My experience with Meta advertising goes back to the beginning, long before we stopped calling them “Facebook ads.” This website was launched in 2011, and many of its early pages were filled with targeting strategies.
Back then, targeting decisions could make or break your results. Since advertisers defined which groups of people saw their ads, it was those who knew the secrets of targeting who found the most success.
Speaking for myself, I can say that targeting was my primary obsession. Ad copy and creative took a back seat. And to be honest, advertising was so cheap that it didn’t even seem to matter what my ads looked like or what I said in them. If I reached the right people, my ads just seemed to work.
A common line I used back then to emphasize the importance of targeting went like this: “The best ad can’t fix bad targeting, but good targeting can fix a bad ad.”
When we made age or gender selections, they were respected. We had multiple types of location targeting to choose from, depending on whether people lived in a location, were traveling there, or were recently there.
Interests and behavior options — later called detailed targeting — were seemingly limitless. There were interests to define everything that represented our ideal customer.
When lookalike audiences came out, they were groundbreaking. They simplified the difficult task of finding the best interests and behaviors. Instead of stressing over the correct combination of interests and behaviors, we’d simply create lookalike audiences to target the people who were similar to our customers. And to make them extra powerful, we’d layer interests on top of lookalikes.
Custom audiences changed everything. They started with our customer list, extending the power of email broadcasts. And then the offsite pixel came along. Advertisers these days probably couldn’t grasp a time when there were actually two different pixels: One for targeting and one for conversion tracking.
Remarketing was everything. If you had a large remarketing audience like I did, you could spend almost all of your budget on targeting your website visitors, email list, and page followers.
We had control. Combined with the relatively low cost of advertising, we had incredible success.
The Evolution
Those days were amazing, but fleeting. I wish I had appreciated them more when they were happening.
If we were to trace the beginning of the end of targeting control, a good place to start would be Cambridge Analytica. While the scandal itself exploded in 2018, we first started hearing about it around 2015-16. This brought increased scrutiny to the power of Facebook targeting, and the damage it could do in the wrong hands.
Lawsuits accusing Facebook and advertisers of using targeting in discriminatory ways followed. This led to special ad categories, which restricted targeting control when promoting products in real estate, employment, and financial industries.
Regular waves of the removal of interests and behaviors that could be used for discriminatory purposes followed. And then, eventually, audience expansion.
Targeting expansion was introduced as an optional benefit. Check a box and you could reach people beyond your targeting inputs if it would improve results. This option then came for lookalike audiences.
Eventually, the option to turn expansion off in certain situations disappeared. If you were optimizing for conversions, your ads would reach people beyond the detailed targeting and lookalike inputs you provided — assuming, of course, doing so could lead to better results.
Then came Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, which virtually eliminated any and all targeting inputs. All in the name of optimization and performance.
This would lead to new algorithmic targeting options via Advantage+ Audience. It was the hybrid between no control with ASC and full control with original audiences. You could provide audience suggestions that we were told would be prioritized before going broader. Algorithmic targeting was encouraged, and Meta eventually moved to Advantage+ Campaigns that emphasized this hands-off approach even more.
Not surprisingly, advertisers got lost, confused, and frustrated along the way. They desired the control they once had. They thought they had control that they didn’t. And in an alarming number of cases, this confusion would lead to inefficient strategies and bad results.
My goal with this course isn’t to convince you that algorithmic targeting is better than full control ever was. Instead, algorithmic targeting is unavoidable. In many cases, your inputs mean very little, if anything at all.
And truthfully, resistance to this reality only makes things worse. You will not get the control back that you once had. And even in the case of remarketing, you’re usually better off letting the algorithm do it for you.
In the upcoming lessons, I’ll explain what modern targeting means and how you can avoid pitfalls to find the most success with it today.
Free Mini-Course
If Targeting Inputs Don’t Matter, What Does?
You’ve learned that most targeting inputs are just suggestions now. So how does Meta decide who sees your ads? The answer is Andromeda — Meta’s retrieval engine — and your creative is the new targeting. My free Andromeda mini-course covers what it actually is, what it isn’t, and how to use creative diversification to reach the right people without touching a single audience setting.
