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Largely depends what you're selling. For example, I have a client in the travel industry--their ads kill on FB.

Well, I used to scrape audiences from open groups in order to get extremely targeted segments. That works.

Just in case someone else thinks of doing this; it's totally against the Facebook Ad Guidelines

There's other ways of doing exactly that which maintain user privacy and are within the guidelines though.

Other ways are?

wait.. so you can feed a bunch of facebook user ids to the ad system, and only those users will see your ads?

Yes, but via API (or 3rd party using the API) only.

niche, target audience, budget and testing... your welcome.

How is that specific to facebook ? Also this looks a lot like what OP did which failed to be even close to be as succesful as search engine ads.