Recently, we took a look at diving deeper into Facebook’s ad capabilities. When you start spending money every day on Facebook advertising, you want to be sure that your money is being spent in the most productive and lucrative ways. Interest targeting allows you to place your ads further in front of the people that care about the types of products or services that you are selling. This is when we came across the product Connect Explore. It is a software tool created by Wilco de Kreij. This targeting software tool runs off the Facebook API and claims to uncover hidden interests that various other tools can’t access as well as eliminating the need for split testing entirely.

So, how does it work? In the most basic language to describe it, the software allows you to search for a keyword that you would use in your marketing. From that keyword (or keywords) that you type in, it will give you suggestions for a whole host of additional interests to add on to your adset. You can go further and generate even more suggestions from the keywords and suggestions that you have already selected. You can layer these interests as well to be sure that you are targeting only those that are genuinely interested in those topics. Normally, you would be targeting someone in any one of those interests that you’ve highlighted. With the layering tool, it allows you to divide your interests up to tell Facebook to only target individuals who are interested in at least one thing in each layer. So they are interested in many of the things you are targeting. This tells you that they are much more likely to buy.

For example, instead of targeting those that are interested in “dogs” you can layer to target people who are interested in “dogs”, “dog toys” and “dog food”. You’re probably much more likely to find someone interested in buying a dog product than just getting your ad in front of someone who has said they like dogs. They might not even own a dog.

Once you’re happy with the interests list you have created, you can apply all of these interests to a specific Facebook adset through the software. After doing some research into Connect Explore, we decided to give it a try. So far, we’ve set up our account, integrated it with our Facebook ads account, and set up targeting for one of our ads. We watched the tutorials, went through and fleshed out all of our interests and applied them to a current ad we are running.

Here’s what we’ve found so far. If you watch the tutorials, finding interests through this software really is self explanatory. One of the great benefits to this software, that I’ll get into in my next article, is that once the ad is running you can track which of these interests are producing for you and which are not producing and costing you more money than necessary. It really does eliminate the need for split testing. The Connect Explore tool does allow you to find VERY targeted interests and to develop an audience that is specific to your adset. Will it produce results? This is still to be determined. We applied these new interests to an existing ad to track the changes from before using this targeting software to after. In our next article, we’ll dive into what our results have been and tracking analytics through this tool.

Have you used Connect Explore? What have been your results? Have any questions about the software you’d like us to answer? Comment below!