by Ana Bedoya and David Marks
In this post iOS 14 world, many social platforms have been looking for ways to counter the data loss impact. Facebook specifically has been pushing marketers towards their machine learning tools to connect Facebook users with the most valuable content.
At Jump, we believe broad audience targeting is best. Targeting broadly essentially means that you're mostly relying on Facebook's delivery system to find the best people to show your ad to. This approach can lead to Facebook's algorithm finding potential customers you never would've known about otherwise.
Based on 2021 ad spend for one of our client accounts in the fintech vertical, 93% of spend was allocated towards broad audiences.
This clients budget allocation to broad targeting resulted in a 28% lower CPM when compared to that of the lookalike audience targeting. Lookalike audiences will often generate higher CPMs due to their smaller audience size.
Background: Types of Audience Targeting
Specific Targeting
Targeting specifically essentially means that you're giving Facebook a relatively strict set of audience parameters to work within while finding the best people to show your ad to. These parameters can take the form of Demographic Targeting, Custom Audiences, or Lookalike audiences. They may lead to a potential audience that's smaller, but also to one that's more interested in what you're advertising.
Broad Targeting
Targeting broad audiences means that you’re not looking to appeal to a specific custom audience – but rather, you want to show your ads to as many Facebook users as possible who may be interested in your products or services. Rather than creating specific ad sets and using audience targeting tools to create a small subset of users, you’ll broadly target a large variety of users.
The Hack:
Facebook offers a multitude of options when it comes to audience targeting, getting as granular as the types of foods and movies an audience may like. Though this targeting is efficient it greatly lowers the pool size your product or service can reach, which comes at a cost.
Facebook offers a multitude of options when it comes to audience targeting, getting as granular as the types of foods and movies an audience may like. Though this targeting is efficient it greatly lowers the pool size your product or service can reach, which comes at a cost.
Targeting broad typically nets the lowest CPM, due to the lesser cost of reaching a broad audience definition. At Jump, we go broad and let the creative do the targeting which gives us more time to focus on creative optimization rather vs. targeting optimizations.
Even when using specific targeting such as Interest or Lookalike cohorts, Facebook will let advertisers know ads may be delivered to users outside those cohorts for optimal performance.
When targeting a specific interest, such as skincare (shown above) Facebook will target the interest but will go out of that interest to find conversions if it is cheaper (it will not go outside age or location).
