Sometimes you don’t have to target at all (aka– is Facebook putting folks like us out of a job?)
You’ve heard of the benefits of micro-targeting, to go all the way down to just one person.
That requires a lot of work.
Building lots of ads to test combinations of demographics, precise interests, audiences, partner targets, and so forth is cumbersome.
But Facebook has gotten a lot smarter.
You may have noticed that optimized CPM bidding automatically chases your objective by choosing the right sub-audiences and bidding appropriately.
But check this out:
Here one advertiser is targeting 308 million people for his Facebook ads product.
He’s not targeting just people who like Facebook marketing, a friend of fans, lookalikes, corporate marketers, people who attend social media conferences, employees of Facebook, or whatever.
Just anyone in these countries who is not a fan.
And he’s getting fans at 9 cents each with an ad CTR of 2.3% across newsfeed and right-hand side placements.
Even more, he got 163 fans out of 189 clicks– an 86% click-to-fan conversion rate.
This is proof that Facebook is doing most of the work here.
Do you think this means that micro-targeting isn’t necessary anymore, that Big Brother has so much more data and sophistication that we’re better off trusting him?
Is this Facebook deciding that it’s easier to just do the optimization for advertisers, rather than teach them?
We’ve done a number of tests where giant audiences often outperform micro-targeted audiences when it comes to CTR, CPC, and CPA.
Optimized CPM against large audiences is working effectively against objectives of all types.
What have you seen?
