The BEST Facebook Ads Targeting Option (NEW DATA)

0:00I recently polled my YouTube audience and I asked them which type of cold audience targeting option produces the best results for their Facebook and Instagram campaigns now the results were very very interesting I want to discuss what they mean how they actually differ from our own Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns because there is a difference and I find that very very interesting and what this means for your Facebook ad campaigns which targeting options you should try which targeting options you should be focusing on now the first thing to really clarify is that we're only talking about cold audiences here not warm audiences and I Define cold

0:28audience as people who have not interacted with your business before so not someone who's visited your website sign up your email list watched a video of yours on Facebook Instagram none of that cold audiences and for this poll over 1300 people responded which is great it's a great data set for us to be able to use so much raw data we know that because these people are part of my audience they're going to be very much interested in Facebook and Instagram advertising there's probably some some pretty decent budgets on average being spent amongst those 1300 people and we can definitely use this data and extrapolate out to the sort of broader

0:59Facebook an Instagram advertising landscape so really useful data here okay so when I asked the question I gave three different cold audience targeting option types of course there are thousands of different targeting options specific targeting options you could use but I wanted to get a sense for which category of cold audience targeting option people are using and where they're seeing the best results so three I used were broad targeting which is otherwise known as open targeting it's just being able to advertise to everyone within the location that you want to advertise in everyone everyone I also selected detailed targeting as an option that's going to be interests behaviors

1:32things like that what a lot of beginner Facebook advertisers will at least start with and then I used look-alikes now a lot of people think that look-alikes are warm audience targeting options they're not I look-alike audience is based on a warm audience that's the source but it contains people that are a cold audience that have not interacted with your business before that's who's going to be included in a look-alike audience they are a cold audience type and therefore when we're assessing the performance of lookalikes we need to compare it to other cold audience targeting options as we've done with this pump so there are a number of really interesting things that

2:02we can conclude based on this information now the first one is that there are a lot of people within the Facebook Ads industry that are recommending that you just go with broad targeting open targeting is the only way to go you don't need to use any specific targeting options that's a waste that's going to lead to worse results that's clearly not true looking at this data it is in some circumstances for 44 of people they saw their best results from broad targeting so great and actually that was the best option of the three that got more people saying that was their best option than the other options

2:32but for 56 of people that responded to this poll they are seeing better results from other types of cold audience targeting and this is why it is so important to test and it's also really important to be wary of Facebook advertising advice that you give where someone says this is the best way to do it always that's rarely the case in my experience there are certain areas where yes broad targeting will absolutely work well and I've created a video about that I'll include a link in the description where if you've got a broad appeal product that lots of people a large percentage of the population are going

3:03to be interested in Broad targeting can work for you if you've got lots of data in your ad account broad targeting can work for you but if you don't meet those two criteria often you're better off with a different option and that's partly what we're seeing in this data here the second thing to note is that the spread is pretty even yes there are more people that have gone with open targeting as their best performing cold audience targeting option than say look-alike audiences but none of these three have received say three percent of the vote here and in which case I'd probably be saying you can ignore that

3:32don't worry about advertising using that cold audience type but the smallest one is look-alike audiences with 21 to me that very much indicates that you want to be testing all three of these cold audience targeting types because it's a good chance that one of the three could work for your business you can't just say this is the way to go or you can completely ignore this definitely worth a test the third thing that's really obvious to me is someone who's been involved in Facebook advertising for a decade now is that this changes a lot so if you rewind a few years ago let's say to 2019 and you asked the same question

4:03I would expect that 70 maybe more of people would say that look-alike audiences was their best performing cold one is targeting option we were using look-alike audiences primarily for our cold audience targeting across our clients then but that's obviously not what we're seeing now that's something that's changed post IOS 14. as you can see doesn't mean you should ignore look-alike audiences but they're not as powerful not obviously the best option as they used to be say three or four years ago in 2015 if I'd have asked this question no one would have been doing open targeting open targeting would have been seen as crazy you wouldn't have

4:35given any direction your results would have been pretty poor so this really does change and it's likely to change going forward I iOS 14 really changed the sort of balance of power from lookalikes to open targeting it is roughly what we've seen there's likely to be more changes likely to be things that happen that lead to further shifts amongst which is the best option so don't fall into the Trap of finding something that works now and thinking that'll work really well for the next five years it might work really well for the next year 18 months two years maybe even shorter time periods than that and

5:07you need to be willing to adjust with the times and stay up to date with my content and other people's and find out what's working now because as we can see it really does shift before we get into that you want to quickly mention our done for you Facebook and Instagram advertising services so if you want my company to create manage and optimize your Facebook Instagram ad campaigns take that workload off your hands and also help you get significantly better results we could almost certainly help you do that to find out more you want to book a call with one of my team members there's a link in the video description

5:35below a free call no obligation you can find out more about a service we can let you know if we work with a business like yours before good chance we have at this point I know yeah hopefully we get a chance to work together now when we look at our campaigns across the board and we take a look at which type of cold audience targeting options performs best for our clients at Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns we would see a shift from the results from my audience which is interesting so firstly we're going to see more in the open targeting category I would say that 60 65 of our

6:03clients are seeing their best results with open targeting then from the remaining 35 or so I'd say 25 is going to be lookalike audience so around 25 of our clients are still seeing their best results when it comes to code audience targeting from lookalikes leaving roughly the final 10 to detail targeting which is interest behaviors and things like that so quite a difference between what we're seeing and as an agency and what my audience is seeing now this discrepancy makes sense if you think about the average business that works with us our clients they're going to be spending more on their Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns than the average

6:37person in my audience responding to this part now of course there's going to be exceptions but if we just take an average I would imagine that's going to be the case most businesses will run their own Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns initially they'll scale up to a certain level and then they'll start working with an agency like mine now we know that as you spend more you generate more conversion data within your Facebook and Instagram ad account as I've already mentioned open targeting performs better when you have more data within your ad account because that gives meta a lot of information to be able to put your ads in front of the

7:09right people they don't need as much input from you as The Advertiser saying this is the ideal type of audience that I want you to Target so that's the first thing more spend skews things more towards open targeting and that's why I think we would see a big difference between our number a good 20 or so and what I saw from the pump okay I guess that makes sense and that's something to keep in mind with your own Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns is that as you scale you may well want to shift if you're finding better results with other code audience targeting options to a

7:38more open targeting approach we also see our clients usually getting better results from look-alikes than detailed targeting options like interests and behaviors and again that makes sense because the businesses that we're working with are going to be more established on average than the people following my content and running their own Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns a lot of which will be quite small businesses at this point they're fairly new now when you have a more established business you have larger warm audiences so you have more people that visit your website you have more people on an email list so much raw data so if you're using

8:11those as your Source audience inputting that into your Facebook ad account and creating look-alike audiences off of those that's going to produce higher quality more accurate look-alike audiences we know that the more data you can put into the source the better quality the look-alike audience is so if for example you're creating a look-alike audience based off a source audience of 200 people that is unlikely to perform as well as if you're creating a look-alike audience based off a source audience of 20 000 people and again because we're working with more established businesses that have larger budgets larger customer bases I think that the more data is leading to better

8:45accurate look-alike audiences which is leading to better results through that cold audience content type so what does that mean well it means that if you're relatively new to Facebook advertising you have a new or new-ish Facebook ad account you may well see the best results when it comes to code audience targeting with detailed targeting options interests behaviors things like that as you grow as you generate more conversions as you build larger warmer audiences you may want to shift to look-alike audiences and test open targeting that's sort of the trajectory that people go on it's why a lot of people within the Facebook advertising industry recommend always

9:22going with open targeting because they perhaps work with a handful of really large Brands they've got large brand Equity that have a product or service that is very much broad appeal a large percentage the population is going to be interested and for that type of business that they're working with perhaps they own one themselves that is definitely going to be the way to go open targeting but there are tons of businesses that don't have that situation that's that's not their circumstances they could be really Niche down for example and going after a very specific industry if you have a newish Facebook ad account and you're really specific which is a great

9:52way to go by the way you're going to get traction a lot easier early on if you do Niche down then you're just just not going to work that's not the best way to use open targeting for that type of business you want to be going with much more specific interests maybe with a combination of look-alike audiences maybe switching to look-alike audiences once you've built up those Source audiences but just something to think about be wary of the one-size-fits-all advice when it comes to targeting or anything else there are specific tools for specific circumstances and that's what this poll is really showing us something we'll see great results with

10:21this I think we'll see great results with this other people see great results with this now one of the options listed here is look-alike audiences and I find that lookalike audiences are very much underused and very much misunderstood by a lot of Facebook and Instagram advertisers so I'd strongly recommend you check out this video which is a full walkthrough on how to create look-alike audiences which types to use how to adjust your strategy if you are using look-alike audiences as we've seen there's a good chance that it'll be your best performing cold audience targeting option so strongly recommend you give them a test and check out this video