about retargeting or scaling, you need a solid foundation. This is where Core Audiences come in. They are your go-to for reaching fresh faces—people who’ve never interacted with your business before. This is where we move beyond just picking an age range and a city and start painting a detailed picture of your ideal customer from the ground up.

Think of it as building a persona using Facebook’s enormous dataset. The real magic happens in the Detailed Targeting section. This is where you can layer demographics, interests, and behaviours to find incredibly specific pockets of people.

Beyond Basic Demographics

Sure, age, gender, and location are the fundamentals, but the real gold is hidden in the more granular demographic options. Facebook lets you target people based on major life events, which can be an absolute game-changer for many businesses.

For example, you can pinpoint people who are:

• Newly engaged: A dream audience for wedding photographers, venues, and caterers.
• New parents: Perfect for anyone selling baby products, family photography sessions, or even financial planning services.
• Recently moved: The ideal time to get in front of them if you offer local services, furniture, or home improvement.

Targeting by job title can be tempting, but a word of caution here. Relying solely on titles like ‘CEO’ or ‘Founder’ is a bit hit-and-miss, as many people just don’t keep this information current on their personal profiles. It’s often much more reliable to target based on what people do rather than what they say they do.

Key Takeaway: Focus on life events and other actively updated demographics. They’re often far more reliable indicators of a person’s current needs and buying intent than a job title they might have set years ago.

The Art of Interest and Behaviour Targeting (Targeting Audiences on Facebook)

Now, this is where you can get really creative. Instead of just plugging in obvious interests, think laterally. What are your customers’ hobbies? What magazines do they read or TV shows do they watch? What are their real-world habits?

Interest targeting helps you reach people based on the pages they’ve liked, the groups they’ve joined, and the content they engage with. A high-end kitchenware shop, for instance, could go after people interested in Gordon Ramsay, The Great British Bake Off, and Bon Appétit Magazine.

Behaviour targeting, on the other hand, is based on actions tracked by Meta, both on and off its platforms. This is seriously powerful stuff. You can get in front of users based on:

• Purchase behaviour: Look for ‘Engaged Shoppers’—people who have a proven history of clicking on ‘Shop Now’ buttons.
• Device usage: Targeting users of the latest high-end iPhones or Samsung models can be a great proxy for disposable income.
• Travel habits: ‘Frequent international travellers’ is a classic behaviour segment for targeting affluent individuals.

Let’s walk through a real-world scenario. Imagine you run a local London bakery specialising in bespoke wedding cakes. Your targeting stack could look something like this:

By layering these criteria, you’re not just targeting “women in London” anymore. You’re reaching a hyper-specific group of engaged women in the London area who love baking, are actively planning a wedding, and are known to make purchases from ads. This is how you build a powerful Core Audience from scratch, making sure your ad spend hits the mark with people who are most likely to convert.

Targeting Audiences on Facebook: Unlocking Your Highest-Value Custom Audiences

While Core Audiences are brilliant for casting a wide net and finding new faces, your most powerful targeting assets are usually already in your back garden. This is where Custom Audiences come in, letting you tap into your own data and on-platform engagement.

We’re shifting focus here from pure prospecting to smart re-engagement and conversion. These are your warm leads—people who already know your brand. Speaking directly to an audience that has already shown interest is your ticket to a much healthier conversion rate and a better return on your ad spend. It’s about making your budget work smarter, not harder.

Harnessing Your Own Data Sources

Without a doubt, the most potent Custom Audiences are built from data you already own and control. These sources give you a direct line to people who have interacted with your business outside of Facebook, creating a rich pool for high-impact retargeting campaigns.

You’ll primarily be working with:

• Customer Lists: This is gold. You can upload a list of customer contacts (like email addresses or phone numbers), and Facebook will securely match this data to user profiles. It’s perfect for driving repeat business from existing customers or upselling new products to your most loyal fans.
• Website Visitors: This is classic retargeting, powered by the Meta Pixel on your site. You can build dynamic audiences based on user activity, and the level of detail is fantastic. Target everyone who visited your homepage in the last 30 days, or get super specific and go after users who abandoned their shopping cart in the last 24 hours.
• App Activity: If you have a mobile app, you can track what people do inside it. Think about building audiences around specific actions, like completing a level in a game or making an in-app purchase.

Pro Tip: Don’t just dump your entire customer list into Facebook. Segment it first. Create separate lists for one-time buyers, repeat purchasers, and your highest lifetime value (LTV) customers. Trust me, targeting these groups with offers tailored to them is far more effective.

Engaging Your On-Platform Fans

Beyond your own data, you can create incredibly powerful Custom Audiences based on how people engage with your content directly on Facebook and Instagram. We often call these Engagement Custom Audiences, and they’re brilliant for nurturing interest and guiding people down your sales funnel.

As you can see, you can build audiences from people who have interacted with everything from your videos to your lead forms. This gives you a whole arsenal of touchpoints for re-engagement.

Some of the most effective engagement audiences I’ve seen success with include:

• Video Viewers: Target users who watched a specific percentage of one of your videos. Someone who sat through 75% or more of a product demo is a seriously warm lead.
• Instagram Account Engagers: Build a list of everyone who has visited your Instagram profile, liked a post, or even sent you a DM.
• Facebook Page Engagers: Just like with Instagram, you can target anyone who has engaged with your Facebook Page, from a simple page ‘like’ to a direct message.

Actionable Custom Audience Scenarios (Targeting Audiences on Facebook)

Let’s make this practical. Targeting gets a lot more powerful when you have a crystal-clear goal for each segment. Here are a couple of tried-and-tested blueprints you can adapt for your own campaigns.

Scenario 1: The Abandoned Cart Saver

• Audience: Website visitors who added an item to their cart but didn’t purchase in the last 7 days.
• Goal: Recover those almost-sales.
• Ad Creative: Use a Carousel Ad to showcase the exact products they left behind. If you can, sweeten the deal with a small, time-sensitive discount code to nudge them over the finish line.

Scenario 2: The Video Follow-Up

• Audience: Users who watched at least 50% of your latest brand story video.
• Goal: Move people from simple awareness to active consideration.
• Ad Creative: Hit them with a follow-up ad that reinforces the video’s core message and presents a clear call-to-action, like visiting a specific product page or downloading a guide.

Knowing which ad formats work best gives you a real edge. For example, data shows that Carousel Ads can hit a 1.92% click-through rate, with Video Ads close behind at 1.84%. And with 98.5% of UK Facebook users on mobile, making sure your creative is mobile-first isn’t just a good idea—it’s absolutely essential.

Ultimately, Custom Audiences are the bridge between platforms like Google and Facebook. While a user on Google is actively searching for a solution, your Custom Audiences on Facebook let you re-engage those same people based on their past actions, creating a powerful and cohesive cross-channel strategy. For a deeper dive, our guide on Google Ads vs Facebook Ads breaks down exactly how these platforms can work together.

Targeting Audiences on Facebook: Scaling Your Reach with Lookalike Audiences

You’ve done the hard work. You’ve meticulously crafted your Custom Audiences and now have a crystal-clear picture of your best customers. But how do you find more people just like them without going back to square one with your prospecting?

This is where Lookalike Audiences come in. They are genuinely one of the most powerful tools for targeting audiences on Facebook, and your ticket to smart, sustainable growth. Instead of just guessing who might be interested in your brand, you’re using your own high-quality data to tell Facebook’s algorithm exactly what kind of new customers to go out and find.

Choosing Your Source Audience Wisely

Let me be blunt: the effectiveness of any Lookalike Audience is entirely dependent on the quality of its source. Garbage in, garbage out. A Lookalike built from a vague, low-quality source will only ever find you more low-quality prospects. It’s that simple.

Think of it like giving a chef an ingredient list. If you just ask for ‘food,’ you’ll get something bland and generic. But if you hand over a list specifying ‘organic, locally sourced vegetables and prime cuts of beef,’ you’re on your way to a masterpiece.

Your source audience is that specific ingredient list. The goal is to give Facebook a pool of users who perfectly represent your ideal customer.

Here’s how different sources stack up, from weakest to strongest in our experience:

• Weak Source: ‘All Website Visitors’. This group is far too broad. It lumps together people who bounced after two seconds with those who actually made a purchase.
• Better Source: ‘All Purchasers’. This is an improvement. At least you know these people have spent money with you.
• Strong Source: ‘Repeat Purchasers’. Now we’re getting somewhere. These are people who liked your product enough to come back for more – a great signal of quality.
• Best Source: ‘Top 10% of Customers by Lifetime Value (LTV)’. This is the gold standard. A Lookalike based on your most profitable customers is primed to find other high-spenders.

Key Takeaway: Always use the highest-value data you have for your Lookalike source. A smaller, higher-quality source audience (Meta suggests between 1,000 and 50,000 people) will almost always outperform a huge, fuzzy one.

Understanding Lookalike Percentages (Targeting Audiences on Facebook)

When you create a Lookalike, Facebook will ask you to choose a percentage, from 1% all the way up to 10%. This percentage represents the top slice of users in your chosen country who are most similar to your source audience.

This isn’t just a simple slider; it’s a strategic choice you need to make between precision and reach.

A classic, tried-and-tested strategy is to start with a tight 1% Lookalike. If that performs well and brings in conversions, you can then test a 1-3% or 3-5% Lookalike. Just make sure to exclude the smaller percentage audiences to avoid overlap and stop yourself from bidding against yourself in the ad auction.

Advanced Lookalike Strategies

Once you’re comfortable with the basics, you can get clever by layering your targeting for even greater precision. Simply running an ad to a broad Lookalike Audience can work, but adding another layer of targeting refines your focus and can seriously improve your return.

Imagine you’re promoting a new line of high-end, vegan skincare. You could create a 1% Lookalike from your top-spending customers. Great start. Then, you could layer that with Core Audience interests like ‘Veganism’ and ‘Organic products’. Now you’re not just targeting people like your best customers; you’re targeting people like your best customers who have also shown a direct interest in the core values of your new product. This is how you find your next wave of superfans.

This strategy is particularly effective in the crowded UK market. Interestingly, recent data shows that UK adults on Facebook are spending more time on the platform, with daily usage jumping from 28 minutes to 39 minutes over the past year. With the 25-34 demographic being the largest user group, this increased engagement provides a ripe opportunity for highly-targeted campaigns to capture attention.

Lookalike Audiences are also a fantastic tool for lead generation. By creating a Lookalike from a list of your most qualified leads, you can find new prospects who are much more likely to convert. For those focused on this objective, our guide on creating effective Facebook lead generation ads offers more practical advice.

Targeting Audiences on Facebook: Advanced Audience Layering and Optimisation

Getting a handle on the individual audience types is your first major milestone. But the real competitive edge? That comes from weaving them together into sophisticated, layered targeting strategies. This is where you graduate from just picking an audience to actually building hyper-precise segments that can deliver some truly exceptional results.

Think of it like being a chef. Your Core, Custom, and Lookalike audiences are your top-shelf ingredients. Layering is the recipe that combines them into a gourmet meal. A simple Lookalike Audience is good, but a Lookalike refined with specific behavioural filters? That’s outstanding.

Combining Audience Types for Precision

Advanced layering is all about using one audience type as your base and then narrowing it down with criteria from another. It’s a powerful way to find the sweet spot where two strong data sets overlap, giving you the “best of both worlds.”

Let’s walk through a real-world example for an online fitness coaching business:

• Base Audience: Start with a 1% Lookalike Audience built from your highest-value clients. This finds new people who share the same characteristics as your very best customers.
• Layer 1 (Interests): Now, let’s get more specific. We’ll narrow this Lookalike by adding interests like “Marathon running,” “CrossFit,” or “Healthy eating.”
• Layer 2 (Behaviours): For the final touch, we’ll refine it even further by adding the “Engaged Shoppers” behaviour.

See what we did there? You’re no longer just targeting people like your best clients. You’re now targeting people who are like your best clients, and have a proven interest in high-intensity fitness, and are known to actually buy things from ads. This is how you dramatically improve the quality of your prospecting.

The Critical Role of Audience Exclusions (Targeting Audiences on Facebook)

Just as crucial as deciding who to target is deciding who not to target. Smart exclusions are the unsung heroes of efficient ad spend. They stop you from wasting budget, prevent you from annoying existing customers with the wrong message, and keep your campaign data clean and reliable.

By strategically excluding certain groups, you ensure the right message always reaches the right person at the right time. Failing to do this is one of the most common and costly mistakes I see in Facebook advertising.

Make sure you have these essential exclusions baked into your campaigns:

• Prospecting Campaigns: Always exclude your Custom Audiences of recent buyers (e.g., the last 180 days) and anyone who is already a lead. You’ve already won them over or you’re in the middle of a conversation, so showing them a top-of-funnel ad is just burning money.
• Retargeting Campaigns: When you’re targeting website visitors, be sure to exclude people who have already converted (like making a purchase or filling out your contact form). There’s absolutely no point in paying to show a “Complete Your Purchase” ad to someone who has already done it.
• Lookalike Campaigns: If you’re running tests on multiple Lookalike percentages (say, a 1% and a 1-3% audience), exclude the smaller audience from the larger one. This stops them from overlapping and prevents you from bidding against yourself in the ad auction.

A Framework for Continuous Optimisation

Your job isn’t finished once your layered audiences are up and running. The real key to long-term success with targeting audiences on Facebook is to get into a relentless cycle of testing, analysing, and refining. This process is what turns good results into great ones.

The image below gives a great visual of a simple but powerful workflow for A/B testing your audience segments.

This workflow shows the core loop of optimisation: figure out what you’re testing, run the split test, and then dive into the results to inform your next move.

Once you’ve put advanced audience layering into practice, the next vital step is understanding which specific campaigns and ads are resonating with these new segments. To track this properly, learning how to create UTM tags efficiently is a game-changer. These tags add tracking codes to your URLs, letting you see in your analytics exactly which ad sets and creatives are driving traffic and conversions.

This data-first mindset isn’t just for social media; it’s the bedrock of smart digital marketing everywhere. For brands wanting to bring the same level of detail to their search campaigns, our guide on maximising Google Ads ROI for UK brands offers strategies that perfectly complement a strong Facebook presence. Taking this holistic view ensures every single pound in your marketing budget is accounted for and working as hard as it possibly can.

Targeting Audiences on Facebook: Your Common Facebook Targeting Questions Answered

When you’re deep inside Ads Manager, all the theory in the world goes out the window. What matters are the practical, real-world questions that pop up when you’re trying to get your campaigns off the ground. Getting your audience strategy right often comes down to knowing exactly how to handle these common scenarios.

Let’s cut through the noise and tackle some of the most frequent questions we hear from clients. These are the kinds of concerns that can make or break your budget, so having clear answers will give you the confidence to troubleshoot issues and master targeting audiences on Facebook.

How Long Should I Wait Before Deciding an Audience Isn’t Working?

There’s no single magic number, but a solid rule of thumb is to let your ad set run long enough to gather at least 1,000 impressions and fully exit the ‘Learning Phase’. Anything less and you’re just not giving the algorithm enough data to work with.

If your campaign is focused on conversions, the goalpost shifts slightly. You’ll want to aim for at least 25-50 conversion events before you even think about making a final call. Keep a close eye on your key metrics like Click-Through Rate (CTR) and, most importantly, your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). If after 5-7 days your performance is nowhere near your targets and shows zero signs of improving, it’s probably time to pause that audience and test a new one.

What’s the Best Source for a High-Quality Lookalike Audience? (Targeting Audiences on Facebook)

The best source will always be one that represents your highest-value customers. Simple. A list of all your website visitors is a decent starting point, but honestly, it’s far from ideal. A list of actual purchasers is much, much better.

But a list of repeat purchasers? Now we’re talking.

The absolute gold standard is a customer list segmented by lifetime value (LTV). Uploading a list of your top 10% of customers by LTV will create a Lookalike Audience of people who share traits with your most profitable clients. This is leagues more powerful than modelling an audience on generic page engagers or broad website traffic.

Should I Worry About Audience Overlap in My Campaigns?

Yes. One hundred percent, yes. Significant audience overlap is a silent killer for campaigns, quietly sabotaging your results without you even noticing. It happens when the same people are in multiple ad sets you’re targeting at the same time.

This forces you to compete against yourself in the ad auction, which inevitably drives up your costs. It also leads to ad fatigue when users see your ads over and over again from different campaigns. You can (and should) use Facebook’s ‘Audience Overlap’ tool to check the percentage of overlap between any two of your saved audiences.

To prevent this, you have to be meticulous with your exclusions. For instance, if you’re running a prospecting campaign to find new customers, you must always exclude your Custom Audiences of recent website visitors and existing customers. This is non-negotiable if you want to ensure your budget is actually spent reaching genuinely new people.

Feeling overwhelmed by the complexities of Facebook audience targeting? The expert team at PPC Geeks can help. We build data-driven strategies that increase traffic, leads, and sales while cutting wasted ad spend. Reclaim your time and get a free, in-depth PPC audit today.