How to Use Facebook Interests to Get Ahead of Your Competitors

Although Facebook has many targeting options and with constant updates to its ad manager possibilities it’s not easy to know how to use all of them effectively. Today we’ll take a closer look at one of the main features of Facebook Ads which is Facebook Interests. There are some myths and hypotheses about them that are worth investigating.

What are Facebook Interests?

Interests are simply the activities people spend time on online. How does Facebook know that and what signals do Facebook algorithms analyze? Let’s look for an answer in official sources first. In Facebook Blueprint lessons we can find the following information:

“Detailed targeting options, including interests, may be based on people’s interests, activities, and pages and posts they like on our platform.”

So basically all the information you provide to Facebook and all the activities like likes, shares, comments, and all the clicks may be used to establish your interests. What else? Let’s take a look at the off-platform information description:

“When you visit a website or use an app, these businesses or organizations can share information about your activity with us by using our business tools. We use this activity to personalize your experience, such as showing you relevant ads. We also require that businesses and organizations provide notice to people before using our business tools.”

Ok, so if you’re browsing the internet and the app and websites use Facebook tools (like Facebook pixel for conversion tracking), the information they’ve gathered may also be used for defining your interests and serving you the right ads.

So, if someone has so much information about you, they must know exactly and precisely what your interests are. Right? Let’s see.

How to see your Facebook Interests?

The easiest way to verify if the interests are correct is to verify them by yourself. You can actually see how Facebook sees your interests, and I also encourage you to try the same with your friends or family (if they allow you) and count how many of them make sense.

To do that go to the https://www.facebook.com/adpreferences and in one of the sections, you’ll be able to see and edit some of the signals used to deliver ads to you. I won’t show you all my interests for obvious reasons but I found among them for example:

• “Insurance” – I don’t have insurance and I haven’t thought about having one.
• “Cats” – I don’t have a cat.
• “Coupons” – I don’t even know what kind of coupons they are.

So let’s think about it. Even this simple test showed that if your main idea is to sell cat food to people interested in “Cats” you will probably lose a lot of money targeting people who never buy cat food. Are interests useless then? No!

How to use Facebook Interests?

Even if Facebook Interests are far from perfect. They are not completely useless. There are a few ways to use them effectively.

1. Use specific interests

“Cats” is not the best choice because it’s very broad. I could watch memes with cats (who doesn’t). And my friends have cats so it’s not completely wrong even if I don’t have a cat. You can try something more detailed like a specific cat breed or some popular cat-food brand or cat toys or people interested in pet stores etc.

2. Use a combination of interests

If you want to reach real cat lovers, one criterium maybe not enough but if you’ll choose a combination of interests, your chance for running successful ads increases a lot. 

There are 500,000,000 people interested in “Cats”.
There are 50,000,000 people interested in “Cat Food”.
And 20,000,000 people with the interest called “Big Cat Rescue”.

But only 2,000,000 are interested in all of the above.

And if needed we can go further down the road and get people really crazy about cats.

3. Combine interests with other criteria

I don’t want to get too much into details of all the different targeting options here but if you did your homework you should have much more information about your clients, geographic area, age, gender, custom lists, lookalike audiences, the technology they use. You can try all of that together with targeting to narrow your audience down and find your perfect customers.

How to find specific Facebook Interests?

You can use a regular Facebook ads manager to look for interests but there are a few flaws in this approach.

1. You’ll see only a few suggestions for every keyword you try.
2. The suggestions are extremely not-smart to put it lightly (look at the screenshot).
3. You will see the same few interests as anyone else. That means most people will target the same (or similar) group of people and get into the extreme bid war.

Luckily there are other ways to find interests. I will share my two favorite methods.

1. Use Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights is a powerful tool that will not only give you interests ideas but also provide a lot of useful information about your audience. Information you can use in other channels and your general brand communication.

Just go to the https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights and there you can analyze any audience you want. They might be your fans but also people with a specific interest. I will try “Cat food” and immediately I will find out that 70% of these people are Women, 30% of them work in Administrative Services. The most popular product among them is Purina, and so on. Most of this data may be used directly in creating your Facebook Ads audience.

2. Get the complete Facebook Interests list

How to get a complete Facebook interests list? Is it even possible? And why Facebook doesn’t publish a PDF with the list openly in ad manager or anywhere else?

As usual, it depends. As we already know interests are created automatically based on the various signals from Facebook and FB partners. It means the list is constantly changing and evolving. 

If you keep the same interest in your ad targeting for months, it doesn’t mean you’re targeting the same people over and over. Some of them will drop from the list and some of them will be added after some time. Some of the interests will be removed and some of them will appear etc.

But still, there are many more options than what we see in the Facebook Ads manager. To discover all of them we need to create a Facebook App and get the info from the API. But don’t worry, it’s not as difficult as it may sound. Just follow this simple instruction:

1. Create the app

Go to the https://developers.facebook.com/apps and click on the “Create App” button. Choose a goal, a name, your email address, and connect it to the business manager (this is optional, you don’t have to do this, we won’t be promoting the app for real.

2. Get the access token for your app

When you’ve created your app and you’re in the dashboard go to the Tools -> Graph API Explorer. Choose your app, choose the “App Token” option. In the Access Token field, you’ll see what we are looking for. Copy that token.

3. Look for the interests list

Now you can use a marketing API. Here’s the full documentation of how it works but we will try only one thing today. 

Try this URL:

https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adinterest&q=[Cat]&limit=10000&locale=en_US&access_token=your-access-token

And replace the bolded text with the access token you’ve generated in the previous step. You will see the full interests list containing the word “cat” and suggestions based on that. And there are hundreds of them. You can find the interests here your competitors wouldn’t think of and reach a very specific audience.

As you might spot there are a few parameters in the URL we used. Let’s break it down.

• type=adinterest – this is the syntax to list all the interests with a chosen keyword. There are other types as well, you can find details in the API documentation.
• q=[Cat]– this is the keyword we’re looking for. You can type anything else here which makes more sense for your business.
• limit=10000 – this is the maximum number of results you will see. If you change it to “limit=10” you will see only the top 10 results.
• locale=en_US – this is the language of the results. You may use another language if that’s the case for your campaign but keep in mind the audience size you will see is the global size. So if you check the language, the audience size will stay the same so it’s not that big of a difference.

I hope based on these few tricks your Facebook campaigns will scale fast and you’ll never waste any money on the wrong audience. If you’re interested in more tips on how to implement Facebook Pixel (and others too) using the data layer and Google Tag Manager – go ahead and visit this blog post: https://hiredigital.com/blog/google-tag-manager-data-layer.