Your Targeting Methods Are Outdated: Here's the Updates

Do you know what the most crucial element in ads is? Creative? Copy? No doubt, they are essential. However, the most vital aspect is the process before the ad goes live—one significant step, i.e., targeting. Think about it: before you publish an ad, you need to specify the budget, objectives, and target audience broadly. The other two—budget and objectives—are more straightforward. But targeting is where the magic happens. All the ad experts are always concerned about the changes in the targeting methods. And that’s why the old way of targeting is irrelevant in 2024. What I’ll discuss in this newsletter is the changes you and your institute need to be aware of.

AI HAS ENTERED THE TARGETING SECTION. You probably have been bombarded with the news of the integration of artificial intelligence into a million different things. And such is the case with ad targeting, too. Meta has very recently introduced Advantage+ Targeting, which uses the capabilities of this fabricated innovative intelligence to build upon your already-existing targeting data and researches further to create data for a bigger audience and target them to gather more leads. What this means is that if you can fine-tune your targeting to the best, Meta will add to your expertise and get you more leads. You should be using this for almost all of your campaigns, except for the remarketing ones, where you have a particular audience to target. Meta’s Advantage is one of the examples of AI being integrated into targeting. There are numerous other ways that AI impacts targeting, and you must always be looking out for it.

IOS-14 CHANGED THE WAY TARGETING WORKED. This is an old update that changed the way targeting worked. However, it’s an important update that needs to be noted. Conversion tracking was way simpler before the update. Previously, you could track the user at every marketing step and retarget them with the audience created with the specific device tracking IDs. But, with the new update, it’s only when the compulsory cookie consent form is “allowed.” This needs you to brainstorm and target very particularly to reach out to students that are appropriate for conversions. The way out is broad targeting, which brings me to…

BROAD TARGETING IS THE THING. As I discussed, the IOS-14 update changed how we target, and its solution lies in broad targeting. Look, broad targeting is blowing in 2024. This is evident with the numbers it accrues to the institutions—it has a 49% higher ROAS. Now that we don’t have much information about the student because of the IOS-14 update, it’s better to target a broad spectrum rather than using something like the lookalike audience. Another benefit of using the audience comes with tools like Meta’s Advantage+ Targeting. Advantage+ plays its game when you target on a broad spectrum, Advantage+ plays its game, and you would be in a way better position than Segmented targeting.

In this whole targeting theorem, what I wanted to say is that targeting on ad platforms has changed, and you need to change with it, too. You must constantly be updated if you expect fruitful results from your institute’s ad campaigns. An easy way to do that would be to subscribe to the newsletter!