How to Create a Cold Audience on Meta/Facebook

Step 1: Visit the Audience in Meta Business Suite

visit https://business.facebook.com/
Navigate to the Audience

Step 2: Create a “Saved Audience”

Name field
- When creating the audience, make sure to give it an identifiable name you’ll easily be able to remember when searching from the ad creation tools. 2.Audience Field
- Select “People recently in this location”. This is an extra safety measure to avoid bot traffic on ads. Some bot accounts set their accounts to less suspicious countries.

Because of bot traffic on Facebook, a lot of locations are not “safe” for advertising: they are going to get you a lot of clicks, but not from real people. This can really hurt the page’s performance if content is shown to the wrong people. Make sure ton only select countries in this list.

“Greenlight” countries:

Austria
Canada
Denmark
Finland
Germany
Ireland
United Kingdom
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Sweden
Switzerland
United States

Pro Tip: You can add locations in bulk

Advertising to countries outside of this list is possible, but it’s best to create a separate audience and ad set for them and put a smaller limit on the budget to make sure it doesn’t get spent on bot traffic.

Step 3: Interests Field

I usually try to add as many related interests as possible, including genre of music (metal, symphonic metal, power metal etc. I also include similar bands that are targetable through Meta/Facebook

Other info

I usually aim for audiences that are rather large (1-5M) when it comes to cold traffic. Facebook algorithms usually do a pretty good job at pin-pointing what kind of people respond best. Helping it a bit with interests is definitely great but being too specific won’t let Facebook auto-optimize properly.

The same concept applies for age and gender: I leave them pretty much open unless I’m trying to do something specific (i.e promoting a product that’s specifically for men or women)

Summary

Here’s what my “main audience” for Elvann looks like. I use this audience for gathering leads through lead ads, but leads are generally-speaking not the best objective for cold ads, but they work best for me specifically. Testing what works and what doesn’t is a big part of getting good at running Facebook ads, and the creative is really where the magic happens.