Whether you’re creating specific Facebook Ads or just Boosting posts, successfully creating Audiences in Facebook is one of the key ways to get your content in front of the right people.

The following strategies can act as a useful starting point for you to adapt according to your institution and the data you have available.

Targeting Current Students

Targeting current students on Facebook for Returners’ Campaigns is generally much easier than new students because their usage of the tool will likely give clear indicators of their student status.

The following methods are high-level ways you could consider targetting current student audiences:

Targeting to those that identify as linked to an institution and of typical university age and present in the associated location
- And Lookalikes of the above and of typical university age and present in the associated location
Targetting to those that ‘Like’ your page and of typical university age and present in the associated location
1. And Lookalikes of the above and of typical university age and present in the associated location

Linked with the institution (#1)

The most straightforward way to find current students is to use the ‘Institution’ field for the partner you are working with. This is because many students will set their Facebook profile to show they are attending a particular university.

If using this field, you should consider:

Constraining this audience to mean University-attending ages – to prevent targeting alumni
Constraining the geography of this audience – to ensure you are hitting current students, who are likely to be living in (or recently have been in) the town your accommodation is based in

Use your Facebook page as a starting point (#2)

Your own Facebook page (or your institutions, if you have access to it) is a great starting point because it has a pool of people that we know are (or have been) interested in our product.

You can use this information to a) more heavily target existing page enagers or b) create lookalike audiences.

Creating a Lookalike Audience

Creating a lookalike audience is a useful tool that allows you to use the power of Facebook's dataset to search out larger pools of potential customers. It is important to tweak lookalike audiences to try and ensure that these pools do not contain large portions of irrelevant people that Facebook's algorithm fails to detect (or takes time to detect) are not eligible for our product.

When you create a lookalike audience of any size, you should consider:

Constraining the geography of this audience – to ensure you are hitting current students, who are likely to be living in (or recently have been in) the town your accommodation is based in
Constraining this audience to mean university-attending ages – to prevent Facebook’s algorithm from targeting people that are highly unlikely to be target customers, although if targeting parents is part of your objective you can raise the age accordingly

Sense checking lookalike audiences

When creating lookalike audiences you should use the estimated size information to sense check the parameters you are setting. For example, if your parameters yield an estimated audience size of 500,000 when your institution's size is only 30,000 students, you probably need to tweak your settings to prevent a load of spend going to ineligible customers.

Targeting New Students

Targeting new students on Facebook is generally harder because we are trying to capture a very specific pool of people that are confirmed to or are likely to attend the partner institution in question. Targeting too much wider than this – for example all demographics of typical university age – will simply be a waste of budget because our ads will be displayed to many many people not likely to attend the instutition.

Page Retargeting

Therefore the most effective way of doing this is using page retargets – that is, to display advertising to people that have previously visited our content. You could:

Choose to retarget to visitors of a wide range of content, such as all your partner institutions’ pages if you have access to that data. The wider the net you cast, the less defined your audience will be – for example, you might end of displaying ads to someone that has visited content as a local resident, or a rearch fellow from another university.
Choose only to retarget to visitors of the accommodation-related content, such as your partner institutions’ accommodation webpages. This will yield a more defined (and smaller audience) which is likely to be more relevant. However, targeting to this pool will likely be more expensive because it is so defined.

Should I constrain demographics to retarget audiences?

One question to consider is whether you should constrain demographics to the above audiences, for example by constraining one of the above audiences to a particular age-groups. This is something we examined in the continuing student audiences.

Whilst this could be effective for particular campaigns or pieces of creative, for new student campaigns we often see a bell-curve in the ages of people that interact with these types of ads. This is presumably reflective of interactions from typical university-going age groups and their parents, both of whom have been visiting university material and are in the retarget pool. Because parents are likely to be influencers in a students’ accommodation decisions, showing ads to them is as likely to be valuable as the students themselves and so constraining by demographic should be considered carefully!

How do I achieve page retargetting?

Page retargeting on Facebook (and its associated features) cannot happen without some technical setup, but thankfully this is quite straightforward and requires the installation of a Facebook pixel. This usually means a line of code needs to be added to each page of a website, and GDPR / cookie compliance should be checked before this is done. 

Because pixels like these are so commonplace (and website content management stems have built-in features for them) it is likely that this can be achieved without the use of a developer. It is also likely the use of pixels is covered in an institution's privacy policy, but of course this should be checked by the person adding the pixel.