Ad targeting
What is ad targeting?
Ad targeting is the set of rules that decide who sees a campaign: location, age, interests, behaviour on your site, or a list of customers you already have. On Meta and Google you draw the boundary and the system looks inside it for the people most likely to act. Narrow is not automatically better — a small audience costs more per impression and runs out faster.
Example
A furniture maker sells sofas and delivers within about 150 km. First attempt: the whole country, ages 25 to 65, interest “furniture”. On €600 the campaign brings 120 enquiries, but 40 of them are outside the delivery area — €200 spent on conversations that cannot end in a sale. Cost per usable enquiry: 600 / 80 = €7.50.
Second attempt: a radius around the three towns the vans already cover, plus a separate ad for people who viewed a product page in the last 30 days. The same €600 brings 95 enquiries, 88 of them deliverable, at €6.82 each. Fewer enquiries, more sales, and a sales team that stops apologising for geography.
Why it matters for a business
Targeting decides how much of the budget reaches people who could buy at all. It is also where the platforms have changed most. In the EU an ad may not be targeted using special categories of personal data — health, religion, ethnicity, political views, sexual orientation — and ads shown to users the platform knows to be minors may not be based on profiling. Both rules come from the Digital Services Act. Platforms add their own restrictions for sensitive subjects such as credit, employment and politics, where some options are switched off entirely.
The other shift is automation. Meta and Google now expect a boundary and a signal rather than a hand-built list: give the system a clear conversion event, and enough of them to learn from, and it finds buyers inside the boundary faster than a stack of interests does.
What to ask
- How large is this audience, and how many days does it last at this budget before frequency climbs?
- How much of the budget reaches people who cannot buy — outside delivery, outside the language, outside the age?
- Does the campaign have enough conversions for the system to learn? Below roughly 50 a week per ad set, learning is slow.
- Where does the targeting data come from, and do we have a lawful basis for it?
- Which audience do we deliberately exclude — current customers, recent buyers, job applicants?
Who sees the ad, and why, is a decision we make with you in social media management.