Test Interests and Lookalikes vs. Advantage+ Audience

Do you still use interests and lookalikes? Many advertisers use them as a safe approach because they’ve used it for years. But neither may be all that impactful.

If you still use them, I want you to do this…

Setup

Create a sales campaign.

There are several reasons we’ve chosen this objective for the test. First, optimizing for conversions (and purchases) are the most reliable and tend to be the highest priority. Second, this is also when your inputs likely matter the least because you can’t avoid audience expansion.

Create two ad sets:

1. Original audiences targeting interests or lookalikes
2. Advantage+ Audience without suggestions

Everything about the two ad sets and ads within them should be identical except for the targeting.

The Test

Next, create an A/B Test. Select both of these ad sets to compare.

Generate as much volume of results as possible so that they’re meaningful. This will rely heavily on your budget and how long the test runs. You can run A/B tests for up to a month. Do not let Meta end this test early.

Make sure that the Key Metric that determines the winner is Cost Per Purchase.

What to Look For

Using interests and lookalikes is a strategy that most long-time advertisers use without giving it a second thought. But the truth is that this choice may not make the impact that you think it does — or it once did. When optimizing for conversions, your audience expands anyway.

You may get similar or better results when going completely broad. I’ve already seen that the distribution of my budget to new and remarketing audiences is virtually the same no matter what approach I take. I’m also in the middle of a test just like the one I describe in this post, and the results have been remarkably similar.

I encourage you to challenge your assumptions about what works and what doesn’t at least once per year. Maybe this test will confirm your assumptions. Maybe not.

For more on testing targeting strategies, check out my blog post.