Navigating Meta's Mixed Messages How to start betting on Facebook's Meta'ing.
By Rocco Baldassarre Edited by Bill Schulz
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
March was a big month for Facebook and Instagram advertisers.
Per a statement via CEO, Mark Zuckerberg's, media mouthpieces: "We're removing some Detailed Targeting options because they are either not widely used, they may be redundant with others or too granular, or because they relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as targeting options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion or sexual orientation."
Most advertisers have found themselves with the need to replace some of their most successful audiences. I have had the same issue myself and thought it would be helpful to share the solutions that worked for me as they relate to Facebook's latest evolution.
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Understand potential clients
Working with fewer targeting options requires you to understand what type of potential customers you are working with.
If you are trying to advertise a local or a national business with a wide audience, you could target a broad one and use the conversion API to optimize your traffic toward people that are more likely to convert.
However, if you are advertising a more specialized company, you might end up with a much higher cost per conversion by using a broad audience. Specialized businesses need a more targeted approach within the new limitations of Facebook.
Leverage data to reach qualified users
Facebook has a wide array of targeting options that every burgeoning entrepreneur should familiarize themselves with.
1) Focus on people that have already interacted with your organic and paid content.
Re-engaging with people that have already embraced your brand will be an easier sale than somebody that has never heard of your brand. Social engagement audiences are also very powerful in customizing your messaging depending on how familiar people are with your services with the goal to potentially move them along the sale funnel.
2. Target those whose behavior is similar to the ones that have already engaged with your content.
Facebook offers the opportunity to create different lookalike audiences based on how targeted you want to be. It is usually worth testing a few options and seeing how different lookalike audience sizes work for you
3. Create lookalikes of engaged product viewers.
Similar to what we have seen for people engaging with organic and paid social posts, you can create lookalike audiences to target people who are similar to the ones engaging with your product or service pages. They can also be created for people that purchased, added to cart and initiated checkout.
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Test your creatives
Given that our targeting options have been reduced, we still have the opportunity to test more creatives to see what combinations of texts and images generate more engagement. This is something that many companies do at first, but then, not so much once they find something that works.
As a general rule of thumb: Always have a minimum of 5 ads that you are testing, at any point in time, and have creative collect enough data so your decision-making is always relevant.
Create duplicate campaigns
We have been noticing that campaigns with smaller budgets tend to deliver a better cost per conversion than one campaign with a larger budget. Facebook gets the most out of smaller budget projects, while it experiments aggressively when the budget is larger.
The overall ethos within Zuckerberg corporate is to constantly experiment with bidding and budgeting strategies to find what works best for a company.
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