Open Targeting: The Big Facebook Ads Debate

0:00if you've ever set up a Facebook ads campaign watched a YouTube video on Facebook marketing or spoken to anyone about online advertising you'll know that setting up your targeting is a pretty big deal or is it what if I told you that targeting isn't as important as you might think it is if and that's a really big if you fall into any of these four categories which in theory means that if you don't need to worry about targeting anymore you can put that energy into crafting better offers coming up with better and creative or doing whatever it is that you want to do with that time

0:30that you've saved but before I get into that I need to catch up to speed with open targeting so let's quickly start by explaining what open targeting is now open targeting is quite simply not using any specific targeting options not adding in any interest any behaviors any demographics just advertising to everyone within your chosen location often you would have the age range as just 18 plus you wouldn't add in any detailed targeting options and you would have the broadest possible audience the most open audience and that's what open targeting is now we would never have used open targeting six or seven years ago and since then it's become a lot lot

1:03more popular the logic behind it is that meta has become a lot more sophisticated as an advertising platform and the platform itself is so much better now at working out exactly who to put your audience in front of than it used to be six or seven years ago and often it's going to do a better job of finding out who to put your ads in front of than you as the advertiser are so if you limit your audience significantly by selecting a specific interest you're potentially missing out on all those people that don't form within that interest categorization that matters not able to advertise to because you've set that

1:36parameter that they would otherwise be able to work out okay this person isn't technically interested in this but based on their recent activity we think they'd be a good Prospect for this business let's put an ad in front of them and see if they become a lead or see if they purchase that the logic behind it now there are extremists that say you should only ever go with open targeting why would you go with any other option just let the algorithm let meetta figure it out that's always going to be the best approach and some of these really strong advocates for open targeting wouldn't even retarget they wouldn't make an

2:05exception for retargeting they would say meta's going to figure out who visited your website recently or who's on your email list or whatever so just do open targeting and the people that need to be retargeted will be retargeted now personally I feel that that is a step too far I think there are definitely scenarios in which you absolutely want to be specifically retargeting people let's say for example you were running an add to cart campaign where people who had added something to cart but had not gone ahead and purchased by your website you wanted to put an ad in front of them to help get them over that final hurdle

2:34with say an exclusive 10 discount you've probably seen these sorts of things lots of us has used these well you can't really do that if you're not going to be targeting you might not want to offer the 10 to absolutely everyone in an open targeting setup likewise if you're using the omnipresent content strategy which I'm a big fan of for service based businesses expertise-based businesses where you have a high average customer value and you need to demonstrate to your prospects that you know what you're talking about that you can deliver good results that you are trustworthy that you've done work for people just like them in the past you need to tick all

3:04these boxes before they're ready to work with you and you can do that in an omnipresent content strategy because you are guaranteeing that you're putting many different ads in front of people over time that do tick all those boxes how can you do that if you don't retarget you can't really do that by the way if you want to know more about on present content strategy I'll include a link in the video description below to a video that shows you exactly how to do that how to set it up and all that sort of stuff so for me the not retargeting side of open targeting that element

3:32that's just too far I think that's too extreme but we also have to discuss the other side of it of is open targeting always going to be the best option as a cold audience targeting option that is a much more interesting question and I do want to State at this point that I am by no means against open targeting we use open targeting a lot in fact I would say that it is commonly our most successful cold audience targeting option but it is not always our most successful cold audience Target production I think that's a really important distinction so in a minute I'm going to go through

4:03exactly when we would and wouldn't use open targeting when I'd recommend you do so before I get in touch I want to quickly mention our done for you Facebook book and Instagram advertising service if you want my company to create manage and optimize your campaigns for you help you get significantly better results take that workload off your hand and you want to find out more information about that you can click on a link in the description below that'll take you to a page on our website where you can go ahead and book a call in with one of my team members find out more information and obligation call

4:28um hopefully we'll get a chance to work together so as an agency when do we like to use open targeting firstly if an ad account is fairly mature you've got a reasonable amount of conversion data in there we find that open targeting tends to perform better and that makes sense because if you've had more conversions take place then meta understands what a conversion is for your business the types of people that are likely to convert and all sorts of other data points like what time of day are people most likely to convert what day of the week people most like to convert how many Impressions on average does someone

4:56need to convert for this business they have all this data they can use to get you the better results so we're often looking for accounts that aren't just brand new ones that have some conversion history we're also more likely to use open targeting for businesses where their product or service has a broad appeal so for example if you're advertising jewelry that has massive appeal you can advertise that to the general population and know that most people are either going to be wearing jewelry or have someone in their life that they would buy jewelry for so it's going to hit a really large percentage of the population if for example you're

5:25selling Springer Spaniel dog training programs specific to that breed is open targeting going to come as well probably not you want to reach the really specific people that have Springer Spaniels and that training program is is right for okay so how broad is the appeal of your product or service and that's a determining Factor now with that said as the years have gone on and as we've been using open targeting more and more the criteria that I just mentioned the requirement for those to be substantial is coming down explain what I mean before we might have said right we're not going to do open targeting if we have an account with

5:59less than a thousand conversions that number is coming down all the time as meta's machine learning processes as their AI gets better at working out who to Target and we will now test open targeting with brand new ad accounts it's still like to form better with mature ad accounts but we will test it with brand new ad accounts the exact same for the niche product or service versus the broad product or service before we would only do it with those broad product services that appeal to tons of people now we are more willing to test it with more and more Niche product Services there are things that

6:30are really very specific on one end that we still struggle with we tend to find we don't get the best results open Target with those but there are ones that will work really well now that are fairly Niche and we'll see open targeting perform really well that maybe a year ago two years ago wouldn't have done so well with open targeting so the the barrier to entry as it were for open targeting is coming down all the time and if you do decide to test open targeting and perhaps it doesn't work as well as some other options for you now as your ad account generates more

6:57conversions I'd encourage you to test it again in say six months time and then maybe again six months later at some point it's quite likely that open targeting is going to be your best performing cold audience targeting we are also much more likely to use open targeting if we're advertising a local business or one that operates in a country with a smaller population so if advertising in the US for example Nationwide we're going to test open targeting against a bunch of different other detailed target options interest things like that look-alikes maybe if we're advertising in a country like Ireland with a population of say 5 million ish we are much more likely to

7:29rely on open targeting because once you start adding in those detailed targeting criteria you really narrow that audience size down and and we know that meta campaigns generally perform better with large audiences one of the reasons why open targeting is working so and that Dynamic is even more exacerbated if you're advertising on a local basis if you're just advertising to a town of 100 000 people there's basically no targeting option you can go with other than open targeting if you're advertising to a city of half a million people a million people we're almost certainly going to be using open targeting and that's going to be our

7:59best performing cold honest targeting option maybe you get into the point where you could start using like a 10 look-alike or something but for the most part with those smaller populations you're going to have to go with open targeting so that's something to really think about particularly if you're advertising for local business when you test open targeting it's also important to be aware that it can take a little bit longer for that to start to deliver good results than more specific interest targeting options let's say because you've got more people there's more things that matter when you narrow it down to say a specific interest you're

8:29only giving them one maybe a few different groups of people within that to Target and they're going to sort of work it out faster now obviously the downside to that more specific option is perhaps it doesn't run for as long or it's not as successful and profitable once it's up and running but that's just something to be aware of if you run a test between say open targeting and more detailed uh specific interest targeting Behavior targeting things like that and you only run the test for two or three days you might see that open targeting is not doing well if you ran that for a couple of weeks perhaps the open

8:57targeting would work better those time frames are always need to be adjusted depending on conversion volume I get this question all the time how long should I run a an ad for to see if it works and my answer is always how far off your target CPA are you and how many conversions generating if you're generating one conversion every three days you've got to run that ad for ages to know if you're generating 500 conversions a day you might know whether the ads working within a few hours the best targeting options change all the time as well so make sure you subscribe and I'll keep you up to date for example

9:25right now meta is introducing a hybrid option I explain exactly what it is and how it works in this video here this hybrid option is going to act as something between open targeting and a detailed targeting more specific option it's really interesting go ahead check out