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Most course creators get excited about detailed targeting, but that’s where they end up wasting the most money.
- Cut your lead gen costs in HALF with my $37 mini-course–NOW only $17!
- Watch Episode 972: Troubleshooting Facebook and Instagram Ads Increase in Cost Per Lead
I break down when detailed targeting actually makes sense, how to layer vs. narrow your interests, and the audience size sweet spot that keeps your costs low.
I also call out the common targeting traps that drive ad costs up, like choosing random celebrity interests or ignoring your ad creative, and show you what to focus on instead if you want leads that actually convert.
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SPEAKER_00:
As an online course creator, you might be wondering how do I do detailed targeting on Facebook and Instagram ads? And that is a good question. I will show you that, but I will also tell you why this is a waste of time if you have some better targeting options available to you. This is what I’ve seen as a Facebook and Instagram ad manager for established online course creators since back in 2020. Because if you get this wrong, it’s going to waste lots of money for your business, which means it will take you longer to be reaching the people who you want to be reaching to serve with the skills and passions that you have, thus making your business money. So what is even detailed targeting? You can’t see what I’m about to show you, so click down in the show notes below and go over to the YouTube channel so that you can see exactly what detailed targeting is. So detailed targeting is a targeting option that Meta has where you can choose specific demographics of people with which to show your ads to. So for example, I’m targeting travel and tourism, page admins, frequent travelers, travel bloggers. And this option is good. But like I said, I’m about to explain it to you why you would not want to start out doing detailed targeting unless you can’t do some other better types of targeting. And also later, you will understand the two different types of detailed targeting. One is where you’re layering or stacking interest, and the other one is where you’re narrowing down interest. Plus, if you’ve wondered how big of an audience you could be targeting or should be targeting, I’m gonna tell you that. So before I get into detailed targeting, you don’t want to start out here. Unless you’re a brand new business and you don’t have larger warm audiences with which to build cold look-alike audiences off of, you don’t have that. Start at detailed targeting. If you do have larger, better warm audiences, then you’ll want to do look-alike targeting. Both are a method of targeting cold audiences, people who do not yet know your business, haven’t interacted with you online. But what I’m seeing right now in fall of 2025 is that look-alike audiences are working better than detailed demographic targeting. Okay, now, so what do I mean by larger warm audiences? A warm audience is your email list, a warm audience is people who have visited your website. A warm audience could also be Instagram and Facebook followers. Let’s just stick with those basic ones. Okay, so if you have an email list over a thousand people, that’s good enough to upload to Meta and build a lookalike cold audience off of that. And if you have a lot of Instagram followers, Meta already knows about them, so you can just build a look-alike cold audience off of that too. Same thing goes for website visitors, but there’s this concept of warm and cold, warm people being familiar with your business, cold folks not have being familiar with your business. And if I had to choose, which I do on a daily basis, when I have new clients, then I will use lookalike audiences first. But if you’re a newer business, and my heart goes out to you, as a newer business, if you’re using Facebook ads, this is the most expensive time to use Facebook ads. It’s much better as a newer online course business, especially if you’re using ads to grow your email list with a lead magnet. It is much better to pursue organic methods of doing that. That could be cross-promotion, you know, with somebody else who it makes sense. You promote their lead magnet, they promote yours. That could be building up your organic following and promoting your lead magnet with strategically created Instagram reels that are connected to mini chat where somebody comments the phrase and then and then they receive the lead magnet in the DMs. Things like that would be better. But if you must build your email list and you don’t have larger warm audiences, then yes, you can use detailed targeting if the kind of targeting that you need is easily accessible. It is for plenty of niches, but not for everyone. So you’re gonna have to come in here and do some research. DM me at Quajo on Instagram. It’s at Q U A Y J O and ask me about targeting because I can probably make videos for you. And I even have some other questions that I was asked, and I will answer those at the end of this episode. So there are two types of detailed targeting. You gotta know these. One is called stacking, and the other is called narrowing. So when you first open up Meta Ad Manager, at least right now, so many different accounts are different and over time things do change. But you can click on further limit the reach of your ads, which will allow you to switch the setup and it gives you a warning. Forget that warning. But we’re basically turning off Advantage Plus targeting where the algorithm can expand more liberally on its own or of its own accord past your targeting guidelines that you have set, and then we have the detailed targeting option here. Now, stacking just means that you are adding on interests together so that you are increasing the size of your targetable audience right over here on the right hand side. So if I start, for example, I have a yoga, a lead magnet that’s related to yoga or Pilates, I might type in yoga and choose this interest, and then I might also type in yoga again and choose this one. So now I’m stacking interests where I’m targeting the people who are interested in yoga fitness, and I’m targeting the people who are interested in yoga pants, and I’m going to target the people who are specifically interested in Hatha yoga. That is stacking, okay? And it allows me to target more and more people. Okay. Now, you can also use the detailed targeting function to narrow down an audience. Now, why would I do that? Well, for more specific interest-based targeting. For example, I could say I want to target people who are who are interested in yoga, but I don’t want to target everyone who’s interested in yoga. So I will define further and say not only must you be interested in yoga, but you also must match. I’m gonna say you also must match, I like this one, business page admins. I just went from like 53 million down to like 1.9 to 2.2 million. Now, what did I do here? Now these ads will show to only people who are an admin of a Facebook business page, and they’re interested in yoga. That’s a lot different from what I had before. So I’m narrowing now, whereas stacking what I had before meant that I could be targeting or I could have been targeting people who had one interest or the other interest, or both, but now they must have this broad interest and additionally this narrower interest. Now here’s a good use case. For example, let’s say that your business serves other business owners. It happens all the time, right? Let’s say you’re a business coach in the yoga niche and you coach yoga studio business owners how to grow their businesses. I had a client who did that back in the day. I coached her and she was doing it quite well, actually. Well, in this case, she might want to target people who have the yoga fitness interest, but who are also business page admins, and then within that audience are probably people who are yoga-related business owners that need her business coaching for yoga folks’ help. See how we’re doing this? And that is the difference between stacking and narrowing. You can even narrow down further if you want, and say, okay, you have to meet the yoga fitness criteria and be a business page admin and be a third category. Have fun with this. But don’t make the mistake of narrowing down too small because then your cost, your CPM as in cost per mil, as in cost to show your ad to a thousand people, it will skyrocket. You want to keep your audiences pretty big, okay? Like around one to two million. Meta right now likes bigger audiences. By the way, if your lead costs are creeping up, andor you are launching ads and you want my best way to, and this is what actually works because I do it all the time, to lower lead costs and still target the highest quality person as possible, i.e. get the best quality lead as possible. And you’re just like, but I don’t know how to test ads or how to start and then what to test first and second and third so that I can get the lowest cost per lead reliably. Well, then there’s this course that I have. It’s called the ad testing cheat code, and that helps you nail down this one skill that’s super important because if you don’t do the work, then your lead quality might be lower or your cost per lead is going to be high, and then you can’t attract the right people into your business, which ultimately means you’re missing out on revenue and you’re adding into your frustration because you’re spinning your business wheels, spending your money and not seeing the return on investment that you had hoped for. So this is super affordable. Get it in the show notes below. Here’s a mistake you probably want to avoid, which is don’t target random gurus, you know. Like I had a discovery call for ads management with this lady, and she was telling me that her previous ad manager was targeting the Taylor Swift interest. Now, yes, Taylor Swift is popular, but what does targeting people who are interested in Taylor Swift have to do with getting good quality leads for the fit a business that’s in the fitness niche? I do not know. I really don’t. And I feel like isn’t everybody interested in Taylor Swift? Just about don’t target people who are interested in Oprah or Taylor Swift. Do the research to target people who are interested in things that actually align with your ideal customer and/or lead, but ideal customer, yes. And another mistake is running ads without refreshing ad creative and ad copy from time to time. Like targeting alone will not fix bad ads. You need to be testing new ad creative, new graphics and new visuals. You need to be refining your copy, focusing on changing up the ad copy hook, you know, the top two or three lines of the ad copy, or even changing up the headline, like that portion of the ad that’s in bold and shows up next to the blue call to action button. And now, before I answer some questions I was asked about this topic, I want to show you real life what audience stacking and narrowing can look like. So this is from a client. We did audience stacking where we were targeting REI interest, travel and leisure, you know, backpacking travel and tourism, backpacking travel, couch surfing, and I don’t need to go further, but we were stacking those, meaning that Meta’s algorithm would target somebody who had any one or multiples of these interests. Okay. But we also narrowed down and said they could have any one or multiples of these top interests, but they also had to match the travel blogger interest down here in order to be targeted by our ads. And so that’s like a real life example where you can stack a bunch of related interests together, and then you can further narrow down and add some criteria down below. And of course, you know, you should be targeting the correct age range, and there is no correct age range, but you can target age range and gender based on the age range and gender that your paying customers usually are, right? Like if you serve folks routinely who are over 30 years old and women, then it makes no sense for you to target people who are younger than 25 years old and men. Follow what I’m saying here. A question that I’ve gotten asked is how do you know if I should start, or how do I know if I should start with broad targeting or detailed targeting for my lead magnet ads? So if you’re asking this question too, you’ve heard about broad targeting, and you’re like, ooh, Meta likes broad targeting. I should be doing that. Well, you probably shouldn’t start off with doing broad targeting and qualified yourself as in you are a newer business that does not have larger warm audiences and thus you’re doing detailed targeting. You don’t want to do broad targeting. Broad targeting, what that means is no detailed targeting, and you’re just choosing an age range and a location, country, if you will, and targeting your ads there and letting the algorithm from all the people who are in that country and have that same age range that you picked, just letting the algorithm pick for you who it’s going to show the ads to. That does work quite well. If your business is more mature, i.e., has a lot more traffic and data inside of your pixel. So generally, super mature businesses have a huge organic social media following, a large email list, lots of people purchasing, lots of people opting in. And if they have the MetaPixel installed, which, oh yeah, if you’re not running ads yet, install that Pixel right now. But if they have the Pixel installed, that Pixel is seasoned, as you will sometimes hear folks say, which just means it has a lot of data. And since there’s a lot of data, Meta already knows tons about who’s opting in and you can try open targeting. But otherwise, if you’re newer, then just do interest-based targeting. Of course, like I said, it’s better to start with look alike cold audiences built off of your warm audiences if those warm audiences are quality. Here’s another question. If my course is niche, like for real estate investors or homeschool parents, how do I actually find the right detailed targeting options inside of ads manager? Well, that’s good. There’s two ways. One way is just to start start typing in interests, and you will see Meta make suggestions to you. But be warned, those suggestions that Meta makes, it’s also making those kind of suggestions to other people that typed in similar things to you. So you’ll be getting more heavily targeted interests, which means you’ll be paying more to target those. The other way, which takes a lot of time, but can find lesser targeted, smaller audiences that you can just stack up, would be to go to Google and search things like best books for homeschool parents. Find all those books, because Google always gives you big book lists, and then target the authors. Search the authors’ names here, and sometimes you will find folks that are targetable, like that. Or you could search events for homeschool parents or organizations for homeschool parents. Type those into Google, spreadsheet all the results, and then come back and type in the results one by one here. I like to do that. I’ve seen better results than just asking Chat GPT. You can, of course, ask your favorite AI and see what happens. But yeah, to find the right detailed targeting options, you’re going to have to type and search and look and decide what works and what does not work. Like if I type in homeschooling, then I can see there’s this homeschooling primary and secondary education interest. There’s a homeschooling interest. And if, like I said, if I type one, it gives me suggestions: homeschool mom, stay-at-home mom, parents with preteens, international school. So that might not be homeschool specifically, but I can start to look at those suggestions. So it’s just going to be a lot of searching. Okay. If you’re worried about is your audience size too small or large enough, like don’t go, don’t go smaller than a million. Okay. This is assuming you’re a course creator with an audience that could be anywhere inside of a country. If you’re not an online course creator, I don’t know why you’re listening still now, because this is advice that works specifically for online course creators. But you know, there’s other options for you if you’re not an online course creator. But if you are an online course creator, could because I’m giving you the stuff that has worked over the years for and still does for online course creators. Now, you might be asking, Quayjo, how can I layer detailed interest-based targeting with look-alike audiences? You could target a look-alike audience and at the same time target an interest-based audience. I would not. Right now, you know, Meta loves look-alike audiences. You don’t need to combine, especially because if you turn on the advantage plus option with your ads, then you have a look-alike audience, a cold audience as a base. And then Meta, since the Advantage Plus option is on, that means Meta’s algorithm can expand as it sees fit beyond your look-alike targeting to find the right people for you. And that option does work quite well. So no need to give Meta more direction with detailed interest targeting layered on top of a look-alike audience targeting. And maybe you have this question too, which is how do I know if targeting’s actually the problem or if it’s my ad creative graphics or videos or even landing page that’s the problem, as in that’s making my ads expensive. And this is like a classic pain point. And I do have a specific episode for that on this audio podcast. Just go ahead and look into the show notes and click on that episode right there. It’s called Troubleshooting Facebook and Instagram ads increase in cost per lead. Until the next time that you see me or hear from me, take care, be blessed, and see you in the next one. Bye.
