Have you seen a decline in your performance and are unsure of the next steps to take to keep your ROAS as high as possible? It’s time for you to A/B test interest vs broad targeting.
What is broad targeting?
Broad is a type of targeting that you are setting up at Adset Level that gives freedom for Facebook to choose to whom to show your ads.
Broad on targeting level (importance: high)
High-level broad targeting is no interest targeting or lookalike settings. This can also involve semi broad targeting with high potential reach interest such as Google (potential reach: 56,300,000 people in UK)
Broad on age range level (impact: low)
This is where you decide who should see your ad, for instance, 18-65+, this will give Facebook more guidance on who you want to target especially if you have an age-specific product or service.
Broad on a location level (impact: high)
This is where we target broad but based on either city or country-level targeting. For instance, if you target Manchester there are 4,900,000 potential people you can reach – or 56,300,000 people in the entire United Kingdom.
The pros of broad targeting:
- Less management time (less time building out campaigns and research audiences)
- A quicker way to build a customer profile if this is something your product or service lacks.
- Can achieve lower CPCs/ CPA’s
- Can gain insight into what locations (cities) gain the better results.
- Less money spent on testing
The cons of broad targeting:
- Giving your media spend to Facebook can result in your budget being allocated to locations with higher CPC’s resulting in a quicker spend.
- Since IOS changes there are restrictions on the amount of reporting you can access leaving you unsure of what aspects of the broad targeting are working.
- Broad success is not always sustainable long time.
The future of Facebook interest targeting
After the IOS14 update, the most efficient way to run Facebook ads is constantly evolving. In some cases, tactics which worked last month can no longer be fruitful the next month. Many advertisers are currently weighing up the pros and cons of continuing to run interest-based or switching fully to broad targeting and there are pros and cons to both.
The pros of interest targeting:
- Specific targeting to a pre-researched customer profile
- Allocating your media spend to specific customers
- Increases the amount of data you have on successful campaigns
The cons of interest targeting:
- Since IOS14 the audience size pool of certain interests has decreased with the number being inaccurate
- You could be missing out on interests that you are unaware of which the Facebook pixel could give you access to
- You’re targetting the wrong interests and wasting ad spend
More Facebook ads changes are coming
Starting April 11th, 2022, Facebook will be rolling out consolidating the ad and interest topics into singular ad topics. This will change the controls people have allowing the people who see ads more control over the types of ads they see.
This ongoing shift is clear that Facebook is moving more towards broad targeting and relying on the conversions API and Facebook pixel.
With Facebook consolidating topics/interests it will be more important than ever to continue to test multiple interests by either stacking or separating them per adset to continue to gather data on the effectiveness of interest-based targeting.
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