People who run traffic campaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you'll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More optimized for link clicksThe link click metric measures all clicks on links that drive users to properties on and off of Facebook. More or landing page viewsLanding Page View is a Facebook ads metric that represents when people land on your destination URL after clicking a link in your ad. More have a problem…
Now, I know. I don’t recommend traffic campaigns because they are flawed and often lead to bad results, but you may not have an option. A common scenario is when selling on Amazon, you can’t optimize for 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. If you want to send people to your product on a domain you don’t control like Amazon, you’ll need to optimize for link clicks or landing page views.
Meta Made it Worse
This has always been a challenge, but Meta made it worse. Any type of audience expansion removes your control of who sees your ads. This is a rabbit hole topic, but audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More expansion is fine for purchases because the algorithm’s focus is getting you more purchases. It goes off the rails for top-of-funnel actions when your audience is expanded because quality isn’t a concern.
But, until recently, you could avoid this when optimizing for link clicks or landing page views. You switched to original audiences and turned off expansion. But, thanks to a recent change (it’s still rolling out), Advantage Detailed TargetingWhen turned on, Meta can expand your audience to reach people beyond the Detailed Targeting (interests and behaviors) that you selected, but only if that expansion is expected to lead to better results. Location, age, gender, and exclusions are hard constraints, and the expanded audience will continue to follow those rules. More is now on for traffic campaigns and can’t be turned off.
This means that if you want to use detailed targeting when optimizing for link clicks or landing page views, there is no way around expansion. By combining a potentially problematic optimizationThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More type with an expanded audience, you are virtually guaranteed low-quality results.
The Solution
Top-of-funnel optimization is the one case where you need some sort of targeting control to make it at all viable. Removing control makes it completely unusable.
So if you absolutely need to optimize for link clicks or landing page views because you have no other choice, my recommendation is to use original targeting with custom audiences or lookalikes. You still have the ability to turn off expansion in those cases (for now, at least).
Or, when possible, always prioritize optimizing for conversions.
