How to target Facebook groups with ads in 2025

Reaching the right customers on Facebook has never been easy. With over 3.065 billion monthly active users in 2025, making your ad stand out amidst countless content and accurately reaching the target audience can overwhelm any advertiser.

If your ad campaign is not delivering conversions, the problem may not lie with the product but with the targeting strategy. Misidentifying the target audience can lead to wasted ad spend and increased Cost Per Conversion (CPA). There are millions of different ways to reach the ideal customer when running Facebook Ads, but in this article, Optimal Agency will explore the most common mistakes in identifying the target audience while sharing the most effective strategies to ensure your ads reach the right people and deliver real results.

Distinguishing the 3 main audience types for Facebook ad targeting

When we run Facebook Ads, understanding the audience types is a crucial factor in ensuring the campaign reaches the right people and achieves high effectiveness. There are three main audience groups that advertisers can leverage. Each type has its own setup and is suitable for a specific stage in the marketing funnel: awareness – consideration – conversion. Below, we will delve into each type to understand how to apply them effectively.

Core Audience

This is the audience group identified by Facebook based on user behavior data and characteristics. We—as advertisers—can manually customize them based on criteria such as age, gender, location, interests, or purchasing behavior. For example, if you are a brand selling protein bars, you can create a campaign as follows:

• Age: 25–45
• Location: around Sydney city
• Interests: fitness, healthy eating, protein supplements
• Behaviors: frequent online shoppers
• Additional filter: those with upcoming birthdays to offer a “birthday trial” discount code

The Core Audience is very useful when you want to expand to new customers, especially during the brand awareness phase. This is the ideal choice for campaigns aimed at “warming up” the market and seeking potential customers for the first time.

Custom Audience

A Custom Audience is a group of people who have previously interacted with your business—through Facebook, Instagram, your website, or email. This is a “warm” audience segment that we often use to increase conversion rates and optimize ad spend. You can create a Custom Audience based on:

• Website traffic (tracked using the Meta Pixel)
• App activity
• Customer lists (emails or phone numbers)
• Social media engagement (likes, comments, messages…)
• Video views (e.g., people who watched 75% of the ad video)

For example, if someone visits your junk removal service quote page without leaving information, you can run a retargeting ad with a reminder or a special offer to encourage them to return. Or if a user has watched 75% of your product introduction video, it is a strong signal of interest, and you can target them with an “immediate close” offer ad. The Custom Audience is the “secret weapon” in the middle and bottom of the funnel, commonly used for:

• Abandoned cart follow-up
• Lead nurturing campaigns
• Cross-sell or upsell ads

When implemented correctly, the Custom Audience yields the highest ROAS in most campaigns.

Lookalike Audience

The Lookalike Audience is a way to find new people whose behaviors and characteristics are similar to your existing customers. Facebook analyzes the source audience (such as a customer list or Custom Audience) to expand the reach to similar individuals. The mechanism is simple:

• We select the source file, for example, people who have made a purchase.
• Facebook analyzes its shared behaviors and characteristics.
• The system automatically creates a new group of people with a “similar profile.”

You can adjust the similarity level:

• 1% Lookalike: the most similar audience, small reach, high quality.
• 2–5%: broader reach, but similarity slightly reduced.
• Super Lookalike: combining multiple files to test performance.

For example, A cosmetics brand created a 1% Lookalike from its loyal customer list, resulting in a 49% reduction in CPA and over 66% increase in conversions. This is the power of Artificial Intelligence in scaling ads while maintaining high accuracy. You should use a Lookalike Audience when:

• You want to scale the number of potential customers without guesswork.
• You already have a high-quality Custom Audience and want to find similar people.
• You are running a conversion campaign in the early or middle stage of the funnel.

How to target Facebook groups with ads in 2025

When running Facebook Ads, targeting the right audience is the key factor for maximizing our campaign effectiveness. If you have ever felt that ads are “burning money” without yielding results, likely, you have not correctly identified the group of people you need to reach. Below is the detailed guidance we at Optimal Agency recommend, helping advertisers create the most accurate and profitable audience files in 2025.

First, access Ads Manager and start creating a new campaign. In the first step, you need to select the appropriate objective for your business goal, such as increasing website traffic, increasing conversions, or boosting brand awareness. Choosing the right objective will help Facebook optimize the ad for the action you desire most.

Next, move to the Ad Set section—where you can specifically set the target audience. Here, we will:

• Define Geographical Location: You can select countries, states, cities, or even specific ZIP codes. For example, if you are promoting commercial cleaning services in Sydney, limit the display radius to 10–15 km around the city center to reach the right potential customers.
• Set Age: Choose a range appropriate for the ideal audience. If you are advertising high-end furniture, you might focus on the 30–55 age group—those with higher purchasing power.
• Select Gender and Language if necessary, which is especially useful when advertising in multilingual regions.

Next is the most crucial part — Detailed Targeting. Here, you have two options:

• Browse to select audiences based on Demographics, Interests, or Behaviors.
• Search to enter specific keywords such as “hiking,” “online shopping,” “car insurance,” etc.

For instance, if you are a sports store, you can target people interested in “fitness,” “gym,” or “hiking.”

You can also narrow Audience to apply the AND logic—meaning the person must have more than one specific interest or behavior. For example: “people who love the gym” and “interested in dietary supplements”—this helps the ad target the group with a real need.

Additionally, you should use Exclude to remove redundant or unsuitable segments, such as people who have already purchased or are too far from your business area.

Once set up, Save the Audience if you intend to reuse it for other campaigns. This is a great way to save time and ensure consistency in subsequent campaigns.

You need to choose the Ad Placement. In this section, you can let Facebook distribute automatically or manually choose between Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed, Messenger, or Marketplace, and then finalize the budget and ad duration.

Common mistakes in Facebook ad targeting and how to fix them

Meanwhile, Facebook is increasingly pushing for automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), making targeting less reliant on selecting specific “interests” or “ages” as before. However, if you do not clearly understand how this system works, you can easily let Facebook spend money in the wrong places.

Facebook is automating more and more

When we create a new ad campaign, it is easy to see that Facebook is gradually automating almost every step. Whether you are an advertiser running a Leads (potential customer acquisition) or Sales campaign, the ultimate goal is to increase revenue.

The majority of businesses we have collaborated with share one desire—converting viewers into actual customers. However, the question many advertisers often ask is: How do I choose the most effective targeting strategy to generate sustainable sales?

The answer does not lie in choosing the “right” audience from the start, but in the combination of Facebook’s automation and the smart testing strategy we will analyze next.

Facebook Advantage+ and the power of AI

Facebook is increasingly promoting its Advantage+ system, a tool that uses AI to automatically optimize ads based on user behavior data. We find that campaigns using Advantage+ are now significantly more effective than previous manual targeting methods.

The best strategy is to select the Sales objective, enable Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) for Facebook to automatically distribute the budget among the ad sets. For example, if you are selling furniture, you can create several different ad sets: one targeting people who love home decor, one targeting newlyweds, and one broad audience group. Facebook will then learn to allocate money to the highest-performing group—helping you save budget while increasing revenue.

Is Lookalike Audience Still Effective?

Previously, Lookalike Audience was the “ace in the hole” in the advertising world, especially when you had a list of real customers. However, in recent years, the performance of Lookalike has clearly declined. In tests we conducted, in many cases, a Broad Audience combined with Advantage+ yielded better results than Lookalike.

However, you can still try Lookalike—just base it on the group of people who made a genuine purchase (Purchasers) and expand the range from 1–10%. For example, if you sell online courses, create a Lookalike from students who have paid. If you only leave the file at 1%, the range is too narrow, causing CPM to increase and performance to decline sharply.

Retargeting

If you already have a stable customer base or engagement level, then Retargeting is the most powerful tool for revenue optimization.

We often retarget people who have visited the website within 180 days, followed the Instagram page, or previously engaged with the Fanpage.

For example, if you sell industrial cleaning services, run ads to people who have visited your website or watched a service video.

We recommend setting the maximum retargeting window (180 days) to leverage the entire pixel data. If the customer file is small, a budget of just $5/day is enough for brand reminders. This method increases frequency, builds trust, and drives purchase action.

Cold Audience

When targeting completely new customers, the secret lies in letting Facebook learn on its own through Advantage+ Campaigns.

If you are a local business, limit the radius to 25 miles around the store to ensure ads are only displayed to people who are genuinely likely to visit and buy.

If you are a national or international brand, create separate campaigns for each country to easily adjust the budget and ad language.

Regarding age, we advise starting from 25 years old and above, as the 18–24 group often lacks strong purchasing power.

If your product is exclusive to one gender, select accordingly—for example, a women’s spa should select Female.

Most importantly, do not add too many Interests. Let the AI optimize itself. You can add 1 initial directional interest, for example, “digital marketing,” but the rest should be decided by Facebook based on actual behavior.

Ad creative is the key factor

No matter how you target, the Creative and Copywriting are what make the viewer stop and take action.

For example, if you advertise a gardening service, Facebook will automatically identify that you are targeting middle-aged homeowners living in suburban residential areas.

Therefore, instead of spending hours fine-tuning the audience in Ads Manager, focus on creating engaging content—authentic videos, compelling offers, strong Calls to Action, and a landing page optimized for conversion.

The difference between a good advertiser and someone who just runs ads does not lie in choosing the right “interest” but in the overall strategy—from creative concept, the offer, to the user experience.

When you understand how to make Facebook work for you instead of against it, you will find that reaching the target customer is not difficult—you just need to know how to effectively coordinate AI and Creative.

Targeting Facebook groups with ads in 2025 is not only a smart tactic but also an optimal way to connect directly with communities that share specific interests and needs. When you clearly understand how to select the right groups, build engaging content, and use ad tools correctly, every dollar of your budget is invested more effectively. Remember, success does not come from reaching many people, but from reaching the right people, at the right time, with the right message.

Frequently Asked Questions