Facebook Ads Reflections After a Year: Is Targeting Still Important? | Overseas Notes

Recently, our team has been reviewing the projects we’ve managed for clients over the past year, mainly analyzing Facebook ad targeting and our media buyers’ insights and summaries. It’s quite hardcore, and we’d like to share some of our thoughts with you:

How Important is Targeting in Ad Settings Nowadays?

If this question was asked three years ago, it might have been seen as a weak argument. But we can no longer ignore the trends, especially based on the data from the client projects we’ve collaborated on over the past year at Overseas Notes. Although many media buyers may be reluctant to admit it, targeting is no longer as important as it used to be.

Last year, I might have said that audience targeting is still important, just not as much as before. But now, we can perhaps be more aggressive in saying that targeting may not be important at all anymore.

Some may criticize that there are still many media buyers sticking to the strategies they’ve used for years, insisting that it’s still effective and necessary, because that’s how I thought a year ago too.

Overview

In the past, we might have always believed that there are many factors that determine the success or failure of our Facebook ad campaigns. But nothing was more important than targeting. Facebook ad targeting was one of the main reasons for the success or failure of ads. We might have created perfect ad creatives, but if the targeting was off, it wouldn’t have a good ROI.

But the situation has changed now. Our ad settings have become less important due to Audience Expansion and the shift in algorithm-based targeting. In most cases, we can provide audience suggestions or settings to the system, but how much impact these settings have on ad reach is still a question.

Changing Deployment Strategies

Now we can start segmenting audiences from the campaign level, and think more about whether our deployment strategy changes are really necessary. Recently, a media buying expert conducted a test using four different ad audience targeting settings:

Advantage+ Audience with audience restrictions
Advantage+ Audience without audience restrictions
Custom audiences with Advantage Custom Audience enabled
Default broad targeting
The conclusion was that the actual reach of the different settings didn’t seem to differ significantly. A few years ago, we could define the exact target audience pool that should see our ads: based on location, age, gender, custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and detailed targeting. Facebook’s ad delivery optimization would then show the ads to the people in that pool who were most likely to convert. But the situation is no longer the same, especially after Facebook introduced features like Advantage Audience Expansion and Advantage+ Audiences. This means the level of control we have over who sees our ads has changed (or decreased).

Here is the section on the ad settings that we can still control, translated into English:

The Ad Settings We Can Absolutely Control

• Age
• Language
• Excluded custom audiences

Got it, here’s the updated section on the ad settings we can still control, with the additional detail on location targeting options:

The Ad Settings We Can Still Control
In most cases, the ad settings we can still control are:

• Location – Facebook actually provides four location targeting options:
• People living in or recently in a location
• People living in a location
• People recently in a location
• People traveling in a location
• Age
• Language
• Excluded custom audiences

The veteran media buyers all know these four location targeting options on Facebook. This level of granular control on location is something we can still leverage in our campaigns.

Here is the updated section translated into English:

The Ad Settings We Can Only Partially Control
In most cases, the ad settings we can still control are:

• Location – Facebook now only provides the “People living in or recently in a location” targeting option. This means we cannot target just the local residents or just travelers, our audience is slightly broader, but the impact is not that significant.

As for the following settings, we are not sure if they actually affect the real ad delivery and impression performance:

• Custom audiences
• Lookalike audiences
• Age maximum
• Gender
• Detailed targeting

We can no longer control the audience as precisely as before, as Facebook’s algorithm optimization and expansion features have significantly reduced our control over the audience. This is why we believe targeting may no longer be as important.