Facebook states that over 9 million active advertisers use the platform to promote their services and products. But the funny thing is that everyone gets the same interest suggestions to target (and that’s only 25 interests).
Thankfully, there is a secret weapon that you can use to find your audience and target it. List specific interests that practically no one else is targeting! Step up your game by using Facebook Marketing API.
Still, before you bring this marketing trick to life, you need to create that perfect video that will show the best of your product or service and make everyone go crazy about it. Here, Performante comes on stage. We provide market expertise and create unforgettable content pieces that your audience is missing. By the way, you’ll be able to enjoy your handcrafted video ad in the shortest time possible.
Facebook Marketing API? What Is That?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It helps you add important specifications to your campaign as the interface allows applications to access data and interact with external software components, microservices, or operating systems. To be able to take advantage of an API, you need to know exactly what changes you need to make in the data provided.
Of course, you can spend hours learning about Facebook’s Ad Campaign Structure to fully understand what you’re working with. But that’s too complicated and time-consuming. In this article, we present to you a step-by-step guide that you can start following straight away. And you don’t need to be an experienced developer to do that 😉
How to Use Facebook Marketing API: A Step-by-Step Guide
Create First App
Welcome to Facebook for Developers. Click the ‘Get Started’ button in the upper right corner and Create First App. You will be asked to give your App a Display Name. Don’t forget to add your contact email. Once you click on the Create App ID, your very own App has been created.
Request an access token
Now you’ll need an access token – your ‘ticket’ to the magical world of Marketing API. Go to this page, select the App that you have just created, and then generate an access token. The design of the page on your computer can be a bit different, but you should still perform the same steps.
The long, complex number that will appear is your Access Token.
Choose one of the targeting methods
- The adinterest method
With this method, you would have to input a keyword and the API will generate a list of related interests for you.
Make sure to save this URL:
https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adinterest&q=[Tennis]&limit=10000&locale=en_US&access_token=your-access-token
Delete our keyword ‘Tennis’ and input yours. The first letter has to be capitalized. Replace the ‘your-access-token’ with the sequence of numbers and letters that we have just generated.
Once you have changed the URL, insert it in the browser, and hit enter.
Here, you will find not only the related interests but also the size of the audience that you can reach, if you use these interests. - The adinterestsuggestion method
This method is similar to the previous one, but it might not work for every input keyword. You can think of the adinterestsuggestion method as of an extra mile – it may propose the same list of related interests as the method we mentioned before, but it might also open new hidden options that you have never considered before. We would suggest giving this method a try.
Here is the new URL:
https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adinterestsuggestion&interest_list=[%22Tennis%22]&limit=1000&locale=en_US&access_token=your-access-token
Your keyword needs to be inside the brackets and the %22 (it’s an alternative solution to quotation marks). The first letter has to be capitalized. Copy-paste your access token, insert the URL in the browser, and hit enter.
Use Facebook and Google to search the interests
At the moment, you have plenty of specific interests that you can use. Make sure to check if those are relevant or not. Sometimes, Facebook can list odd interests that are not at all relatable. Simply go to Facebook or even Google and search for the interest. PETA, for example, hardly has anything to do with Tennis, so we can certainly cross that one out.
Conclusion
Follow our simple step-by-step guide to unlock thousands of specific interests and create a more effective campaign. With FB Marketing API, you can also manage and optimize the ads in realtime, build dashboards to compare the performance, and simultaneously create multiple advertisement templates. You can go through a few Facebook online courses to master that.
For now, we hope you were surprised by how easy it is to reveal hidden interests. When conducting a competitive analysis, don’t forget to check what interests your colleagues focus on. Do they know the trick as well? 🙂
