Creating Facebook Ads That Work: Interests-Based Targeting vs Non-Interests-Based Targeting
Our Theory
We’ve been running Facebook ads for a while, and wanted to finally find an answer to a hot debate, whether or not it’s more successful to run interests-based targeting on a new campaign or non-interests based targeting. From our experience, we hypothesized that a campaign built on interest-based targeting will generate a 15% greater Add-to-Cart rate than a campaign built on non-interest-based targeting. For anyone looking to beef up their Facebook advertising strategy, here’s what we learned.
Disclaimer: For the purposes of avoiding the disclosure of our client’s identity and sales strategy, we have changed the product names in this study. We will call the company Color Company, and the two products Product Yellow and Product Blue.
Our Data
We ran both of our campaigns for the same amount of time and with the same total budget, to keep things even.
For targeting on our Interest-Based Campaigns, we chose Interests that contained the product name and added Facebook’s top suggestion of related interests/topics.
As you can see, interests-based campaigns generated more efficient average costs per Add-To-Cart.
Reach
It is important to note that the budgets for both the Interests-Based and Non-Interests-Based campaigns were the same for the duration of the experiment. For both products, the difference between the number of people reached in the Interests-Based Campaign and the Non-Interests-Based Campaign was staggering. For Product Yellow, the Interest-Based Campaign reached 13,376 more people than the Non-Interest-Based Campaign. For Product Blue, the Interest-Based Campaign reached 6,837 more people than the Non-Interest-Based Campaign.
These numbers indicate that in order to reach a greater number of people in a short time-frame, it is advisable to study your target audience, and to gather points of interests or demographics that could be used to target similar people via Facebook Advertising. After all, Facebook is highly advanced in their targeting!
ATCs
For Product Yellow, the Add-to-Cart rate for the Interests-Based Campaign was 0.31%, while the Add-to-Cart rate for the Non-Interests-Based Campaign was 0.10%.
For Product Blue, the Add-to-Cart rate for the Interests-Based Campaign was 0.21%, while the Add-to-Cart rate for the Non-Interests-Based Campaign was 0.11%.
From these, it is apparent that the Interests-Based Campaigns have consistently generated stronger Add-to-Cart rates than Non-Interests-Based Campaigns run with the same budget for the same time period.
Cost per ATC
For Product Yellow, the Interest Based Campaign had a 34.3% higher cost per ATC for the Non-Interest Based Campaign (USD $7.44) than for the Interest Based Campaign (USD$4.89). For Product Blue, the Interest Based Campaign had a 32.6% higher cost per ATC for the Non-Interest Based Campaign (USD $12.85) than for the Interest Based Campaign (USD$8.66).
Our Conclusion
Since it’s clear that targeting by specific interests is a better way to get your product off the ground quickly and efficiently, marketers using the Facebook advertising platform should choose interests pertinent to their product. This can help you generate not only higher Add-to-Cart frequencies, but can generate a higher reach and cheaper ATCs as well.
We hope this series helps you create better Facebook advertising. If you want to maximize your Facebook ad efforts, check out our optimization tool, Adchill.
