I love the idea of paid social, but the reality is that Meta's targeting is becoming a black box. Last week I burned $300 on a campaign where I set precise targeting - specific age range, only women, just three cities. Woke up to 850 landing page clicks. Excited? Nope. Zero conversions. Not a single one. Then I checked the demographics breakdown: 80% men, much older than my target, and spread across completely different cities. What is the point of even defining an audience if the algorithm just ignores it?
A colleague mentioned that this is likely the work of Advantage+ - Meta's so-called 'optimisation' that overrides manual targeting. And you can't even turn it off properly. There's a toggle buried in the ad set that says 'further limit reach', and supposedly choosing the third option restricts delivery to your defined audience, but even then you'll get outliers. Plus, narrow targeting drives up CPC significantly - we're talking tens of dollars per click.
The bigger picture: Meta is phasing out manual targeting altogether. The platform now relies on creative to define the persona, not the settings. So if your creative doesn't naturally filter for the right audience, the algorithm will serve it to whoever it thinks is most likely to engage - which, for my landing page, turned out to be men in other cities. It's a fundamental shift from targeting towards AI-driven distribution, and it's making small budgets even harder to justify.
If you're running local, niche campaigns, the platform is actively working against you. The only real fix is to either increase your budget to compensate for the inefficiency or redesign your creative to speak directly to the desired demographic - but that's a whole other rabbit hole. For now, I'm testing the 'further limit reach' option, but I'm not holding my breath.
