Did you get all of that? Targeting has changed a whole lot during the past decade, but especially the past five years. You can’t advertise like it’s 2021 and expect to get good results. It’s time to adjust and take a modern approach to targeting.
That includes…
Suggestions Don’t Hurt, But They May Not Help
It’s critical to understand when you are and aren’t using audience suggestions, and what that actually means. You aren’t restricting the audience. It’s debatable whether you’re even guiding it.
This can be proven with age range, gender, and custom audiences (when using suggestions that match audience segments). It doesn’t matter how important those suggestions are to you. Meta will completely ignore them if it means getting more results.
It’s unlikely suggestions can hurt results. Feel free to use them. But don’t use them as if they are an important factor. They probably aren’t doing much, if anything.
Deprioritize Detailed Targeting and Lookalikes
Along those lines, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors) and lookalike audiences are almost always used as suggestions now. If you use one of 11 common performance goals, detailed targeting cannot be restricted. The same is true for lookalikes and nine performance goals.
Unlike using suggestions for age, gender, and custom audiences, it’s much more difficult — even impossible — to prove the value of suggestions when using detailed targeting and lookalikes. Sure, split testing may help, but they can’t prove anything on a global scale.
We will never know how much Meta actually considered your detailed targeting and lookalike audience inputs before “finding more results.” And because of that, refer back to the first section. Suggestions are unlikely to hurt. But it’s time to stop looking at them as an important element that impacted performance.
It’s possible that these types of suggestions could be more valuable for new accounts where Meta has less data. That makes sense in theory. Use these suggestions to test that theory. But it’s also possible the theory is false and Meta doesn’t need that info.
Use Value Rules to Solve Problems
One of the primary reasons advertisers will turn off Advantage+ is to restrict by age and gender. In most cases, that restriction is unnecessary. But there are absolutely times when there’s a problem related to age and gender that needs to be solved. But you can leave Advantage+ on and use value rules instead.
That problem to be solved would be related to information that you have and Meta doesn’t. Meta is focused on getting you the immediate optimized event, without concern for what happens later. The information you have that Meta doesn’t could be related to customer lifetime value, lead quality, or even quality beyond an optimized engagement.
If you use breakdowns and see that Meta is exploiting cheap, low-quality results by demographic group, use value rules to solve it. Bid less for those groups instead of removing them entirely.
Avoid Multiple Ad Sets for Targeting Purposes
Once you understand that detailed targeting and lookalikes are almost always suggestions now and there’s no reason to restrict by demographics, it begins to make sense that there are dwindling reasons to create multiple ad sets for targeting purposes. It just isn’t relevant now.
There’s no reason to create separate ad sets for detailed targeting and lookalike audience groups when those inputs are only used as suggestions. When you do this, you create multiple ad sets that can ultimately reach the same people. You water down your budget and create a situation where auction overlap is likely.
It’s inefficient and it hurts results. There are always exceptions, but don’t create exceptions unless they’re helpful or required due to a business goal.
Remarketing As An Exception, Not a Rule
There is no debate about the value of people in remarketing audiences (though the value differs by type of audience). The debate is over whether you need to explicitly target them now.
Define your audience segments in Advertising Settings and then run sales campaigns with wide open targeting. How much of your budget is dedicated to remarketing? It’s likely 10 to 20 percent, if not more.
Remarketing is no longer needed to “show Meta the right people to target.” Assuming you send Meta complete data, the value of those people is already known and will be prioritized. You don’t need to segment your targeting to focus on people “more likely to convert.” Meta will already do that.
I know your remarketing results are amazing, but they’re also misleading. They are propped up by view-through conversions and neither scalable nor incremental. It’s much more efficient to allow Meta to reach those remarketing audiences automatically and dynamically distribute your budget between remarketing and prospecting groups.
Are there exceptions when remarketing might be useful? Sure, especially for high-ticket up-sells. But even then, know that your remarketing is only meant to help make your other efforts more effective, and your results will be inflated.
Focus Less On Targeting
Bottom line: Take more of a hands-off approach to targeting. Not only do your inputs make less of an impact now than ever before, you can hurt results by micromanaging this stuff. You can’t avoid algorithmic targeting now, as much as you’d prefer it.
Deprioritize any targeting-related concerns so that you can consolidate your budget and prevent unnecessary restrictions on the algorithm. Use value rules to solve the problems that come up, but otherwise back away.
Then you can spend more of your time and energy on the things that matter most: Your ads.
Free Mini-Course
Want to See Algorithmic Targeting in Action?
You’ve learned that most targeting inputs are just suggestions now. I get it — that’s hard to accept without proof. Audience Segments are what finally convinced me. They show you exactly how much of your budget goes to remarketing vs. prospecting, and the results might surprise you. I regularly see 20-25% of my budget going to remarketing automatically, with no targeting inputs at all. That’s the data that made me stop using separate remarketing campaigns entirely. My free mini-course walks you through how to define your segments, use the breakdown, and make sense of what you see.
