The biggest myth when running Facebook ads is that you should target specific audiences. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Why should I use Broad, or Open targeting?
Interest groups & lookalikes, and retargeting audiences will always be smaller than just focusing on age, gender, and location. Not only are these audiences much smaller, but the information used by Facebook to figure out who is in the audience is very inaccurate. Repeated studies have shown that at least 30% of any interest group is there by mistake and that sometimes more than half of the users in an interest group are there not because they have the intent to buy something but because they actually dislike the thing that they talk about often, which is how they were in the interest group, to begin with.
Another downside of interest groups and look-alike audiences is that they will always fatigue. You will eventually have to turn them off because the performance got so bad. However, broad or open targeting will continue to improve over time because Facebook is a machine-learning algorithm, and you are letting it learn who you want to spend money on.
You can try to find audiences that behave well for your business and chase that performance with more &more creative testing. Ultimately these ad sets will only get worse, and you’ll have to start over, and Facebook will be a little more expensive when you do.
Or you can make ads that are designed to appeal to specific people throughout your marketing funnel and let Facebook find the right ones to show ads to every single day in a way that will let Facebook get better and better at that decision making which means your performance will continue to improve over time.
Broad is stable, projectable, and cheap. This means we can have the highest confidence in future outcomes, and you’ll never need to use anything else.
Broad also never fatigues because it is quite literally everyone!
Broad also provides no restriction to the users that your ads are most appealing to. This means your ads will always be shown to the best people!
The Best Facebook Ads Audience, is none at all.
We know that Facebook ads make their own audiences. When we post Instagram reels or even TikToks, YouTube shorts, or post pins on Pinterest, our reach is often exponentially higher than a follower account when our content is good.
Our ads are no different than this organic content. Facebook will show our ads to the people who most want to see them. When we use targeting audiences, like interest, groups, and look-alikes, and custom audiences like retargeting… We are restricting who we are allowing our content to be shown to. This limitation comes not only at a premium cost, just like guac at chipotle, it costs extra, but it creates a situation that results in ad fatigue.
When someone says that a lookalike or interest group does better than a broad, what this means is that we have more conversions at a better CPA or ROAS attributed to that audience. However, this does not mean we’ve actually made any more money. Instead, this means that Facebook was able to take more credit for the conversions that happen across our business.
An easy example of this is a very common hack to improve ROAS… target people who have opened emails in the last 24 hours with the Facebook ad. This audience will have the best ROAS of any Targeting Audience, but you may lose money. Instead, you’re giving Facebook credit for a conversion after somebody views or clicks on an ad the same day they open an email and purchase.
When we use broad targeting, however, instead of stealing credit from other channels, our reporting is even less trustworthy, and we waste more money… We can actually improve the volume of opportunity. Every one of those other channels has.
This is called incremental lift, and Broad is the absolute best at doing this. Remember, Facebook is a business amplification tool, not a profit-generation device.
Targeting audiences might bring you results that look better on Facebook, but broad will bring you more money to your bank account and will never fatigue.
Ultimately, broad targeting is the most effective way of stabilizing the type of user that comes into your store and getting those people for cheaper. This allows you to focus on improving the quality of the customer experience and, ultimately, their lifetime value to your business.
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