What are Broad Categories?
Broad categories are predefined categories of users provided to you from Facebook. This data is anything the user may have filled out on their profile, such as relationship status, liked pages, or the apps they use through Facebook. Facebook gathers this data from the user’s profile and congregates it into larger general categories that we call broad categories.
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Should I Use Broad Categories in my Advertising Strategy?
Broad categories are vital for your advertising strategy. Incorporate broad categories into your content marketing strategy to ensure you maximize your number of views, conversions, sales, and ultimate customer retention.
Why Pay Attention to Broad Categories?
Broad categories provide extremely relevant content to the audience of your choice. Reaching your target audience, after all, is everyone’s end goal. Your ad is going to be taken extremely differently by teens versus their grandparents.
Broad categories help make sure that your ads are streamlined directly towards who would be interested in your company or brand. They contain everything as pertinent and foundational to identities such as political leaning or something as unifying as music taste. Whether you want to connect to singles or country music lovers, broad categories are your friend.
How do I Acess the Broad Categories?
You can find broad categories under Facebook’s ad creation page. There, you should be able to see a drop-down list of already generated categories that Facebook has made for you. What’s awesome is how Facebook has optimized this for you. You don’t have to go looking for each individual interest because they’ve grouped those interests together in identities. This is especially pertinent if things like parent status or political affiliation are relevant for your target audience.
All you have to do is click on the relevant category for your business. Yep, it’s that simple!
How are Broad Categories Different From Precise Interests?
Thankfully, it’s pretty self-explanatory. When you add more and more broad categories, you are expanding the reach of your audience. You are opening the possibility for any potential audience member of any interest to see your ad.
For example, if you check the box for both parents and small business owners, you’re going to be sending your ad off to anyone who may fit into those categories. Why? Because these two categories aren’t mutually exclusive.
Meanwhile, precise interests are much more exclusionary. This makes sense as they are taken from groups and specific pages that they go to fill out. When you select these, your ad will be going to an audience that fits all of the above criteria.
