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Over the past few years, marketers have largely accepted that broad targeting works on Meta platforms. They’ve also accepted that interest targeting and lookalikes matter less than before. Which means the audience building tactics that performance marketers have spent years perfecting matter less as Meta’s algorithms improve. Where does this leave us?
This leaves us with a problem: many marketers have learned the wrong lesson from this development. Broad targeting doesn’t work because targeting no longer matters. Broad targeting works because Meta’s algorithm is so good at identifying future customers that it often knows more about who is likely to buy than the advertiser.
It evaluates many more signals and behavioral patterns than advertisers have access to. We just need to tell Meta what we’re interested in. For most advertisers, it’s about sales.
Applying the same thinking to other types of campaigns within Meta – and increasingly across other ad platforms – can waste millions of dollars. In conversion campaigns, the optimization signal does the heavy lifting. Let’s take a closer look at what I mean.
Signal Optimization is the New Targeting
For years we’ve been saying, “Creative is the new targeting.” I still believe this to be true. Good creative naturally attracts the right audience and turns off the wrong audience. But a second change gets far less attention than it should.
The conversion event you choose increasingly determines who Meta finds, how it spends your money, and ultimately the business results you generate. In many cases, the signal you optimize for matters more than the audience metrics themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than in traffic campaigns.
The broad targeting lessons that work so well in conversion campaigns often fail spectacularly in traffic campaigns because the signal Meta receives is fundamentally different. When you optimize for purchases in a conversion campaign, you’re effectively telling Meta: “Find me more people who look like the people who buy my products.”
Each purchase improves the model. Each conversion teaches the algorithm something about the characteristics of a future customer. In this environment, broad targeting makes perfect sense because the optimization signal does most of the work.
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Why traffic campaigns are different from conversion campaigns
Traffic campaigns differ from conversion campaigns on a fundamental level. When you optimize for traffic, you’re no longer telling Meta to find future customers. You tell Meta to find people who click on ads. These two groups are not the same.
Clicks are plentiful and Meta can generate them all day long. The challenge is not finding clicks. The challenge is finding clicks that ultimately lead to business results. When you optimize traffic with broad targeting, you essentially remove the two mechanisms that typically improve quality: audience constraints and strong optimization signals.
If you’ve ever wondered if this is happening in your own account, there’s an easy way to check. Get audience and placement breakdowns for your traffic campaigns and compare them to your conversion campaigns. Ask yourself:
- What proportion of deliveries are aimed at older demographic groups?
- How much broadcast is sent to Audience Network?
- How many “Amen” or “Praise Jesus” comments appear on your ads?
- What is the difference between distribution and shopping-optimized campaigns?
I’ve seen countless examples where traffic campaigns are considerably older than shopping campaigns. Has the ideal customer suddenly aged 30 years? Probably not. More likely, Meta found a segment of users who frequently click on ads: our parents and grandparents.
The same thing often happens with Audience Network, where traffic campaigns drive a disproportionate amount of spend toward placements that generate low-cost clicks but very little downstream value. If Audience Network is still enabled in your traffic campaigns, I would start by fixing this issue.
You get what you optimize for
Anthony Bourdain we talked about ordering a well-done steak. His point: When you order a well-done steak, you’re signaling to the restaurant that you don’t particularly care about the quality of the cut itself. At this point you are mainly evaluating whether you received a steak. The restaurant knows this and optimizes accordingly.
Traffic campaigns often work the same way. When you tell Meta that all you care about is traffic, you’re signaling that you don’t particularly care where that traffic comes from. You don’t measure customer quality, purchases, or incrementality. You evaluate whether clicks appear in reports. Meta knows it too.
Just like a steakhouse happy to monetize the worst cuts of steak, Meta will happily monetize clicks that never convert. It doesn’t do anything wrong. It simply optimizes towards the goal you gave it.
The incrementality trap
Traffic campaigns become especially risky when brands start talking about incrementality. Most discussions about growth ultimately come to the same conclusion: we need to reach more people who don’t already buy from us. This is a reasonable goal. The mistake is to assume that the path to additional clients simply generates more traffic.
More traffic does not automatically create more incremental sales. More traffic does not automatically create more additional customers. Remember, your team’s goal is not to maximize visits. The goal is to maximize the number of people who buy who otherwise would not.
While this often means reaching beyond the audience Meta thinks it will immediately convert, too many brands miss the right next step. The solution is usually not a traffic campaign, much less a broadly targeted traffic campaign. A better approach often combines a conversion campaign with a different signal:
- Instead of optimizing traffic, can you optimize the PDP view?
- Instead of optimizing for a click, can you optimize for an engagement event on a collection page?
This same strategy applies even in traditional conversion campaigns, because optimizing for purchases does not mean that Meta will find additional purchases. This is what makes incremental allocation so interesting.
If you get iROAS less than ideal When testing the incrementality of your conversion campaigns, consider optimizing for purchases from new customers, high-LTV customers, or a specific category that matters most to the business instead of all generic purchases.
Each step gives Meta more information about what success really looks like. Each step provides a stronger signal. As the signal improves, the need for prescriptive targeting diminishes.
The richer the signal, the less targeting you need
This is the heuristic I’m increasingly using when evaluating paid digital strategies: the richer the signal, the less targeting you need. The weaker the signal, the more targeting you need.
Most marketers understand the first half of this equation because they have found that broad targeting performs better in conversion campaigns. Far fewer people understand the second half, which is why so many traffic campaigns continue to generate millions of clicks while creating surprisingly little business impact.
But the broader lesson extends well beyond traffic promotion campaigns.
The conversion event you choose increasingly determines who the algorithm finds, how it allocates spend, and ultimately the business results it generates. Whether it’s a purchase, a new customer, a high LTV customer, a PDP view, a specific product category, or any other significant business outcome, the signal itself is one of the most important strategic decisions marketers make.
The best advertisers no longer only think about audiences and creation. They think deeply about the signals they are sending to the algorithm and whether those signals match the outcomes they are trying to create.
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