The Myth of the Cheapest Possible Audience

You’ve probably seen an ad where some marketer claims to have the secret recipe for $0.01 clicks. It’s obvious that if you target the entire world and set your bid cap at $0.01, you’ll find thousands of people willing to click.

This is actually a real issue when countries like India or Bangladesh are used as targeting. In these countries, where click farms are a genuine business, workers will click on your ads and “like” your pages just to avoid being flagged as fake accounts.

We saw it firsthand recently: it’s possible to get 200,000 new followers in Bangladesh for $3,000, straight through Facebook’s Ad Manager. The value of that audience is probably negative — meaning it will almost certainly hurt you rather than help you.

When it comes to the cost of your ads: quality beats quantity.

The quality score

Optimizing content and making it more effective is essential for marketers.

Most platforms, including Facebook Ads and Google Ads, factor “Relevance” or a Quality Score into their cost calculations. This factor helps them avoid serving low-quality ads.

In March 2019, Facebook replaced its Relevance Score with what it calls the Ad Relevance Diagnostic. Rather than rating your ad on a scale of 10, the platform now tells you whether your ad falls above or below average. To do this, it factors in three elements: quality, engagement, and conversion.

A good score means a better price

Finding the most relevant audience possible is the main factor to consider.

Since ad buying works like an auction, the more precise your audience, the higher your relevance score will be. If you send the right message to the right audience at the right time, your ad has a much better chance of being optimal and relevant. Why? Because these platforms have nothing to gain from serving poor content to their audiences. When your ad is good and relevant, the platform rewards you with a pat on the back — a good score — and therefore better performance.

What to do with a highly sought-after audience

If you’re one of the 77 Quebec gin brands (as of March 2020) running a Facebook ad targeting gin-and-tonic enthusiasts (20K according to Facebook), you’ll almost certainly be competing against someone else in the auction. As a result, regardless of how “relevant” your message is, your cost will be higher.

If your cost for gin-and-tonic fans is high, would it be better to target other audiences instead? Maybe — but nothing beats a precise, qualified audience. That said, gin-and-tonic fans likely also drink other spirits or cocktails whose search terms are in lower demand.

Trust the algorithm to find your gin-and-tonic fans

While your targeting on Google or Facebook can be surgically precise, these platforms all run powerful algorithms that do a remarkable job. So let those algorithms do their work and optimize themselves. An audience that’s too narrowly targeted could actually get in the way of that work.

One trick is to enter more auctions (by targeting more people), using a broader audience than the 20K we started with. After all, not every gin-and-tonic drinker shows up every single day. They might just be hiding somewhere else.

So, in short: aim for a really, really good targeting — just not too good 😉