This week, we’ve released Overlap Targeting for Facebook Ads, a powerful new feature that lets advertisers combine targeting to reach niche audiences.

In this post, I’ll walk you through Overlap Targeting and explain how you can use it to reach your ideal audience.

The Limitations of Traditional Facebook Targeting

Facebook ad targeting is remarkably powerful and offers countless methods for targeting your perfect audience . But when you’re trying to reach a niche audience, it can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to refine your audience with Facebook’s native tools. That’s because adding multiple items to a specific targeting category (e.g., adding multiple interest targets) adds both groups of people to your audience. That means you’ll have a larger and less relevant target audience.

To illustrate this, let’s say you sell vintage NFL jerseys online, a relatively niche product. Your target audience is interested in football collectibles.

But if you add “Football” and “Collectibles” as targeted interests, you’ll end up adding two separate groups to your target audience when all you really want is the overlap of these two groups.

Targeting multiple interests like this is inefficient because football fans aren’t necessarily interested in commemorative jerseys and collectors aren’t necessarily interested in football. Your ads would then display to many disinterested people and result in wasted ad spend.

Instead, you want to target people who are interested in BOTH football AND collectibles. You want to reach the overlap of these two interests. It’s a smaller audience, yet a highly relevant one that’s worth investing in. That overlapping audience is highly likely to purchase your product, and it’s the one you should focus on reaching.

So how can you reach this overlap audience?

About AdStage Overlap Targeting

AdStage Overlap Targeting lets you refine your Facebook ad targeting with “and/or” conditions to reach a niche audience. It’s an incredibly easy way to decrease your cost per acquisition and increase your ROI by focusing your ad spend on a highly relevant subset of users.

With Overlap Targeting, you can refine your targeting from those interested in “Football or Collectibles” (about 225 million people) to “Football and Collectibles” (about 4 million people).

Layering And/Or Conditions for Broader Reach

To expand your reach to highly relevant audiences, you can even combine the “and” statements of Overlap Targeting with the standard “or” statements created by default when you target multiple items. For example, you can target people who like (either NFL, football or San Francisco 49ers) AND (either collectibles, antiques or souvenirs).

This selection targets a broader audience of people who’ve indicated some interest in football and some interest in collectibles, but it still filters out people that are only interested in one of these categories.

Availability

Overlap Targeting for Facebook Ads is available today in AdStage. It can be used to refine targeting across Custom Audiences , Interests, Behaviors and Target Partner Categories; and it will be expanded even further in the coming weeks.

Try it today with a free 14 day trial of AdStage !