The Art of Online Business

The Right Audience Size for Facebook and Instagram Ads—And What to Test First

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie • Episode 949

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Let's break down the best audience size to aim for when running Facebook and Instagram ads—and how to start testing with a lookalike of your email list once it’s big enough. 

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If your list is still small, no problem! I show you how to use Detailed Targeting by stacking interests and income filters to hit that sweet spot. I also explain why it’s so important to give your ads a few days to learn—because lead costs usually drop as the algorithm figures things out. 

Remember, staying consistent matters… kind of like a toddler who keeps trying until they finally walk. If you want ad campaigns that bring in quality leads without wasting time or money, this is for you.




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Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:

Speaker 1:

So what is the right audience size for you to target on Facebook and Instagram ads? Which audience of all of them should you probably start off testing first, and if you don't qualify for that audience the one that I go to to test first in my clients' accounts then what might you be able to do instead? That's what this episode is about. You want 1.2 to 3 million in audience size, because that is a big enough audience in my experience, which is just five-ish years of managing I don't know around $4 million, almost $4 million, of ad spend for clients in meta and Facebook and Instagram ads Hi, I'm Quwejo, by the way. That's enough audience for the algorithm to do its thing.

Speaker 1:

Now, what do I mean by algorithm? Do its thing. Think of this like a two-person Latin dance. I live here in Mexico. I have lived here in Mexico since 2020, when I got stuck outside of my 12-year home in China. That was fun, not fun Lots of crying, lots of praying. But in bachata and salsa, I'm learning bachata right now. It's a cool partner dance, right, and you have to give and you have to take. I'm the guy, I'm usually the leader, and the lady who's following me looks for my cues and I have to make sure, as a leader, not to be overbearing and to let her shine Well.

Speaker 1:

When you're running your Facebook and Instagram ads, it's like the same thing. You have your ads management tricks. Hopefully you're learning more and more tricks that can get you high quality leads at low lead costs. Ie reading the signs of what's happening and if things are heading south, you can pull out your trick and change up the ads. Right. So you're doing your ads management, but what a lot of folks look over is the algorithm needs to do its thing and you need to give it time to do its thing. I usually give it three days when I first launch ads to do its thing. And what is doing its thing? Its thing is looking inside of the audience that you're targeting for the right kind of people to opt in. It's what you know. Facebook meta, if you will, collects like 52,000 data points on every user, right? So when you put an ad to work, as in when you publish a new ad, the algorithm looks at what your ad copy is. You know it sees your visuals, it crawls the website that you're sending the ad traffic to, but then it also looks at the data that it's collected about you, your business, if you will, in your pixel that you hopefully have already had installed on your website and connected to your various softwares and connected to your various softwares. And then it goes and looks at the folks in your audience and begins its work of testing your ad out and seeing who responds the best and taking note if algorithms can even take notes on what kind of person would be the best person to opt in for your ad.

Speaker 1:

Right, this takes a bit. Usually three days could be four days, and during that time, that's why you'll usually see lead costs on day one start off higher than you had hoped and then on day two they should trend downward and on day three they should further trend downward. That's your dance partner doing its thing. You're letting it shine, and then you know, on day four and five, you can start to. Then you know, on day four and five, you can start to tweak. You know, turn off low performing ads, add in new ad creative, add in new ad copy, whatever you'd like. Well, not whatever you'd like.

Speaker 1:

There is a science to ads management, and so the next thing is what audience should you start out testing? Disclaimer I am just a Facebook and Instagram ads manager. I am not your Facebook and Instagram ads manager. Nothing I say will always work for you, and you need to test what I'm saying in your account. That's what we do as ad managers. We test a bunch of different things, but you always should understand that with Facebook and Instagram ads, you are taking a risk. Nothing is guaranteed. In fact, you are guaranteed to lose money because that's part of testing through what doesn't work so that you can find what does work.

Speaker 1:

All that being said, when I start up a client account, the favorite audience I like to use is called a lookalike audience of their email list. Now, lookalike audience is a cold audience. Cold and warm just means that warm people know you already or have entered your business ecosphere, interacted with your social media accounts, seen your videos, been to your website or even are already on your email list, whereas cold means they've done none of those things. And so I'll take a client's email list and upload it to Meta and say hey, meta, build me a big old cold audience. Ie look at the folks on this email list and then give me, you know, a million and a half to three million more people who share very similar attributes to the folks said, kind of on purpose, that your email list should be at least 600 people large before you upload it to Meta.

Speaker 1:

Why? Because it's not that you're giving the. It's not that Meta's taking the email accounts and building a lookalike audience off of all of those email accounts. What Meta is actually doing is matching the names and emails from that email list to actual Facebook and Instagram user accounts that it already has and knows about. Right, because then it can use all the data points it collects on those Facebook and Instagram user accounts in order to build a lookalike audience. But the thing is is it's never like upload 600 emails and you get 100% match, as in meta matches up those 600 emails with 600 meta accounts. Nope, it's usually like I don't know 40 to 60%. So imagine uploading like I got my calculator here to figure this out really quick. But imagine uploading 600 emails and then you only actually Meta only actually can build an audience based off of 240 of those emails.

Speaker 1:

And so what we say in ads manager world is you want your email list to be about 600 before you do this, and, of course, the larger the email list, the better. And now I'm going to tell you what to do if you do not yet have an email list of 600. Or maybe you have an email list that you use for a previous business and you're pretty sure that your current email list is not the right kind of email list that you want to build a new audience off of, to target for your new business. And the secret here and before I tell you the secret, take a moment please to head down to the show notes below and click on this little survey to fill it out and tell me what kind of Facebook and Instagram topics or topics for growing your online course business do you need to hear the most? Because this podcast thing I don't like guessing episodes. I would love to just create the content that helps you, because then it helps you out. Also, reward me by showing it to more and more people, because it's exactly what you wanted and it's probably exactly what the other folks who are course creators, membership owners, are also wanting and needing help with. So please tell me. It'll take you 90 seconds to just fill out like five little itsy bitsy questions to give me a tip, a clue on what you need help with.

Speaker 1:

Now let's jump back into what you do if your email list is too small but you still want to target ads, use something inside of Meta Ad Manager called Detailed Audience Targeting. So you get to Detailed Audience Targeting by opening up your ad manager and creating a new campaign and then coming to the ad set level, and at the ad set level you can scroll down here until you find detailed targeting, and then what you need to do is just put in the kind of interest that you believe or that you know because you've done your research and taken surveys, and so put in the interest that your ideal clients have. Now I'll just give you an example. I was coaching because I do Facebook ads coaching. For those of you who, if for because I do Facebook ads coaching. For those of you who, because I do Facebook ads coaching, like, if you have ads that you need to work better, well then you just have me do one-on-one coaching with you for 28 days and you will run a campaign that works way better than if you had just, you know, done all the things by yourself and tried to figure it out by yourself, because you get to leverage my like five-ish years of experience for your business Link in the description below, by the way. For that, now here's what we did for a coaching client of mine is the first step. She knew who she was serving. After I asked her who her ideal clients were, because she had already had plenty of customers, right.

Speaker 1:

So we went in here and we typed college grad, you know in the United States and women, right. So we went in here and we typed college grad you know in the United States and women, right. And we got this huge audience. And then we went to define further, because we knew that we didn't just need to target college graduates. We wanted to target moms who had graduated college, that were parents of older kids. So what we ended up typing here is parent. So what we ended up typing here is parent, partence, parent of, and we picked parents with adult children.

Speaker 1:

Let's say this for now that's easy enough. We didn't pick that exact one, but you get the point. And our audience got smaller. But then we also knew that the moms who had graduated college, who were parents with older kids, they tend to come from higher income households. So we narrowed it down further by going to find further to a top income and we just stacked all of the top income targeting options. Now notice how that audience shrunk down here. Well, we could do that for this client because she already had a bunch of paying clients, so she knew specifically who she needs to target. If you don't have tons of paying clients already and you're still exploring, then yeah, do what I said and see how I deleted that and we're right around 2 million Perfect audience size. By the way, right now I'm looking inside of the ad account, so click down in the show notes below so you can hop over from this audio only podcast straight to this video on YouTube and see what I'm looking at. And there are a ton of different audiences for you to research. If you spend the time doing good research as long as, then your detailed audience targeting by interest should perform well, and if it doesn't, then test a different audience until you find one that performs well. But don't just stop and say Facebook, instagram ads didn't work for me.

Speaker 1:

That's like a baby stopping when they're trying to figure out how to walk. You know, have you ever seen a little kid just like cry, like you know this whole walking thing? Well, maybe they can't talk yet, but they're like, just this just isn't for me. I'm just not going to try to walk. You know, I tried it and I know other people can do it and I see you doing it, mom and dad but you know it's just too hard, it didn't work out for me, so I'm going to do something else, like crawl the rest of my life or just keep rolling around.

Speaker 1:

Now, that's not how it works. Little babies and toddlers, if you will, are persistent until they can walk and they'll grab on everything and clamor over everything you know and pull your tablecloths off the table and knock over your lamps, trying to stand up and whine and cry. So you can kind of hold their hands. You know they won't give up until they do walk and I want you to continue being persistent in the same way. Thank you for telling me in the podcast survey below what kind of episodes would help you the best. And until the next time, be blessed, take care. See you in the next one.

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Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie

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