It’s Fall and for a huge portion of consumers, that means its time for Football. Sports is big business for advertisers and Football is the biggest. Today, Facebook rolled out an additional way for advertisers to target football fans.
A new type of behavior has been added to the Ads Editor called Fall Football. You can find it under Seasonal and Events and advertisers can drill down into 4 subcategories of this new behavior.
Casual Fans: Defined as “people who are likely to engage with Football (US) content.”
Fans of 1 or more Teams: Defined as “those who like 1 or more teams.”
Fans of 3 or more Teams: Defined as “those who like 3 or more teams.”
Super Fans: Defined as “people who are very likely to engage with Football (US) content.”
How can this be useful for advertisers? Let’s look at a hypothetical situation where a sports marketer wants to reach Dallas Cowboys fans.
When you’re targeting professional teams nationally, you’ll always have a healthy audience to work with. In this case, Facebook identifies over 8 Million users in the USA between the ages of 18-65 who like the Dallas Cowboys. That’s a really huge number – probably too large to start a campaign and make meaningful assumptions off a test budget. This is where the new Football Behaviors can become really powerful.
8.2 Million down to 17,400 once we add the “Super Fan” Behavior. Remember, as of October 2014, the Facebook Ads Editor uses OR Targeting for interests. If we were to enter the San Francisco 49ers in the Interests along with the Cowboys, we’d be advertising to an audience that likes EITHER the 49ers OR Cowboys. That’s not so useful for marketers.
Behaviors work differently.
Behaviors, like Location, Age, Gender, and the many categories inside More Demographics, work like AND Targeting. It’s like adding a layer to your target market. Not only do they like the Cowboys but they ALSO belong to the Super Fans category. This is AND Targeting, otherwise known as Union or Intersection Targeting.
Now, we’re down to 17,400 in our audience of Dallas Cowboy Super Fans. This isn’t a large number and you’ll run through this audience quickly, but it’s a great way to prove a concept, test your ad, get some actionable data, etc. If you’re seeing success at this targeting combo, you can expand your audience (by removing the Behavior) and attack the much larger audience. If you’re not seeing success, you can make a safe assumption that if Super Fans aren’t clicking, casual fans won’t be either.