How To Find CHEAPER Facebook Target Audiences

0:00in this video i'm going to show you how to find less competitive target audiences for your facebook ads some audiences are now so competitive there's so much advertiser demand for those people that advertising to them can be really expensive this is fine but there's a simple tool you can use to find out how many other advertisers are trying to reach the same people that you're trying to advertise to and you can use it to find less competitive target audiences less competitive target audiences are less expensive to advertise to you're likely to see better results if you can find them now the reason why that matters is

0:30because the cost of facebook advertising is set by an auction you are bidding against other advertisers for that ad real estate to put your ads in front of your target audience now the supply how many people are on facebook and instagram how often they use the platforms has remained fairly consistent it's a massive supply there's literally billions of people that are on these platforms every day but that has remained fairly fixed the demand the advertiser competition how much demand there is for that ad real estate has increased as people have scaled campaigns as more advertisers have joined the platform and therefore what we've seen is that particularly with

1:03certain target audiences the cost of facebook advertising has increased significantly and i think this situation was made a lot worse by the reduction in the number of targeting options earlier this year facebook removed thousands of different targeting options and that meant that previously you may have had advertisers some advertiser advertised at this targeting option some advertisers that advertise with this targeting option perhaps those two things are related but separate now because there are less options you're forcing more advertisers to use the same targeting options that increases the level of competition and really makes certain target audiences a lot more expensive so i think it's gonna be a really useful video if you're

1:40finding that your cpms your cost per thousand impressions are just going up and up and up it could be because the competition for that audience is massive and you can find other ones and you see much better results so how does this work let's go have a look to do this head into ads manager i'm an example facebook ad account here i've got an example campaign selected i'm going to go ahead and click on ad sets and then we're going to go ahead and do this for adsenant before this is done at the ad set level now you'll see that underneath adset 4 here the name of the

2:06ad set we've got some options one of which is inspect if you go ahead and click on that we can see some really really interesting data now this inspect tool shows us tons of stuff and i'm going to talk about a few different elements but i really want to highlight here is this auction competition section that will show you how competitive how much how many other advertisers are trying to reach the same people as you for a given time period so here we've got an example um campaign well an example ad set as i said we do this at the ad set level and we can see

2:36we've got auction competition which is this um sort of thicker blue line and the way it works is that zero percent that middle line is average competition so obviously everyone who's on facebook and instagram there are advertisers trying to reach them and just the dead average across the entire platform is represented by zero percent therefore the pluses and minuses show how it's either more competitive than average or less competitive than average when it comes to your target audience now if we hover over this little eye and you can see that um this is exactly what meta are describing here but they've got a couple of reference points so as a

3:10reference a data point of 20 indicates high competition while a data point of minus 20 indicates low competition there's obviously going to be fluctuations as we can see in in this data here but that's just a good reference point to where wherever if you get up to say 50 or minus 30 you're really talking about something quite um substantial now one thing that we can see interestingly about this line is that it changes quite a lot so we start here in the first few days with average to slightly above average competition then it drops down significantly and you can see this part is highlighted explain that in a second it dropped down

3:46significantly so we go from on the um what day is that the 6th of june and we're at 24 auction competition so it's quite competitive that day we drop all the way down to sort of minus 30 three or four days later okay why did that happen in this ad set because it's going to be natural fluctuation anyway but why such a significant change well this point here we can see that it says add set targeting updated and this auction competition graph will show you this um which is really really helpful and this is why i wanted to use this ad set because it highlights what i'm

4:19talking about here certain target audiences are much more competitive than others and therefore much more expensive so on june 6th the asset targeting was updated and that has led to a massive decrease we've gone from there 24 aux competition so that's significantly above average high levels of competition down as i said to minus 32 that's significantly below average low competition um by changing the ad set now you can see that this hashed section if we highlight this over here is in the learning phase so actually this ad set stayed in the learning phase for quite a long time after um the change was made which does happen

4:57there weren't many conversions on this particular ad set um it's not the best example in terms of performance to show it's more because it has the interesting change in data which i wanted to use it you could ignore the cost per lead data that's not super accurate in this case anyway but what i'm going to talk about is the different levels of competition now you can do this only with ad sets that have already been running you can't use this inspector take a look at a target audience and try and predict how competitive it's going to be how expensive it's going to be ahead of time so the way i would

5:28recommend you use this is create a lot of different ad sets i'm a big fan of having five maybe even slightly more ad sets running at any one time each ad set has one targeting option run those and then when you're assessing performance one of the things you need to come back in and take a look at is this data auction competition and go aha this ad set that produced a really high cost per conversion guess what it's because there's loads of competition for it this ad set that produced um a really fantastic cosplay conversion there's actually far less competition for that great let's go ahead and target it it's

6:01a really useful data point to be able to use you should also be using auction competition and taking a look at this data to try and work out what may have changed that's outside of things that you've done so you've got a campaign running you've been using the same targeting options the same ads um for a while and all of a sudden you either see a big spike in cost or you see a drop-off in cost and you think what's going on what could be affecting this well there's always going to be external factors to what you're doing that could have an impact as i said this is an

6:29auction it's a competitive market you can come in here and see oh actually our auction competition level dropped off some advertisers that were previously competing with us for this target audience have decided not to advertise to them anymore or maybe left the platform in general which is fantastic that means it might be sustainable likewise you could have the opposite there could be more competition so it's a really useful tool to work out what's going on if you see a big change without you necessarily making a change and while you're using the inspect tool i'd encourage you to come and take a look at the other data points that met provides

7:00they're really really useful information things like audience saturation which will help you work out if your results have dropped off is it because of audience saturation ad fatigue effectively and you can see they give you a frequency number against your costs and you can see if you know your frequency is just keeping going up and up and up and that's led to a decrease in results maybe that's why you want to target different audiences or change up your ads and things like that there's other interesting information here like auction overlap whereas auction competition refers to the relationship between you and other advertisers in regards to targeting your audience

7:33auction overlap is how much are you actually bidding against yourself so if we hover over this little eye this graph shows how often your ads are ended up in the same auction as another from the same account so that's why if you've seen my stuff you'll see i'm a big fan of often using one or just a few campaigns not lots of different campaigns and not having situations where you've got duplicates of ad sets duplicates of targeting options running simultaneously people like to do that to test stuff and scale but you end up with auction overlap issues this is not something you want an auction overlap of

8:021.68 is fantastic you don't want that number to be really high um it's gonna affect your delivery and if i hover over this again you'll see um that to prevent you from bidding against yourself we removed the less competitive asset from the auction so it just doesn't work out properly one of the assets isn't going to deliver correctly it's something that you want to avoid now just quickly returning to auction competition it's important that you're aware that certain industries are inherently a lot more competitive than others so in some cases you may be able to find less competitive target audiences in which case fantastic in other times that's a lot more difficult

8:37to do you might need to test a lot of options and always look at this data in relationship to your cost per conversion whatever it is you're optimizing for if you've got a great cost per conversion on a target audience but the aux competition for that is quite high that's still fine the cost per result cost per conversion should take precedence this is extra data to help you make better decisions but it shouldn't override the most important metric which is how much is costing you per purchase per lead etc and before you go there's something i want to quickly mention and that's a free webinar i've

9:06created that covers one facebook advertising technique the single most important facebook advertising technique that can make the biggest difference to your results i cover in a lot of detail this webinar is completely free the link is in the description below i strongly recommend you go ahead and check it out i think it'd be well worth your time once you've found the right target audiences you are much more likely to succeed with facebook ads but it's also very very important that you aren't making any of the most common facebook targeting mistakes i cover them in this video here i strongly recommend you go ahead and check it out make sure you

9:33aren't jeopardizing your facebook ad campaigns