{"id":67466,"date":"2019-12-04T14:00:57","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T22:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adespresso.com\/?p=67466"},"modified":"2019-12-05T00:52:13","modified_gmt":"2019-12-05T08:52:13","slug":"broad-audiences-vs-lookalikes-which-work-best-for-facebook-advertising-1000-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adespresso.com\/blog\/broad-audiences-vs-lookalikes-which-work-best-for-facebook-advertising-1000-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"Broad Audiences vs. Lookalikes: Which Work Best For Facebook Advertising? ($1,000 Experiment)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ten years ago, the social media advertising landscape looked vastly different than it does today. With rudimentary targeting options, getting your ads in front of an interested audience meant tons of research to find exactly the right person at exactly the right time – all manually.<\/p>\n

However, in recent years the advances of A.I have opened up a wormhole of unlimited potential, allowing you to broadly target entire regions with the A.I doing most of the work….Or has it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In this article, we dive deep into Facebook’s automated ad tactics playbook – Facebook Power5 – and see if human or machine comes out on top.<\/p>\n

Our experiment will answer the burning question on every advertiser’s mind: Which is the best audience for Facebook Ads?
\n<\/strong>The result is mindblowing!<\/p>\n

If we distill Facebook advertising down to just the key elements that we can control, we end up with only four factors:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Campaign type<\/li>\n
  2. Ad creative<\/li>\n
  3. Audience<\/li>\n
  4. Optimization (your goal)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    You can adjust all of them using both Facebook Ads Manager or AdEspresso.<\/p>\n

    This highlights the importance of selecting the right audience, and it\u2019s something we\u2019ve explored in some previous $1,000 experiments. We discovered the best percentage of lookalike to use<\/a>, whether or not to use interest expansion<\/a> and if interests or lookalikes give the best results<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Recently, Facebook has been promoting its Power 5<\/a>, a set of five automated ad tactics designed to improve results while saving you time.<\/p>\n

    One of the Power 5 is account simplification, where instead of having multiple small audiences you consolidate them into a broader audience:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    The experts at Facebook are now regularly advocating for fewer adsets with larger audiences, for example for Dynamic Product Ads they suggest targeting a certain area and demographic but not using lookalikes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Facebook also published a case study with US-based sock company Bombas<\/a> where only two audiences were used for their entire Facebook advertising strategy, including a broad audience.<\/p>\n

    Why Use Broad Audiences?<\/h2>\n

    If we travel back in time to the early days of Facebook advertising, the built-in optimization wasn\u2019t very advanced.<\/p>\n

    This meant that the key to success was to put a lot of effort into creating micro audiences, perhaps layering in several interests or combining interests with lookalikes so that you could show the ad to everyone in the small audience and get good results.<\/p>\n

    A cold audience of prospects might number 10,000 – 100,000.<\/p>\n

    These days, Facebook optimization is a lot better, so instead of showing the ad to everyone in the audience, you can optimize for conversions and Facebook can save you money by only targeting a subset of people in the larger audience.<\/p>\n

    The large audience keeps the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) down and increases the potential to scale as more people can be targeted.<\/p>\n

    Many advertisers have stated the perfect audience size to be around 1-2 million people, and for reference, a 1% lookalike in the US contains 2.1 million people which is a good fit.<\/p>\n

    With a broad audience, no lookalike or interest targeting is used at all, creating an even larger audience and relying totally on Facebook optimizing for conversions to display the ad to just a small subset of that large audience.<\/p>\n

    For instance, a US-based broad audience aged 18 and upwards without any filtering contains 230 million people.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    Can such a large audience really give good results?<\/p>\n

    Let\u2019s find out by putting $1,000 of ad spend into an experiment!<\/p>\n

    Experiment Hypothesis<\/h2>\n

    When setting up this experiment we made four predictions:<\/p>\n