Maximize Social Media Ad Spend Efficiency By Mastering Audience Inclusions and Exclusions

Determining the right audience for your advertising campaigns is as important as creating the campaigns themselves. This is because not everyone wants to see the same types of advertisements or be interested in the same products. This is why ensuring you are selective with your audience is critical for marketing today — especially on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

Now, you may think that simply selecting your current customers and individuals who have shown an interest in your brand or similar products is enough when selecting your audience. Unfortunately, it is more complicated than that. Most people do not want to see advertisements for the same things repeatedly. This is where the concept of audience inclusion and exclusion comes into play in your advertising strategy.

This article will explore the concepts of audience inclusion and exclusion and offer tips and strategies to help your business target the right audience and minimize advertisement spending waste.

Understanding Audience Inclusions

Put simply, audience inclusions are who you choose to include in an audience group. These audience groups are what you use to more effectively cater your advertisements to your individual customers — which helps you appeal to their particular needs and preferences and therefore increases your chances of making a sale.

So, how do you determine who gets placed into which audience groups? Well, there are several different criteria you can use to help your target audience groups.

Some common characteristics include:

• Location
• Interests
• Demographics, such as age, sex, marital status, and economic standing/income
• Behaviors — this refers to viewing history and internet searches
• Engagement with your business

While you could simply lump your entire audience (including current and potential customers) into a single group, chances are that you’ll end up annoying a good portion of them by doing this. So, when creating your audience groups, you’ll want to create more specific groups. 

For example, if you are a local service business with a couple of different locations, you may want to create different groups based on the closest location. Similarly, if you offer a few different services, you may be able to create audience groups that factor in demographics and interests to determine who is the best fit for your various audience groups.

Understanding Audience Exclusions

Audience exclusions, in contrast, are simply those that you choose to exclude from a specific audience group. If you are wondering why you would want to exclude members of your overall audience for a particular advertising campaign, it is quite simple. People do not want to feel constantly bothered by a business — even if it offers products or services that they value. This is especially true with high-value products or services not purchased frequently.

You may want to exclude some of the following categories of people depending on the goal of your advertisement campaign. 

• Current customers
• Individuals belonging to certain demographic groups
• People with conflicting interests or individuals who have given you negative feedback or had a displeasing experience with your business
  • It is a good idea to exclude these individuals from all of your advertisements as it can help you avoid negative feedback.
• Individuals who are already part of another of your audience groups

Excluding certain individuals from your audience is equally as important as including others. Marketing, especially social media marketing, can be expensive, and you do not want to waste your money and time advertising to people who will not purchase anything from you. Because of this, you must pinpoint the very specific group of people that will be the most impacted by the advertisement campaign.

Optimizing Ad Spend with Inclusions and Exclusions

Many businesses do not have an unlimited budget for advertising and marketing. By utilizing audience inclusions and exclusions to target the right audience for your ads, you can ensure that you are using your budget effectively. You can also analyze your ad performance data to discover where you can improve — whether in your advertisement or your targeting efforts.

Over time, you can further refine your targeting practices by utilizing more informed inclusions and exclusions and leveraging user data and ad performance metrics, such as conversions and click-through rates. 

Compliance and Ethical Considerations in Audience Targeting

As more businesses continue to join the online marketplace, customers are becoming increasingly aware of privacy risks, and we have seen an increase in online privacy rules and regulations. Some of the most prominent regulations are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Both of these guidelines aim to protect consumer data and privacy, which makes consumers feel much more at ease when using online services and markets. 

Because of this, compliance with these regulations is not only the best way to protect consumers and yourself, but it also encourages consumers to come to your business because they know their privacy will be protected. 

Best Practices for Ongoing Optimization and Testing

In addition to ensuring that your business complies with national and worldwide regulations concerning privacy and customer data, you also want to ensure that you are not forgoing valuable opportunities to improve your advertising practices. The simple truth is that without testing and experimenting with new solutions, you will not improve. So, you will want to implement experimentation methods — such as A/B testing — to help refine your targeting strategies and optimize your exclusions and inclusions over time.

As you continue to optimize your audience targeting, you may find that tactics like excluding only the current customers who have purchased recently and individuals from certain demographic categories can be incredibly helpful for your business. You may also find that the best way to build targeted audiences is to sort your website visitors into a remarketing audience helps you catch potential leads that did not quite make it through the sales funnel.

Conclusion

Not only do inclusions and exclusions help you pinpoint the right target audience for your ad campaigns, but they can also help you more efficiently identify which advertisement methods and strategies are the most effective for different parts of the customer journey. Since so many companies utilize social media for marketing and advertising, you must use your accounts and advertisement budget effectively.

Spending time and money by advertising to individuals outside your target audience is simply a waste. Instead, implementing a strategy for audience targeting optimization — using inclusions and exclusions — can help you to minimize ad spend waste and create more successful social media advertising campaigns.