# Is Meta Ads Targeting Still Needed in 2026?

Channel: Ben Heath
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRNg2jLp-Bc
Duration: 16 min
Language: English
Words: 3686
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/tRNg2jLp-Bc

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[0:00] Facebook advertisers have been obsessed with targeting ever since I started running ads on the platform in 2013. But Meta have changed their ad platform so much since then and changed the way targeting is done. And we have to ask ourselves the question, is there any point? Do we even need to bother with Facebook ads targeting anymore? I'm going to give you my thoughts on that question right now. So before I give you a specific recommendation around targeting, I want to quickly run through the history of Facebook ads targeting uh to get to where we're at today. So like I said, when I first started, it was

[0:28] make or break. You could absolutely take a poor performing campaign, turn it into a high performing campaign simply by changing the targeting, not changing anything else. But as Meta improved their ad platform, as it became better and better, more and more advertisers started experimenting with open targeting, which is adding in no targeting options, just letting Meta work it out. And they started seeing some good results. And over time, more and more advertisers went that way. Saw

[0:52] better results with open targeting. letting Meta find anyone they want on Facebook and Instagram work it out for you was better than constraining it with your own specific targeting options and and that was the trend. Then a few years ago they introduced targetingless campaign options like advantage plus shopping campaigns where you literally had no targeting inputs and that was the purpose of or one of the purposes of that campaign was to just let Meta go ahead and and work that out. Those have fairly recently been reworked into advantage plus campaigns and that's been extended to other campaign types. We've now got advantage plus lead campaigns for example as well as advantage plus

[1:28] sales campaigns um where we can have targeting inputs but they are suggestions and Meta's come up with this option to basically try and establish a best of both world scenario. Advertisers can feel like they're having some targeting input. They can give meta some direction particularly important with new ad accounts. I'll talk more about that later on, but at the end of the day, it's up to Meta to work out and go out who on Facebook, who on Instagram is the best people to target. A combination of warm audiences, cold audiences, all being lumped in together, whereas we

[1:56] used to have them very much separate. And now a lot of advertisers, most advertisers are either going with no targeting options or targeting options that are used as suggestions, not as hard constraints and hard boundaries. Right? So that leads me on to the big question, which is, do we even need to bother with Facebook ads targeting now? And I think the answer for most businesses is probably not. It seems kind of crazy to think that given where I've come from and what used to be so important on the platform that I that I'm saying that, but I think that's where we are now. Now, there are some

[2:26] very important caveats and and certain types of targeting you need to include and certain certain scenarios where targeting is important. I'm going to run through those. Um, so don't just think, okay, never want to add any targeting and and run off. Really important that you do know in case you fit into one of these circumstances, right? But to be honest, for for most advertisers now, Meta is just better at targeting than we are advertisers. And if we add in specific targeting options, often we just get in the way. We add in constraints. We add in uh boundaries that just don't need to be there. And it's much better just to let Meta uh

[2:58] work it out. And that actually frees us up as advertisers to focus on things that are much larger needle movers. We can focus on offers. We can focus on creative. We can focus on brand positioning. something that's going to become more and more important as Meta optimizes um more and more of the delivery and targeting um themselves. That's a place to stand up with things like creator partnerships, working with influencers, how is your brand perceived and and all that sort of stuff. And that's actually all stuff that we can help you with as part of our done for you Facebook and Instagram advertising services. So, we can create your

[3:28] campaigns, we can manage them, we can optimize them. You don't need to worry about any of this, whether you do or don't need targeting, any of the other stuff where we can work on and help you get significantly better results. If that sounds interesting, there is a link in the video description. You can click on that, come through to a page on our website and book in a free no obligation call with one of my team members to find out more. So, if that sounds

[3:45] interesting, go ahead and do that. Hopefully, we get a chance to work together. So, when I say that targeting isn't necessary for most advertisers anymore, what am I actually talking about? I want to be very clear. I'm talking about the demographic and detailed targeting information that is a part of suggest an audience. Let me show let me show you specifically what I mean. Right? So, I'm in an example ad account here. I've just created a quick example sales um campaign. I've jumped to the adset level. This will apply to other campaign types as well, by the way. Going to go ahead and click in edit and then scroll down to the uh to the

[4:14] audience section. So, we've got as part of audience, we've got this control section and then we've got suggest an audience. So, everything that you add in suggest an audience. That's what I'm referring to here. Take it, leave it. Does it provide some benefit? Maybe not a lot. But the targeting stuff that you set up in controls is still very, very important. And you have to make sure that this is correct. The most obvious part of that being location. So this has just defaulted to the United Kingdom cuz that's where I'm in. But do I want to advertise to the whole country or do I want to just advertise to my local area

[4:45] or do I want to advertise to a different country or multiple countries? Really important that you go ahead and select the area in which you operate here. Um this is not something that you just want to let Meta work out and just think I'll just target the whole world and Meta is going to work out where my customers are. Particularly if you're a local business. That's why this part, this location is up in controls. And any of the targeting options that you select within the control section, those are hard constraints, hard boundaries. Those are things that Meta Meta won't take as a suggestion. They won't go outside of

[5:15] those limits. They will go, "Okay, understood. You only want to advertise, you know, within London. Gotcha. We'll do that. Within uh, you know, 10 miles of of New York City, right? Okay, understood. That's that's what we're going to uh to advertise in. they won't look to to go beyond that. And that applies to other controls as well, by the way. So, if we click on show more controls, you can set a minimum age that goes from 18 up to 25. Some products services are restricted in terms of legally what you can advertise. You know, we can only advertise our products people 21 and over. Um, well, then you

[5:47] want to make sure you go ahead and select this. And again, this is within the control section. Therefore, Meta will use this as a hard boundary and they will understand. Uh, you can add in some exclusions and languages. won't really talk those aren't as applicable to to this video. But this control stuff very very important. Okay. But this

[6:02] stuff down here in suggest an audience. If I click on this, this is where we have our age range. Default is 1865. This is where we have gender options. We could choose to advertise to men to women. And then we've got also the detailed targeting options. So this is going to be our interests, our behaviors. So for our business for example, I can add in things like people interested in is social media marketing would be like an obvious thing that we could go ahead and and add in as a detailed targeting option. Now because all of this stuff underneath suggest an audience is a suggestion, Meta can

[6:32] choose to use these or they can choose to go beyond them if they feel like they can put ads in front of people that don't necessarily fall into these categories but who would be likely to be interested in what you offer would be likely to convert. So, if you've selected an age range of say uh I only want to advertise to people 18 to go with

[6:53] uh 25. If meta feels like the people older than that that would also convert, they're going to put ads in front of those people um given this suggestion here. Right? So, just want to be very clear about the distinction between the two. I'm referring when I say most advertisers probably don't need targeting options to this suggestion audience section and everything falls within it. And when it comes to targeting, it's also very important to add in all the your source custom audiences. I'll show you what I'm

[7:18] talking about and explain what I mean. So, if I go ahead and click on all tools and then select um audiences from up here and we will jump in and and go to the custom audience creation window. Don't worry about all this sort of stuff and it's all just example things I've created because it's an example ad account. If I go ahead and click on create audience and custom audience. So custom audiences for those who don't know are warm audiences, people that have already interacted with your business. And there is a trend now of people not doing any retargeting, not bothering setting up any custom audiences. And the logic behind that is

[7:49] they say meta already knows who those people are anyway. They already know who has uh watched a video of yours on Facebook or Instagram or who follows you or who's engaged with an ad recently or even who's visited your website. Assuming you've got the Meta Pixel installed on your website, those are all true. Meta has got the information on those people. So, you can see all the Meta source custom audiences, people who have watched videos, engage with lead forms, engage with Instagram account, engage with your Facebook page. Like, Meta knows all of that. They're going to retarget those people by default anyway, as long as you haven't overly

[8:22] constrained your your targeting options. And there is some logic to not bothering including those. Um, I understand that argument, although I still would go and set them up because it takes a minute or two. And what's the downside in doing so? Very little. But the your source custom audiences, Meta doesn't necessarily have visibility over that stuff. Now, if you've got the pixel set up, if you've got the accurate tracking set up within your app, um, with catalog data, Meta is going to know all that stuff already. So, you can create a custom audience out of people that have visited your website and add that into your adset to target. But to be honest,

[8:55] as long as you got your pixel set up, Meta knows who these people are. They're going to target them anyway as part of an Advantage Plus campaign. But they don't have visibility around your customer lists, your email lists. How would Meta know who's on your email list unless you upload that list specifically? Like Meta is not going to have visibility of those people. And also, when you go through things like setting up a website custom audience, you will see that Meta only goes so far into the past. So then only look for a website custom audience 180 days into the past. So someone has to have visited

[9:24] your website within the last 6 months in order for them to be included in your custom audience and therefore for me to be able to retarget them. But you can upload a customer list of people who have been on your list for years. So it has a much longer time frame. There are also people on there that let's say you're building a customer list particularly if it's from another traffic source. Meta won't have the visibility over those people. Like I said, particularly if they're more than more than 6 months ago. So make sure you get your customer list, your email list um uploaded. I've got tutorials on

[9:50] exactly how to do that. You can find those um on my channel. But just wanted to quickly mention that there is still value in that even if there's now less value in going ahead and setting up all the other types of of custom audience where meta already has um visibility. External sources very very important still. Now there is another scenario where I think it's important to add in targeting details that I'll get to in a second. But first I want to let you know about Hyrosse. Hyro is the best tracking

[10:15] and attribution software for meta ads. It's a software all the big players in this industry use including myself. I use it to track results for my own ads as well as all my organic results as well. So if someone books a call for our done for you services, for example, I can see exactly where that person came from with a lot of accuracy. That allows me to make better decisions for my marketing and my business. Hyos has been able to track that from our ad spend in this campaign, we've generated £96,000, but £58,000 of that was not reported by Meta. So if I was just looking at my

[10:44] data within my meta ad account, I might come to the conclusion that this campaign is doing okay. But in reality, this campaign is doing a lot lot better. Now, this is a relatively extreme example because of the nature of our business. So, most of our products, services have recurring billing elements. Meta might be able to see what we make initially from our ad spend on that initial transaction, but not those subsequent payments. That's why it it shows the importance here of being able to accurately see what we actually get from our ad spend in order to be able to make better decisions and optimize correctly. So, if you want to improve

[11:15] the performance of your ad campaigns without having to touch your ads, go ahead and sign up to Hyros. There is a link in the video description. I do think it's still a good idea to add targeting options in that suggestion audience section for new ad accounts because Meta is much better able to work out who to target to know is a 43y old more likely to convert than a 35y old is a man more like to convert than a woman is someone in this location more likely to convert than this location. Meta is much better able to do that when you have conversion data within your ad

[11:44] account. When Meta can see all these variables and work out, okay, this is the right person to target and even this is the right person to target and this is the time of week time of day to target them. All those uh data points that the Meta can optimize to improve delivery and it's why campaigns often perform better over time. If you add suggestions in add targeting options or suggestions with new ad accounts, Meta can choose whether or not to use them or not like completely up to them. So very limited downside in doing so. And I think it provides some direction for that new ad

[12:14] account where you as a business owner, as an advertiser might know more about the background of a business, might know more about the the type of person that buys. Okay, we know people this age range are more likely to buy. We know people um you know men are more like to buy than women. We know they're likely interested in these few things. I think it's there's very little downside in adding those in and it might help improve your performance early on when Meta is learning who best to put your ads in front of. That process, by the way, is why meta advertising gets so much easier over time. You are likely to

[12:45] see significantly better results if you can stick at this for a year, 2 years, 3 years, and longer than uh than when you're new. And I know a lot of people that consume my content are new to meta ads. They're new to advertising. often they might even have a relatively new business. I just think this is an important point. I I heard something interesting from someone the other day that was saying that they look at starting new businesses as a person is

[13:07] sort of the same time frame as a person. So if you think about how much time, care, attention is required from a six-month old baby, a six-month old business versus one that's 5 years old. Well, the 5-year-old is much more independent, much more able to do things for themselves, but still needs obviously a lot of care and attention in comparison to when a person is 10 or when a person is 15. And you can think about a business in terms of what's required to to to help it out and get it to the next step is just it's so much

[13:37] more labor intensive at the beginning. And anyone that has kids like I do could totally understand that that things change um as they grow up. And I think that's a good way of of framing it. So if things seem really difficult at the beginning with your meta ads, also with your business in general, just know that as time goes on, it is definitely going to get easier. Most people don't stick at it because it's hard at the beginning and then they decide to uh to not. But if they keep going, um it it things really do get easier because both Meta helps you out and you as an advertiser

[14:04] learn as well. With more mature ad accounts, adding those targeting options into that suggested audience, Meta is probably going to ignore them. And what I mean by that is not meta is going to choose to not advertise to the people you've selected, but Meta is just going to do what it's going to do regardless

[14:18] of the targeting inputs that you use. So, we've done tests with more mature ad accounts where we've had an ad set that's added in a bunch of stuff into that suggestion audience section versus one where we haven't added anything in. And you look at the results and you look at the breakdown of how much budget is spent on new audience versus engaged audience versus existing customers. You can see those breakdowns and it's basically identical. you kind of think, okay, so meta is just going to do its own thing to help us get the best results anyway with more mature ad

[14:46] accounts to have conversion data. Probably not a huge point in adding those targeting inputs as I've already discussed. And going forward, I think we need to rethink what targeting is. So targeting used to be I want to advertise to these people, not to these people. And that's that's changing. That's going to change. The way forward is going to be meta. I'm happy for you to work it out and target everyone, but I have extra context on my business that you don't have. That means I know that these people are more valuable than these people. And you can apply certain waitings to groups and say, I'm actually

[15:22] willing to pay more to acquire customers from this demographic because I know they're worth more to my business or that's how I want my my brand to be perceived this way. because I really want you to go after, you know, people in this location or or I want to build a presence there or I really want you to target younger people because we're trying to engage them with the with the

[15:37] brand and and increase brand longevity. And the way you do that is not through the targeting options. It's not through the stuff down in suggestion audience or even controls or even at the adset level. That is done through value rules. And value rules is a relatively new feature that is incredibly exciting, very, very powerful. You haven't heard about it already. If you haven't checked out my video on it, how to play out with it, definitely go ahead and give this a watch cuz I give you a full run through of value rules, how they work, how

[16:02] you're able to add those weightings. Like I talked about the use cases for this. I've had some comments on that video, people saying, "How is this different to targeting?" Very, very different, by the way. Very different. It's affecting the optimization, not the targeting. If you go through the video, you'll understand. Go ahead and uh give that a

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