TEA 76: Facebook Audiences, Ideal Sizes, and Going "Broad"

When I was 13 , our family took a trip to the Outer Banks , north Carolina , and while we were there , my dad booked us a charter fishing trip for my four brothers and myself and him to go catch some fish .

And the next morning , the day after we had booked the actual charter boat , we went out to this boat and we boarded it and began sailing with some other families that were all not fishermen , like we weren't .

They sailed us into the middle of the ocean maybe not the middle of the ocean , but it was a few hours in And as we sailed this boat , i looked around and there's no land in sight . We were on the open water , middle of nowhere kind of scary . I've seen too many movies so I'm a little freaked out by being on the water , if I'm being real .

But when we finally were driving , we're sailing into the ocean , we're two hours-ish in and the captain kills the engine . His crew immediately jumps up , goes to the front of the boat and starts pulling out these massive fishing poles with different types of lures and bait and sinkers larger than anything I'd ever seen before And everyone took their pole .

So they started handing out the poles Everyone . Then you have all these little kids . I mean I was 13 years old , my brothers were even younger , so they're handing these poles that are like four times taller than any of the kids there . And as we're there , he tells us to go cast on this side of the boat .

And so everyone kind of lines up and he says you need to put your feet up and you're gonna cast on this side of the boat . It kind of reminds me of like a whole Jesus in the disciples story , where Jesus tells the disciples to go and cast their nets on this side of the boat . That's exactly what the captain did .

So we all go to this side of the boat , we cast our fishing poles and he tells us you have to wait . We gotta wait for five minutes for the sinkers to start dropping deep into the ocean . Well , once we did that , five minutes in , someone starts to reel up a fish .

Then , 10 minutes in , other people start reeling up fish And within 15 minutes , almost everybody there were reeling in the largest fish that we'd ever seen .

And since there were five boys and my dad and I that were all on this trip , we ended up catching so much fish that we couldn't even take it all home , and so we ended up donating it all the leftover at least that we couldn't stuff in our coolers to a charity that the charter boat had partnered with .

Well , i bring this up because finding profitable audiences to me in audiences on Facebook in general is a lot like fishing . You know , at first you don't know where to fish , right , you open up your ads manager , you start your Facebook business manager , you open your ad account and you get in there and then you realize , oh , i can start targeting things .

And what do I target ? How do I stack or layer things and what the heck are these look-alikes ? And you don't know where to fish . You also don't know what types of bait , lures , sinkers , poles that you need to go fishing .

But over time you start to learn those things And the interesting thing is , if I'm looking and reflecting back on that whole boat experience , the interesting thing is that boat had multiple spots that it would take its customers to fish at , depending on what type of fish you were looking to fish .

Now , similarly , with audiences and with Facebook , you can have multiple pockets inside different audiences based on what you're trying to sell . But it's your job to find them . And every time you launch an ad set , it's like you're casting your line into a different part of the audience pool .

And the cool thing is you can even cast multiple lines into the same audience pool , kind of like we were all there on this boat and we had a ton of us .

It was a great pocket in the ocean that this boat just knew to go , because they had gone there plenty of times and they had all these radars or sonars or whatever it was to find out where we needed to go .

And they had done this enough times to know that if we bring people here and we cast in with this type of bay , with this pool , with these lures , et cetera , we are going to catch fish .

And so with audiences , you can cast multiple lines into the same audience pool And while some might get bites and others might not , the reality is that audience can actually be fished in .

No , i'd bring all of this up because if you want to win on Facebook , you have to look at all of the different assets that you need to have established in order to win . Now you need first you need the right bait , the right lures , the right sinkers , the right bowls . These are to me , these are the ads .

And the second thing is you need the right people . If you could tie both of those together the right ads , and I would also tie in there the right product and offer with that ad to make sure it's relevant . But the right ads with the right people , the right audiences is that golden combination And that's where you can really gain traction within Facebook .

Now the question is should we be targeting a certain size of an audience ? Should we be targeting audiences at all ? Meaning , do we go in and select interests or behaviors ? Are those things still relevant today ? Or should we be doing something called broad ? And by broad I mean you don't select any interest on Facebook . You only select age , gender and location .

Some people call this going broad , some people call it going open . It's the same thing . The idea is you're not selecting your targeting , you're letting Facebook actually do the targeting .

Now I want to talk about going broad in a minute , but I really want to share my experience , because in everything that you learn or everything that you teach , in my scenario , it's based on experience , and I've had wonderful guests on this podcast that go broad .

They are all about going broad And I'm a huge fan of it because it gives you a few things , and I'm going to talk about those in a little bit . But it gives you a few things .

It gives you stability , it gives you scalability as well , because it's going to allow you to not be restricted and hit these ceilings with small audiences , because you've opened it up and let Facebook , the algorithm , actually do its job and start to really work and optimize and do what it does best .

But , on the other hand , i see audiences do very well very often , and so what I want to talk about is the differences between the two , kind of some of the things that we've seen , some of the ideal audience sizes you might want to lean into , or if you're asking how big should my audience size be , if I'm selecting interest , i want to talk a little bit

about that . And then I want to talk about the concept of going broad and the good and the bad with it . Now on the audience front , because I'm a fan of running to interest in audiences . We still see them do really well . In fact , in a lot of cases we see them do much better than going broad .

The good news is , if you're going into the audience game , you're really trying to find these interests , these audiences you can really run profitably to . The good news is you don't need 20 audiences . I mean , of course , it's gonna be dependent on your budget that's a really big factor and also where you live .

You know if you live in a smaller rural area or you live in like New Zealand , for example , you're gonna have a lot less people in your potential audiences And so you might have to go broad a little bit sooner .

But the good news is you don't need 20 audiences to spend a few thousand dollars a day And , depending on the size of the audience , you might only need three to five audiences and you can easily spend several thousand dollars a day on Facebook without fatiguing those audiences .

And so if we're looking at audiences , a common question that we get asked a lot is like you know , what size audiences should we be going after ?

And you know , if I look at a spectrum , on one end you have this super specific , super niche , really small , like hundred thousand person audiences of people that like making espresso-based coffee while they're on their boats in the Atlantic right . That's the really specific .

There's probably only like three people in that category and they all work at the e-commerce alley . So you have the really specific spectrum . And then you have the really broad spectrum where you start targeting interests like yoga . That has 120 million people in the United States , or a hundred million people that haven't interested in that Right .

So you have the really narrow spectrum On the spectrum . You have the really narrow side , i think the really broad side And the question is what size audiences should we be targeting ?

if we're targeting audiences And I would say that over the years , my recommendation has shifted , because back in 2016 , 2015 , 14 , all the way up to maybe 2020 , these are like the glory days This is when you could run a really mediocre ad to a really hyper-targeted audience and you would do okay .

And if you ran ads back , then you know what I'm talking about You could just whip something up , not even think a whole lot about the copy or the creative , just pull out whatever felt good that day And you could throw it to a really refined 600,000 person audience . So it was really relevant and you would get traction , you would get sales .

But then in 2021 , we had the great equalizer . We all know that was iOS 14 . If you were running ads , you know what happened . We started to lose tracking attribution , we lost this transparency on what was happening And it hurt a lot of businesses .

A lot of people didn't know what to scale because the metrics suddenly plummeted , or at least the metrics on the basic Facebook dashboard did , maybe . I mean , buyer intent didn't change , but the visibility on the behaviors of those buyers changed And that made things a little bit less comfortable when you start to advertise and you don't have as much visibility .

And so 2021 happened , in between iOS 14 and 2021 happening , and all the way till now , we have seen ads continue or advertising continue to progress . And if we're looking at Facebook in particular , what we have seen is we have seen from managing millions of dollars on the front lines .

We've seen two things start to happen and what I predict is gonna continue to happen on the audience side of it . Number one targeting will become less important . You know , machine learning right now in AI is handling a ton of our targeting . It's starting to gather all these data points that Facebook has on us .

It's a little scary how crazy it is , but it starts to gather so much data and it knows how to find the people based on the context of your ads , the landing page , the creatives , copy , et cetera , and then it is able to find those people a lot easier , and so , because of that , we don't have to do as much hyper focused targeting that we once had to .

So the first thing that we're seeing happen , and that I believe is gonna continue to happen , is targeting will become less important , and the second thing is that the brands with the best ads will win the game .

Relevant ad copy and creatives are getting easier and easier to get in front of the right people that are likely to take action without tons of hyper targeting , simply because Facebook's AI and then machine learning is getting stronger and more powerful . Every day , every week , we see this getting better and better and better .

But in all of this , what does that mean ? What does that mean ? So if targeting is becoming less important and I still believe it's important I don't wanna discount that .

I believe it's important I'm gonna share some campaign numbers in a second between broad and targeting , and I believe it's important , but what that means is , if targeting is becoming less important , well then ads are gonna become more important . So targeting is becoming less . Well . What's the only other asset that we have to really leverage to get results ?

that leaves us with the ads . And so , because of that , we have to go back to the fundamentals . We have to think how do we create stellar copy , stellar creatives that are gonna have longevity , that will be able to stabilize at higher spend thresholds and break through new ceilings ?

And so , while I don't believe there is an ideal audience size , i would say that , in general , when we're building out campaigns and we're targeting audiences and determining interests , we are going on the larger side of it .

Now I used to lean into the one million , two million five person audience , but now we're really seeing that , yes , facebook is really favoriting larger audiences , whether that's broad or whether that is actually stacking audiences that are in the tens or even pushing it in the 100 million plus range .

And so , if we're targeting audiences , we usually tend to go as large as possible , as long as that's relevant and in the general direction of what our ideal customer would be interested in .

And so , ultimately , what that means is we are seeing ads be more important than audiences And , ideally , what's gonna happen here's what I believe ideal is gonna happen Over the coming year two , three , five , however many years .

It's probably gonna happen a lot faster than five years , but over the next coming years , facebook is gonna become so good at finding the ideal customers that we don't even have to choose targeting And we're just gonna be loading up all of these creatives and all this copy and giving it a Facebook and Facebook is gonna do the heavy lifting and finding the people .

That's what I predict . That's where I believe we are continuing to go . We see it every single day with Advantage Plus shopping campaigns . If you didn't listen to the episode on that , go listen to that . I think that was two episodes ago . On Advantage Plus shopping campaigns . We achieved great , stable , long-term results with it .

You don't get to choose your targeting in there . You get to choose your location , your gender , your age . Facebook does the rest of it , and so over time , we believe that's gonna become more and more important That ads are greater and more important than audiences .

So it means you should be going and allocating more resource to creating and finding and building the best possible creatives and copy that you can . Now let's talk about going broad . I recently had a guest on the podcast , charlie Tishner , the Facebook disruptor , and he's probably five , six episodes ago . Great personality , awesome guy , love all of his content .

He is big on what we call going broad . This is where you're letting Facebook do the optimization and We see this work in a lot of accounts where we are not selecting interests , we're not selecting look likes or even custom audiences in some of these where we're just literally letting the Facebook base do its Thing .

And just so we know broad is defined is setting no criteria to your targeting except location , age and gender , and then we're letting Facebook find the ideal customer within that . Now , there are good and bad things with this .

So the good in going broad if you're considering it or if you've never , or if you've done it , maybe you can resonate with some of these .

The good is , theoretically we would have , we would unlock , unlimited scale , right , because if we're not , if we're not gonna , if we're not gonna restrict ourselves by audiences , then we're opening it up for Facebook to achieve

maximum scale and results by running it to everyone that would fit that criteria of just simple age , gender in Location . So it's unlocking us a substantially larger scale , and this is just letting the Facebook beasts do its thing . It's just letting it begin to optimize . Now what we kind of see from this .

Another good is that we also see lower CPMs Usually , and we usually see lower cost per click . Is this a good thing ? Is it a bad thing ? I'm not sure you know So . A lot of times we see lower CPMs , but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's a good thing .

Sometimes Facebook lowers your CPMs cost per thousand impressions and then it just it just Pushes you too much more people and so your click-through rate is usually really , really low as a result of doing that . Is that good , is that bad ? I don't know .

It just depends on if the numbers shake out at the end as far as CPA , cost per acquisition , or if you were hitting our . Whatever our KPI is , as long as we're hitting that , that's the most important thing . But we typically see CPMs a little lower when we go broad . We also see cost per click a little lower when we go broad .

That doesn't speak to the quality , it just speaks to the fact that we have more people clicking . Is Facebook showing it to better people or worse people ? We don't know . We just usually see that happen and then ultimately and this is also theoretically it's gonna allow it to Stabilize over the long haul .

So , rather than you know if you're running campaigns We've all experienced this right you launch just some audiences , you launch a campaign and it goes for like a week or two weeks or three weeks , four weeks , whatever that is , and then it Fatigued .

Well , theoretically , if we are going broad , right , we're not selecting audiences then and as long as it's not Hammering our warm and hot audiences with a high frequency that , because we're not a if we didn't exclude warm and hot We're just going broad as long as it doesn't fatigue our warm and hot audiences .

Theoretically it's gonna be going really wide into tons of different people and being in front of a lot of different people , and so it would stabilize by doing that . And I say theoretically , because the bad that we have seen with broad is that it doesn't work for everyone .

In our experience , if you have a really niche product , that is like something that you only have a potential 50,000 customers in the world or in the United States , you have a very niche product that most people wouldn't understand by just simply seeing it . We don't see broad do as well for those types of products .

What we see broad do well at are products that are very understandable , products that are like if you talk about clothing , apparel , if you talk about pet products , if you talk about food beverages just things that people are already relatively familiar with and there's not this massive educational curve we usually see broad do better in those scenarios .

So the bad is , it's great when it's great , it's great when it works , but it doesn't always work . And if it doesn't work , the question is well , is it my ads or is it the fact that I'm just having Facebook show this to everybody ?

The other thing we've seen is that newer accounts don't do as well with broad , whereas seasoned accounts is what we call them Accounts that have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions in spend , where you have what people will call in the advertising world a seasoned pixel .

This is where you have tons of purchase and view content and initiate checkout and add to cart data and lead data and all of these different conversion events that are happening . Those are the accounts that we typically see broad do better in . Is it because Facebook has more data from those pixels and from those accounts ? Maybe , maybe not .

My hunch is that , yes , because there's more data , they're more prone to have greater success , and so I will share just some tangible examples .

So we have some accounts that we've run broad and we've run broad for well over a year and they're doing just fine , hammering results , doing way better than we were running to audiences , those absolutely worth running broad . On the other hand , i'll give you an example of one of our own campaigns , because we also run to some .

So we run some things to broad and we test broad like every three months or so , because we just wanna see , okay , has the AI and the machine learning gotten better to where we can actually achieve what we're theoretically hoping to achieve with broad and not happen to do targeting ?

And so right now we're in a season of testing broad to just further validate it . And in one of the campaigns I just looked at in the last seven days , the CPA for the broad campaign was $21 . So the cost per acquisition was $21 .

But we also have what we call an audience lab where we're running against different audiences , and that one has a CPA of $14.95 . Let's just say 15 bucks . So broad 21 , audiences 15 . So does broad work ? Yes , in some scenarios Do audiences work ? Absolutely , i would probably say more scenarios than broad .

So here's my advice If you're listening to this episode and you're like , hey , josh , i've been wondering , should I be going audiences , should I be going broad ? How big should the audiences be ? My answer would be don't worry about the audience size . Focus on creating stellar assets with creative and copy particularly creative .

That's the largest impactor on conversion . And add success is what we've seen . But then I do recommend trying broad and testing against audiences . Build two campaigns On the broad campaign level . Either go advantage plus , where it's automatically going to be broad , either do an advantage plus shopping campaign .

Or you could do another campaign and run a CBO campaign where you set the campaign budget level and then you go in and then on the ad there's no real ad set level . I mean you just load up your ads to the advantage plus And try that .

And then try another campaign where you set a couple ad sets at a certain budget let's call it $25 budgets and try that against it and see what kind of results you see . Now , when you try the broad , you're going to need to give it a little longer . We do see them take a little longer to stabilize . So give it five to seven days .

Seven days is a safe bet And if you don't see results or target CPA , or even getting close to the target CPA , or even your break even on broad , then it might not work right now , but I would try it two to three times .

And if you try this for two to three weeks and you can't get broad working , it may not work for your niche , it may not work for your products or it might not just be working Now .

Ultimately , i believe that broad targeting giving the Facebook beast all the control on the targeting and us just putting in the best copy and the best creators we possibly can is the future And ultimately , that's where we're going .

So if it's not working now , try it every couple months and let's say how can we actually get this to work And will this end up working for me ?

So here's my big takeaway Don't overthink your audiences and focus on building the best ads you possibly can , because those are more important than actually selecting your audiences , because great ads to bad audiences or less targeted audiences will do well , but bad ads to really hyper targeted audiences will do poorly .

Every single time You've been listening to the e-commerce alley produced by Dylan Kass . I hope you like this . I decided to just kind of go into what are some questions that we commonly get around Facebook audiences and ideal sizes and going broad and I'm just sharing from the front lines .

This is what we're seeing And so if you are not part of the e-commerce alley Facebook group , go join it . It's like 4,000 ish of us there . Go to alleypodcastcom slash group And , of course , please rate this podcast to help get it in others hands . We'll see you in the next episode . Thank you very much .