Facebook Hidden Interests
Facebook Ads Manager doesn’t show you all the interests you can target. For example, Facebook only shows you 25 results for the search “marketing” when in reality there are 257 results for that query – that’s only 10% of results.
Being able to see Facebook hidden interests allows digital marketers to get more granular with their Facebook Ads targeting. It’s a competitive advantage for firms since it helps them find “longtail interests”.
Audience Eye has a Facebook hidden interest search engine feature. It allows you to search any keyword and get see 100% of interests that are targetable in Facebook Ads Manager.
If you’re working with clients regularly who run Facebook Ads, this tool speeds up your workflow dramatically.
Sign up with the link below.
How do I see hidden interests on Facebook?
To see Facebook hidden interests on Facebook you have to hit the Facebook Marketing API and with a query. To do this you need to get an app access token. To make an access token you’ll need to first create an app.
To make hit Facebooks marketing api go to the following link and copy your token – https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer
Then copy the link link below and add the token to the end where it says TOKEN.
https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adinterest&q=[%22KEYWORD%22]&limit=1000000&locale=en_US&access_token=TOKEN
Paste the whole link we just made into your browser. Whatever is in section above that says KEYWORD is where you’ll put the keywords you’re trying to search for relative interests.
If you’ve done it right, it will come back looking like below.
No very readable is it? This is why I made Audience Eye, so that Facebook Marketers could find interests quickly and effectively. Audience Eye has a search bar and returns the data in an easily digestible form.
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How do Facebook interests work?
Facebook interests are categories of people in specific psychographic. A psychographic is a group of people that share the same attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria.
Interests on Facebook powerful because they help us target people that will probably be interested in our product. Say you’re a mountain biking shop who wants to target people online. Facebook interest target allows you to target people who have an interest in mountain biking. What Audience Eye allows you to do is see all the interests related to mountain biking that you can target.
What is interest targeting?
Interest targeting is how Facebook chooses which people to show Facebook ads to. Interests are different to keywords in the way that people aren’t actively at that moment looking for a specific topic, but rather they have in the past shown interest in a topic.
Google Search Ads for example are search based, meaning at that moment in time they are looking for a specific thing. In contrast, Facebook display ads are disruptive, meaning they interject on a person’s train of thought.
What are Facebook Hidden Interests
The results Facebook shows us in the Facebook ad manager aren’t exhaustive. There are thousands of hidden interests on Facebook. The results Facebook shows us are only the 25 it thinks are the best results.
But to be the most effective marketers we can be, we need to know all the options and then weight them based on impact.
As a Facebook marketer I’ve spent countless hours in the backend of Facebook clicking through interests, trying to surface unique interests. This process has been super fruitful for me, but it is time consuming. To speed up this process of finding hidden audiences, I built Audience eye.
Audience Eye allows for you to search Facebook hidden interests and see all options related to a topic.
Facebook hidden interests are the interests that Facebook doesn’t show the advertiser on the Facebook ad group section. Here’s an example for the keyword “marketing”. If you search for interests related to the keywords marketing of Facebook, it shows you only 25 results.
There has to be more results for marketing. That’s a huge category.
In reality there are hundreds of marketing related interests. Below is a screenshot showing all the longtail interests Audience Eye returns.
Who knew there are 160K people who have an interest in Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Why Facebook Hides Hidden Interests
Facebook isn’t maliciously hiding interests, it is constrained by the UX it built for ads manager. When Facebook first released the ability to target audiences it started with a few interests. As the platform matured and Facebook started to understand more and more interest categories of its users, the UX of the ad manager outgrew the options. So Facebook has to return what it thinks are the best results for a given query.
But this selectiveness isn’t what us as marketers want. I want to know the options available and make the final decision based on my experience and what I think the search interest of an interest is.
How To Leverage Facebook Hidden Interests To Your Advantage
The best way to leverage hidden interests are to find arbitrage for your clients. The 25 results Facebook ads manager returns for a query, they’re the same for everyone. This means that they are more competitive from a targeting standpoint.
Another factor is you don’t get to see the whole picture for a client. To illustrate this idea, say you’re marketing a ski resort for skiers who like destination resorts. If you search skiing, the results are pretty generic.
But on Audience Eye you can find people who have an interest in globally known resorts, helping you inform them of your destination.
How do I see hidden interests on Facebook?
The only way you can see hidden interests on Facebook is to use the marketing API. The marketing API is where all of this information is stored and accessed from. Audience Eye uses the Facebook marketing API to build our results.
What is Facebook Marketing API?
The facebook marketing API is an API Facebook offers to marketers to give them more advanced ways to create ads on the platform. It is a way to create dynamic programmatic advertising and learn more about audiences on Facebook ads.