How To Find Hidden Facebook Ads Interests? Lifehack.

Why do you need to look for “hidden” interests

To reach your target audience when launching Facebook ads, you need to choose the right interests (parameters); During a search in the Detailed Targeting setting, Facebook limits the number of offers and shows a list of the most relevant parameters; they reach millions of people. The competition for showing to such an audience is maximum.

You can avoid high competition by using hidden interests that Facebook does not show when setting up an advertising campaign. You won’t find them manually in Ads Manager if you don’t know the name of the interest itself.

How to find hidden interests

First, you need to get a token, a small piece of code:

The easiest and fastest way is through the Ads Manager account. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Go to the Ads Manager ad account.
2. Open the developer panel to view the page code.
To do this, press the F12 key or right-click on any part of the page, select View page code.

3. After opening the page code, enable code search (Ctrl + F) and specify accesstoken in the search bar. Copy the found character set to the clipboard:

IMPORTANT: the received token is valid for a couple of hours, so each time, it must be generated anew.

Now that we have a token – let’s move on to the most important thing – getting a list of interests. To do this, you need to send a request to the Facebook API.

Enter the following URL into the address bar of your browser, but don’t go to it:

https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adinterest&q=[keyword]&limit=10000&locale=en_EN&access_token=token

First, you need to substitute the keyword and add the resulting token.

Navigation for the meanings:

• [keyword]is a search word such asLego.
• en_EN– language and country to search for; Interests vary depending on the country.
• Token– paste the character set you copied earlier here.

After filling in all the meanings in the search bar, press Enter. That is the response from the Facebook API:

The obtained results are not structured; therefore, for convenience, this list should be deciphered. There are two ways to do this using the JSON Formatter service.

Method 1. Use the web version of the service – copy the received response from the API, then enter it in the left window and get the result:

Method 2. Install the browser extension, then refresh the page with the results from the API. At the top of the page, on the right side, you will see buttons for switching view modes; We get such a list:

With this design, the size of the audience is highlighted in color, and the categories of interests are visible.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to check and filter the resulting lists of interests because not all results are suitable for your target audience.

Conclusion

This tool will come in handy in your search for new facets of the interests selection for testing hypotheses, scaling, and audience specification.

Author: Anton Meshcheryakov, Targetologist