Best Facebook Ads Targeting Strategy for 2025

in this video I'm going to show you three very different Facebook ad targeting strategies that use different Facebook ad campaign types now I've spent more than $100 million on these three targeting strategies and know exactly which ones you should use and when let's get into it so before you get into the specific targeting options that you might want to select within your Facebook ad campaigns you first need to decide on which Facebook ad campaign type you going to use because once you select the type of campaign that's going to have a big impact on what

targeting options are even available to you as you go through the campaign creation process and there's different ends of the spectrum there's campaign types that allow you to have a lot of input and control as a Facebook Advertiser and others where you basically have none and it's all up to Meta Meta is going to work out your targeting for you okay so to walk you through these options I'm in an example uh Facebook ad account here the first one I'm going to talk about are Advantage Plus shopping campaigns and quickly show you what that looks

like from a targeting standpoint so I'm just going to go ahead and click on this green create button going to go down to sales click continue and then you can see we've got two options we've got manual sales campaigns and then we've got Advantage Plus shopping campaign I'll talk about manual sales campaigns later on if we select Advantage Plus shopping campaign I click continue here now the thing you'll notice about this is that there's only two levels to this campaign there's instead of having traditional three levels of campaign adset ad they've got two levels because

the campaign and adset levels are combined and then this one here is for ad creation right but if we go back to this campaign and adset level the equivalent of so if we scroll down I'm not going to worry about this other stuff I'm just going to get down to the targeting section which is here basically the only input that you can have over the targeting with an Advantage Plus shopping campaign is audience location this section here so you can see it's defaulted the UK but I could change that I could add other countries I

could get more um specific all that sort of thing right and you can see that meta here is encouraging us to be broad with our targeting even so when it comes to an advanced FL shopping campaign you also have this section here but this is very much for reporting this is not for targeting so you can enter in um who your engaged audience is who your existing customers are and that's going to allow meta to report on how much of your budget is spent on cold audience versus people who have engaged with your business versus

people who' have already bought from you previously but it doesn't really affect targeting uh very much this is it its audience location now if you're new to Facebook and Instagram advertising you might be thinking why on Earth would you not want to have more targeting input why on Earth would you not want to say um I think you should Target these people because they're likely to be interested in my products and services meta how do you even know what my products and services are and who's going to be interested in them how are you going

to be able to work out who to Target what we've seen over the years is that meta has become much much more sophisticated at working out who to put your ads in front of who are the best possible prospects and they know because they have tons of data on their users from their interactions both on platform and off platform uh what they're interested in what they purchase what they talk about etc etc um and also they use realtime feedback loops when they're running your ads so they'll test with a setup like this where meta is

going to work it out for you they'll put ads in front of lots of different people and they'll see who engages with them and who then goes on to convert most of the time going to be make a purchase which is what you're going to optimize for most of the time with the Advantage Plus shopping campaign and meta will then go aha okay we can see more engagement from people this age who are interested in this who live here let's put more ads in front of people just like them and those feedback loops are now

very fast meta's algorithm for working this out their AI for putting this in place is very sophisticated and we do typically see that meta does a good job of working out who to advertise to now might thinking okay but why are there so few targeting options in here and really what meta is trying to do with Advantage Plus shopping campaigns is they're trying to eliminate Advertiser error so they're basically saying we don't want you as the advertiser coming in adding in lots of targeting criteria reducing the size of your audience right down because you're likely

to get worse results that means you're going to miss out on a lot of potential customers so they're just going you know what hands off will'll manage it for you there's also to some extent a push to protect user privacy so if advertisers aren't selecting targeting options but sort of Mets doing that behind the scenes then then um they're less likely to come under external pressure because one of the things that people often find a bit creepy about online advertising in general if they're not familiar with it is the ability to Target People based on

their behaviors online or their interests and things like that and this sort of puts that behind um the system as it were behind a wall where us as advertisers aren't doing it it's being done um automatically so there is is that motivation um as well so as matters become more and more sophisticated we've used Advantage Plus shopping campaigns more and more I'll talk about when you want to use which one and and when once we've once we've run through um the options but whilst to beginners this might sound crazy it is often a really good

way to go now in the same way that you have Advantage Plus shopping camp campaigns and then manual sales campaigns there is a tailored campaign version for lead campaigns so you can do manual lead campaigns or you could do tailored lead campaigns um and that does have restricted targeting criteria although it is more you know the diff there is a difference between Advantage FL shopping and a tailored leads campaign in terms of what you can do targeting wise but I just wanted to quickly mention it because if you're thinking well okay this only applies to

sales campaigns right there is a Lead version as well that has a more restricted targeting setup we'll get back to the video in a second before we do I just want to quickly let you know about my mentorship program now with my mentorship program me and my team Mentor people daily to help them get the best possible Facebook ad results we've actually had some amazing results recently from some of our mentees we'll pop them up on screen right now in fact 82% of people that join my mentorship program see a notable Improvement in their Facebook

ads return on adspend within just 30 days of joining and that's a stat that I'm really proud of there is a link in the video description below you can click on that come through to a page on our website and book in a free no obligation call with one of my team members to find out more about it and see if it would be a really good fit for you hopefully we get a chance to work together okay so the next campaign type that then impacts the targeting options that you have um that I want

to go through is a manual campaign in this case I'm going use a manual sales campaign that then uses Advantage Plus audience targeting not to be confused with this Advantage Plus shopping campaign I know because they both contain the phrase Advantage Plus that can make things confusing and this is something that advertisers get confused on all the time on my mhip calls this is something that comes up all the time which one of these two are you actually using people think they're the same thing they are most definitely not so I'm going to show you

the difference now so that you understand so I just go ahead and close that down that's an Advantage Plus shopping campaign if I go ahead and create a new campaign let's go ahead and select sales again uh click continue and this time we're going to go with a manual sales campaign so if I click continue here we've got the three levels again right we've got The Campaign level the adset level and the ad we know that targeting is set at the adset level so that's what we're going to skip through to and not going to

worry about anything else within this adset level instead I'm going to come down to the targeting section okay so the default in most Facebook ad accounts not all but most Facebook ad accounts now is when you create a manual campaign this going to apply to manual sales campaigns just like manual lead campaigns is to have this setup where you have Advantage Plus audience targeting you can see that down here and what you get with Advantage Plus audience targeting is a combination between this audience control set ction and then Advantage Plus audience so the difference between

the two is that anything that occurs that you input within audience controls are hard targeting criteria is in meta follow these as rules I only want to Target people that meet this criteria whereas anything you enter as Advantage Plus audience targeting down here is a suggestion you can see it literally says audience suggestion down here so in the audience controls part we have things like location just like with the Advantage Plus campaign it's like look I only want to advertise in these locations if I'm a local business is only around here uh maybe I only

want to advertise in one country maybe I want to advertise in specific countries but meta don't sort of violate that targeting criteria just stick um to that place there are some other options as well if I click see options you can set a minimum age only goes up to 25 but there are all sorts of products and services that you can only advertise to people over a certain age and that's going to vary between country rights so that might be really important of okay I have to advertise legally to only people over the age of

21 um for this particular product you can exclude custom audiences you can specifically exclude warm audiences um let's say you're running a new customer offer that you don't really want your existing customers to see that would be a good use case and then you can be specific around languages okay so those are the options you've got in audience controls then we come down to the Advantage Plus audience section and these are suggestions so you can enter in things like age ranges uh gender targeting and then detail targeting so for example our um if we were

running ads for our own stuff to called audiences we might add in something like social media marketing people who are interested in social media marketing right so I can go ahead I don't want job titles I want don't want employers I want that as an interest another thing to just watch out for on targeting so I might have something like this but all these criteria are suggestions so even if I set an age range of I don't know 25 to let's say 55 if meta believes there is someone outside of that age range younger or

older who may well be perfect for what we're advertising here and likely to convert they will still put ads in front of them likewise if you select uh along gender lines if you say look I want to go only advertise only to men if meta feels like there are some women that might really convert or vice versa then they would then they will put ads in front of them the same applies detail targeting and you can also with advis plus audience add in custom audience um sections so this could be warm audiences this could be

look look audiences and if you add a warm audience in here let's say website visitors as an example okay so let's go ahead and add in website visitors uh website visitors 180 days and let me there's loads of custom a in there cuz this is an example ad account um so let's say we D website visitors 180 days well yes meta can Target those people but it can also go outside of that um as well and target people who haven't visited your website in 180 days again if the system believes that there are good prospects

out there that are likely to convert so these things are all suggestions and this is kind of a clever hybrid between just fully trust ing Advantage Plus shopping campaigns where you have no control but also going the other end and not giving method the flexibility and saying I only want to Target these people with Advantage Plus audience targeting in manual campaigns you kind of get to benefit from both uh worlds you get to say look meta here's some direction here are some warm audiences of mine um here's some interest targeting options that I think apply

why don't you start there but then you have the flexibility to learn and and Target other people um from there after that then the Third campaign type I want to talk about is manual campaigns just like this one so manual sales campaign manual leads campaign but instead of using Advantage Plus audience targeting where you have this split I just demonstrated between audience controls and Advantage Plus audience instead what you do is you come down here and you switch to original audience options now meta is going to recommend you don't do that they're going to say

you're likely to get worse results up to 33% lower cost per result if you use Advantage Plus audience but you can override and go ahead and say no no I want to use original audiences now once you do that you will see that when it comes to your targeting option you've obviously got the warnings I just talked about but your targeting setup is basically what it used to be before meta introduced Advantage Plus shopping campaigns and before they introduced Advantage Plus audience right so here you're entering things like custom audiences locations age ranges gender uh

detailed targeting options and these can act as hard constraints as in don't mattera go outside these these aren't suggestions anymore these are I only want to Target these people now for us to properly work as in literally just target the people within your targeting criteria you do need to deselect any targeting expansion options which are turned on by default so for example this one here Advantage custom audience is saying you can reach people beyond my website visitors so you would want to deselect that again meth is going to tell you not to recommend you uh

you don't do that and then depending on what other targeting inputs you've selected um you might have other targeting expansion we can see we've got Advantage Detail targeting here now in not in all ad accounts I should say can you actually even turn these off anymore like in some ad account accounts you can't turn off Advantage custom audience or uh Advantage Detail targeting um that's going to vary ad account to ad account some ad accounts don't have original audiences this whole setup as an option anymore but this is the option that gives you as the

advertiser the most control if you wanted to be really specific and say no I only want to advertise to these people now I'll talk about which one you should use and when in a minute but before I do that I want to make a really really important point and that's that the data we receive by default in our Facebook and Instagram ad accounts is nowhere near as accurate as it used to be but in order to get the best out of your Facebook campaigns no matter which campaign type you choose no matter which targeting option

you choose you have to have accurate data without that you can't optimize the campaigns and meta can't optimize the campaigns and we've seen especially with campaign types like Advantage Plus shopping campaigns and things like that where meta has more control that is absolutely crucial now the solution to that lowquality data by default is hyros hyos is the best tracking and attribution software for Facebook and Instagram ads it's a software that all the big players including myself use I use it to track the results I generate from my own ad I also use it for all

my organic content as well which is really useful so someone comes through and books a call for our done for you services for example I can see exactly where they came from with a lot of accuracy and that allows me to make decisions in my business which is really really helpful and let me quickly show you how important this is so I'm in my hos dashboard um I've isolated one of our meta ad campaigns and I created a report for it so we can see the data and you can take a look at this so

this campaign spent just under £2,000 generated £15,000 in Revenue but here's the really important bit reported versus revenue and in this column we can see £12,000 now what that means is that out of the £15,000 that this campaign has actually generated Hy Ros has been able to report on the full 15,000 12 £12,000 of which meta was not originally able to see so if we're just looking within our meta ad account not using hos we would have seen that £ 3,000 of revenue is generated from this campaign and that is not true at all that

is a much much lower roas number than the actual1 15,000 of Revenue that was generated for a number of years now meta's ad tracking capabilities have not been as accurate as they once were because all sorts of privacy regulations to come into effect and it's only heading that way it's only becoming more and more difficult to get accurate data and and track our results as we need to be able to do this is a relatively extreme case and the reason why is because meta has a 7day maximum attribution window and this is an ad campaign

that's retargeting for one of our services that people usually take a lot longer than 7 days to make a decision on so someone clicks on an ad they often won't convert within 7 Days meta simply not able to see that data and that's where hyos comes in the important thing is that you need accurate data and hyos takes care of that so if you want to get better results from your Facebook ads without actually having to touch your ads go ahead and sign up to hos there is a link in the video description so which

one of these three campaign types should you be using so more often than not now we are going to use Advantage Plus shopping campaigns for our clients that's typically what we are going to use and we've been transitioning that way for some time because through enormous amounts of testing we found that more often than not not always but more often than not that is going to produce the best results for our clients but what I should say is that most of the time when we start working with a client they've already running Facebook and Instagram

ads for a while they've already proven that the platform can work for them can generate leads generate um sales what that means is that their ad account has data in it and we have found and it kind of makes sense logically that Advantage Plus shopping campaigns perform better when that ad account has conversion data because of course that's how meta is going to work out who to put ads in front of and all the other optimization points like how often to put ads in front of them and that sort of thing right so the more

sales that you actually have in a in an ad account the more likely and Advantage Plus shopping campaign is going to perform well and that is the scenario with a lot of the clients that that work with us they've already been running um that before but if you're not in that scenario and you are a beginner or you've got a relatively new ad account that doesn't have a lot of conversion data then I do like that middle option that hybrid option where you're using Advantage Plus audience you're using a manual either sales or leads campaign

it can work for either and then you're using that Advantage Plus audience targeting option to give meta some direction some targeting suggestions some initial idea so that meta's not testing from just you know the pool of humanity they are actually sort of uh targeted initially but it also gives meta that flexibility to work out who to Target um you're not going to make big mistakes making your audience far too small and being too restrictive and preventing your your ad campaigns from reaching a lot of potentially good leads a lot of potentially good prospects that might

purchase and become customers and all that sort of thing okay so for me it's it's a nice hybrid I would not recommend that you use original audiences and then deselect all the targeting expansion options like I discussed unless you have a very specific reason to do so it's very easy to do that and mess things up and if I just jump back to the ad account I can show you exactly what I'm talking about so within this original audience's um setup I've got a custom audience in here website 180 days I've also narrowed down by

age range a bit and I've narrowed down by um interest and I'm only targeting the UK and because this is an example ad account it doesn't have the pixel set up on like my website it's on an example website because demonstration purposes we can see that the estimated daily results here reach less than 10 basically this campaign won't run it won't put ads in front of people why because I've gone in and messed up the targeting setup here I've been too specific I've got custom audiences in alongside other Target options like um interest and things

like that not something you want to do with original audiences absolutely fine with Advantage Plus audience because with that setup meta has the flexibility to go beyond those people so they'll start with your website visitors they'll start with people interested in social media marketing but also go and advertise to others if um they think that's going to get you good results and is appropriate but not with this setup so it's very easy with a original audiences to mess things up and that's why meta is really moving away from it and makes it harder to find

and they don't recommend when you switch to it you saw there are all sorts of no don't do this this is not going to get you um the best results however there are some specific scenarios where original audiences uh might be the right option to go with so if you wanted to retarget people and be very very specific that you're only reaching a specific audience and not going beyond that I've talked about that being an advantage for most businesses but for some that's not great let's say you wanted to hit people at a certain stage

of your sales funnel you've got a three-step sales funnel and you want to advertise only to people that have already gone through through step one but not yet gone through step two and you don't want to advertise people that have already gone through step two so you just after that slice of your sales funnel and you want to make sure that they see ads that get them to the next level then that might be a really good way to go a specific warm audience only offer might be something that's not available to new customers well

again you might want to get really specific and um and only and only advertise those people and original audiences with all the targeting expansion options turned off uh might be the way to go there okay so there are some specific use cases but that would not be the default for a lot of businesses and you can make mistakes with it so I think uh Advantage Plus shopping campaigns or Advantage Plus audience manual campaigns I know the terminology is confusing uh hopefully you now understand are going to be the way to go for most businesses and

what I would say around which one to go with those two is that the more conversion data you get the more likely Advantage Plus shopping is going to work really well for you the less you have perhaps lean more towards manual campaigns and advant AG plus audience that will obviously change over time so reassess that don't just think okay I'm Advantage Plus audience with manual campaigns and then not reassess uh you know a few months down the line when you've got more conversion data and if you haven't already absolutely test both of those because we

still find even in ad accounts with a lot of conversion data that sometimes manual campaigns with Advantage Plus audience produces better results and vice versa ad accounts with not a lot of conversion data doing really well with Advantage Plus shopping campaign so really really important to test both of those very quick and easy to replicate and use a different style you can use the same ad creative and and run a shortterm test to see which performs um best for your business and always be led by the data and be willing to to adjust right the

way I think meta is going to go is more towards the Advantage Plus um shopping campaigns where meta has more control over targeting and us as advertisers need to focus on other things for competitive Advantage like creative offers things I talk about all the time time but um but yeah that is just something to be aware of in terms of the thought process of which one should you use run it through those filters test and then go with what you see as best but reassess that maybe run that test every 6 months or so as

your ad account matures and as the platform gets more sophisticated a generated conversions so you now know which Facebook ad targeting strategy you should use and if you want to go one step further and work out the specific targeting options that would produce the best results for your Facebook and Instagram ads go ahead and watch this video in it I show you everything you need to know targeting Wise from a a targeting creation and setup standpoint right so how to create custom audiences to retarget how to create lookalike audiences um the detailed targeting options all

that sort of stuff so if you haven't already go ahead and check this out