The results of a recent study by social media analyst Sotrender showed that only a small number of ads posted on Facebook and Instagram (Meta’s platforms) actually find their target audience.
The study points out that while these campaigns are less expensive, they are also less effective as they have almost no impact and do not generate enough revenue for their businesses. As a result, this only leads to easy burning of advertising budgets.
To achieve these results, the Sotrender team ran thousands of advertising campaigns on Meta’s platforms (both Instagram and Facebook) during the first quarter of 2022.
They found that over 80 percent of these ads were reaching less than 5 percent of their audience because they covered too broad a spectrum to be noticed or taken up by those they were originally intended for.
This means that most marketers simply don’t know the Facebook Ads Manager well enough or don’t know what their target audience is like.
Sotrender’s study also found some other key findings that marketers and agencies should be aware of:
- 50% of all analyzed ad sets reached less than 1% of the defined target group,
- Only 10% of all ad sets reached more than 12% of the specified audience.
- The maximum Facebook audience share among the analyzed ad sets was 72%
However, a little optimism can also be read from the results of this study, because it showed that the smaller the target group of an ad, the easier it is to find it. This should give marketers another initiative to focus on who they want to build their online campaigns for.
Another thing that might worry agencies was the increase in Facebook advertising costs. The reason is that once an ad has already reached all the users that the advertisers designed it for, the algorithm has to put in more effort to find even more users that fall into that particular category.
