Facebook just told us the BEST Audience Size!

meta has come out with a new recommendation when it comes to the ideal Facebook ads audience s now meta isn't usually anywhere near as clear with their recommendations as this and I think this represents a big Facebook ads targeting change and we're going to need to adjust our approach as advertisers to accommodate this So Meta released documentation with their new audience siiz recommendations and it is somewhat different to what I have recommended before so we absolutely have to discuss this so here's the article from meta that I'm referring to and this is basically a documentation that's trying to convince advertisers to use broad targeting it's Lally got broad targeting at the title it's talking about reaching more people and they give a number of reasons why you would want to use broad targeting for example on average 12% um Less in terms of cost per action by using broad targeting broad targeting by the way for anyone that's not familiar is simply not including any detailed targeting options any lookalikes anything that narrows down an audience so just allowing meta to work out who within the total potential population within the area that you're actually targeting who Within that should receive your ads and who should not and what's likely to deliver the best results so if then we continue to scroll down we get to this really interesting section here where the recommendation is set your audience to reach more than 2 million now I've given recommendations around the ideal Facebook ad audience size before and I've said things like you don't really want to go beneath 500,000 people in an Ideal World you wouldn't have this estimated audience size below 500,000 people and I've been much more concerned about making an audience not making an audience too small as opposed to it being too big a lot of people say well how big can it be on the upper end and my response is often we don't really worry about that we will often use open targeting broad targeting and just Target everyone and if we're doing that say us-wide that's going to be 250 million people so we don't really worry about an upper limit but we've always been concerned with a lower limit because we know that audiences that are too small don't perform as well what's really interesting is that meta have really upped their recommendation in terms of it's not half a million anymore or 250,000 like it used to be a number of years ago now it's 2 million plus which is really quite a large Facebook ads audience much larger than we would have typically targeted 5 6 7 years ago let's say So Meta do provide a little bit more context in here as to why it needs to be 2 million plus if you can I'll explain a bit more about that in a second so say here out delivery system works best when your um audience size is greater than 2 million people so it's to help their delivery system more people to advertise to more flexibility they can work out who within that audience is best to advertise to what time of day they're not forced to advertise to a specific number of people which may only be on the platforms at certain times a day and all that sort of stuff right so more flexibility with a delivery system but they do also go on to say so set up your eyes to Target the widest audience possible that makes sense for your business that's not the widest audience possible it's the widest audience possible that makes sense for your business so it's not necessarily always just going with advertising to absolutely everyone that's a really important distinction so the important message here is don't do anything that doesn't make any sense for your business don't advertise in an area where you can't actually serve the people that you're advertising to that makes no sense don't think that the 2 million plus recommendation is that important we're not worthy I also wouldn't worry too much if there are targeting options that you think make sense for your business that sound really interesting and those are beneath the 2 million let's say you're not a local business but you advertise nationally and there's an interest targeting option that you want to test that's 1 million or 800,000 absolutely fine to go ahead and test that you may well see that it produces better results it's also worth noting that in some countries where the population is relatively small you may well be beneath 2 million once you add in some very basic um narrowing criteria things like age gender criteria that sort of stuff may take you beneath that up so don't worry about it too much it's more this recommendation is more interesting for those advertisers that have the ability to Target much larger audiences or smaller audiences or somewhere in between given this new information from meta I think it makes more sense to prioritize those larger audiences and you may well already you've done that and be seeing that those produ the best results but if you haven't definitely test some larger audiences test some open targeting see how it performs um given meths of recommendation I think it's likely to perform better than some of the smaller targeting options that's what we've been seeing U within our agency and we've seen that trend for a number of years that I'd expect that to continue as meta's machine learning processes and AI get better and better at identifying who within the target audience is most likely to take your desired action and most likely to get you the best results and there's something else that I want to quickly highlight that you may not have thought about and that's that if all advertisers went with broad targeting open targeting or as many advertisers as possible did that's better for Meta Meta have all this ad inventory that they want to be able to fill they have all these at this point billions of Facebook and Instagram users and they are on the platform and meta wants to fill every single possible slot it can with an ad that's available if advertisers get really specific with their targeting then metha is only going to be able to put ads in front of those people and they're not going to be able to fill add inventory for all those other people that perhaps advertisers are less interested in reaching because they typically purchase less etc etc right so this is within meta's interest and whenever meta makes a recommendation you always have to think is that in my interest as an Advertiser or meta's interest as a platform often those are the same things right because meta wants us to get good results because if our advertisers get good results then we spend more meta makes more money but every now and then there will be recommendations where you think I'm not sure that's better for advertisers I think that's just better for meta this recommendation is definitely better for meta I do think in most scenarios it is also better for advertisers as well and we can verify that because we've we've been able to test it over a number of years we've been able to test going with uh more open targeting broad targeting options versus more specific and the trend has definitely been towards the open broad targeting producing better results for us advertisers as well so it does overlap but it's just an important thing to note of okay how important is this recommendation who does this serve and this applies to this recommendation versus all the other ones that you may see within an ad account or documentation that the meta provides I recently pulled my audience for example and I asked them what's your best performing cold audience targeting option um and I gave a few different options broad look alikes interest Etc and Broad was the best performer of the options but it wasn't like 90% of advertisers see their best results from board targeting there are a number of people that said no I see my best results from lookalikes I see my best results from detail targeting options so it's important to test and not just always go with the recommendation now there is something else that I want to show you when it comes to audience sizes that has changed recently and I think is very interesting before I do that I want to quickly let you know about our done for you Facebook and Instagram advertising services so my company can create manage and optimize your ad campaigns for you we can take that workload off your hands so we can hopefully help you get much better results if you're interested click on the link in the video description below that will take you to a page and a website where you can book in a free call with one of my team members and hopefully we get a chance to work together so what is this extra audience size um change that I'm talking about so I've jumped in an example ad account I've just created a quick examp example campaign I've jumped to the adset level to uh to demonstrate this now I haven't adjusted any of the targeting um here if we scroll down you can see it'll just be set to basically all of the UK um by default and we can see we've got this estimated audience size over here on the right now if I go ahead and hover um over this little eye to to get more information the change that has been made is that instead of giving estimated audience sizes based on how many total Facebook and Instagram users form with within that category that that those targeting options so let's say for example how many total Facebook and Instagram users are there in the UK how many accounts are there meta have tweaked this so that it only includes people that have been served and AD within the last 30 days and you can see they've got the information here right so estimated audience size based on number of factors y y y it's based on on factors such as targeting selections ad placements and how many account Center accounts so Facebook accounts Instagram accounts ET were shown ads on meta apps and services in the past last 30 days now what this does is it filters out those inactive accounts of which there must be hundreds of millions if not billions at this point because um meta has so many users and people obviously come to the platform they leave it it sounds a bit morbid but there must be hundreds of millions of people that have had um Facebook accounts Instagram accounts that are simply no longer with us so these sorts of numbers for all sorts of reasons are changing all the time and they've adjusted as I said not just to include the total number of users but to include just the one that are active and have um been served ads within the last 30 days now in an example like the UK just targeting the whole of the UK that hasn't actually change the audience size all that much you can see that the people who have um who are using Facebook and Instagram are using it they typically don't set up an account and then not use it for years and give up on it they're either using one of those uh those two social platforms fairly regularly so these this audience size hasn't changed that much but we have seen in certain um certain targeting setup UPS the estimated audience size has decreased quite a bit because it's filtering out those inactive accounts so if you've been through this video and you thought okay well my audience is well over 2 million um that's absolutely fine I don't need to make any adjustments go in and check if your estimated audience size has shrunk has changed to reflect that change to only include active accounts that are being served ads because it may well have come down quite a bit I've had a few messages about this and wanted to adjust it so I think it's a good tweak for meta I think it makes it more useful for us advertisers in terms of estimating our audience size and being able to predict and plan and adjust things um but it is just something that you need to be aware of so as we can see from this documentation meta is really pushing broad targeting and that is sometimes the best way to go but it's not always the best way to go there are scenarios where you do want to use it and scenarios where you don't want to use it and I explain those in this video here in that video I walk you through all the pros and cons of of broad targeting otherwise known as open targeting give you scenarios for yes go ahead and give it a go or no you probably want to wait so I strongly recommend if you are interested in testing broad targeting or anything along those lines that you check this out

Channel: Ben Heath

Views: 20,136

Keywords: facebook ads targeting, facebook ads, ben heath, facebook ads ben heath, meta ads, meta ads targeting, instagram ads, instagram ads targeting, facebook targeting, facebook ads audience size, best audience size for facebook ads, facebook ads targeting audience, facebook ads targeting audience size, facebook ads audience changes

Id: NspFPKClu-s

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023