How to run to a broad audience in Meta while maintaining lead quality

You may have read articles or heard one of your reps suggest broad audience targeting in Meta. This topic has been pushed hard, but there should be a big caveat:

If you don’t set up your campaigns (and, more importantly, your conversion events) correctly, you could be hurt by broad targeting.

What is broad targeting in Meta?

When it comes to Meta, going “broad” is essentially open-targeting. Typically, you do this within a specific country. You will not use any interest, demographic, or lookalike targets.

The back-end of a Meta campaign with broad targeting may look something like this.

At first glance, this might not make sense, but I assure you the algorithm knows what its doing. Meta has over 50,000 data points on every single one of its users, and you can use broad targeting to leverage this to your advantage.

Broad targeting and lead optimization

Now if you’re optimizing for leads and using broad targeting in Meta, you don’t want to fire a conversion for everyone who submits a form — you want to be very specific about what triggers your conversion action.

Let’s say you’re a home improvement company with a basic contaçt form. You don’t want to fire conversions for people who are renters – so how do you make sure Meta only considers homeowners?

You’ll want to add a drop-down on your form so people can indicate whether or not they own a house or rent a house. Then you can set up conversions to only fire if someone selects that they own a house. What this will do is show Meta’s algorithm that only homeowners are firing on your conversion event.

Another example is using value-based optimization points for campaigns in industries like insurance. Let’s say you only want to sell life insurance policies that are over a million dollars. When a user inputs their desired policy amount, you will set up your conversions to only fire when a user selects the drop-down option for over a million dollars. This will yield a higher quality lead over time.

Refining conversion criteria can raise cost per lead

One thing to keep in mind when refining and perfecting your Meta conversion criteria is that this could raise your cost per lead. However, it will increase your lead quality, and you could also see a higher close rate, which will make your earnings per lead higher versus optimizing for raw leads.

Don’t be too restrictive

One thing you might want to be careful about is being too restrictive in your conversion criteria. If you create too many filters, it could raise your cost per lead to a point where you are not getting enough conversions firing in the platform. This will restrict the algorithm by not sending enough positive signals so that proper learning can take place.

Broad targeting is the future of Meta

Going broad is the future of advertising on Meta and some of their new features, including Advantage + campaigns will only allow you to target Broad audiences. As algorithms continue to advance and AI becomes a greater part of advertising, we will see other ad platforms eventually take a similar route.