Should you target all countries when optimizing for a purchase?
Don’t scream at me, I’m mainly challenging our assumptions here. The more I’ve asked myself this question, the more I want to experiment with it.
It’s generally advised you don’t target all countries when optimizing for leads or any type of engagement. The reason is pretty simple…
There’s a VERY wide range in costs to reachReach measures the number of Accounts Center Accounts (formerly users) that saw your ads at least once. You can have one account reached with multiple impressions. More people by country. Meanwhile, the rate of engagement may be about the same worldwide. If you optimize for leads or engagement when targeting worldwide, almost all of your budgetA budget is an amount you're willing to spend on your Facebook campaigns or ad sets on a daily or lifetime basis. More will be spent on the cheapest countries to reach.
Why? Because Meta thinks you only care about the initial action, which is the lead. But these cheap leads are very unlikely to become paying customers in some countries — particularly those it’s cheapest to reach.
In theory, optimizing for a purchase should be different. And it’s related to why targeting all countries isn’t ideal for other types of engagement.
While that range of costs to reach people by country still exists, the rate of purchase will not be the same by country. This is a good thing.
The algorithm shouldn’t waste your budget on cheap impressionsImpressions are the number of times your ads were displayed to your target audience. Impressions aren't counted if it is detected they came from bots. More because it knows that you need purchases. If you target all countries when optimizing for purchases, the algorithm should adjust. If a country isn’t leading to a good Cost per Purchase, your money will be spent elsewhere.
Or at least, this is the way the algorithm should work. It’s why it’s generally okay to use all placements when optimizing for a purchase. It’s the same concept. Audience NetworkAudience Network is a network of mobile apps that have been approved to monetize their apps with ads. This is how you can show your Meta ads to people while they are away from the Meta family of apps. Audience Network and associated groups are among your placement selection options in the ad set. More is a huge issue when optimizing for Link ClicksThe link click metric measures all clicks on links that drive users to properties on and off of Facebook. More because of the high volume of low-quality clicks it provides. But it doesn’t provide conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More, so the algorithm adjusts.
Have you ever targeted all countries when your goal is sales? What happened?
