Understanding Meta Ad Targeting: A Comprehensive Guide
Master Meta ad targeting with insights on setup, Campaign Budget Optimization, and audience optimization to boost ad performance and efficiency.
Discover how Meta's machine learning optimizes Facebook ads using recent conversions, historic data, and industry benchmarks to enhance ad performance.
Behind every Facebook/Meta ad is one of the world's most powerful machine learning systems. Here’s a breakdown of the 3 layers of data that feed Meta’s ML ad optimizations.
PRIMARY SOURCE: Your Recent Conversions
The primary data source is your recent conversion data from your active ad campaigns and tracked event data.
Meta actively tracks up to 28 days of event data, with a focus on the last 7-days for ad attribution.
SECONDARY SOURCE: Your Historic Conversions
Next is your historic data from your past ad campaigns. This considers past performance and increases the total amount of data available to inform optimization.
THIRD SOURCE: Broader Industry Benchmarks
The last data source is the data from other advertisers. This considers past performance across a large number of ad accounts, as well as your peers who are bidding in the same auctions.
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With these data points all taken into consideration, Meta makes micro-optimizations to find better creative variations, reach more of the right people, and deliver impressions to the placements that are most likely to convert (Instagram vs Facebook or Stories vs Reels, etc).
When this system is working optimally, your ads have strong, scalable performance.
Given you have the most control of your recent events and given they have the most weight and influence on optimizations, this is the data you want to focus on maximizing.