Digital Ads 101: Building a Cookbook Audience on Facebook Advertising

If you are new to promoting your books with Facebook advertising, Pacific & Court can help. We have years of experience building, testing and perfecting Facebook and Instagram ads to get the best bang for the digital buck. Below is a snapshot of how to start analyzing audiences on Facebook Advertising.

One of our favorite digital advertising tools is Facebook’s Audience Insights. This free tool available to any Meta business account (which all authors and publishers should have) allows you to scope out how potentially valuable and accessible different book audiences are to market to on these two critical social media platforms. Here are the key insights we take away from a simple search for “fans of cookbooks” in the United States:

Insight 1: The cookbook audience is fairly broad! 9-10 million Facebook users have indicated that they are fans of this genre of books.

Insight 2: This audience is heavily female. 84% of the audience is female (compared to 55% for all of Facebook)

Insight 3: This audience is older. The age groups that comprise 55-65+ make up almost half (49%) of the female audience for cookbooks on Facebook (and 37% for the male audience).

Insight 4: There are some clear “affinity categories” for the cookbook audience that have strong potential for micro-targeting ads. For example, this group tends to like authors like Ina Garten, Josh Axe and Martha Stewart–all of whom have large Facebook audiences that can be targeted with unique ads.

Insight 5: This audience is highly active on Facebook! The average Facebook user clicks on 19 ads per month. This group clicks on 47 ads each month! That indicates that we’ve identified an audience with a much higher likelihood of responding to our ads.