14: Are you targeting the wrong audience?

In this conversation, Stacy Covitz discusses the common issue of audience targeting in digital marketing, particularly in MetaAds. 

She outlines key reasons why marketers may feel they are targeting the wrong audience, including low conversion rates despite clicks, high cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and the complexity of audience targeting. 

She emphasizes the importance of testing and evaluating various elements of a marketing campaign, such as the offer, copy, and creative, to determine the root cause of poor performance.

Takeaways

• Are you targeting the wrong audience?
• People are clicking on your ad, but nobody's converting.
• Your CPM is high?
• It could be your offer isn't speaking to anybody.
• It depends on various factors.
• Look at your entire funnel.
• Do some testing to find the issue.
• Simplify your audience targeting.
• Check if your offer is converting organically.
• Evaluate your creative and copy.

Sound Bites

"Are you targeting the wrong audience?"
"Your CPM is high?"
"It depends."

Chapters

00:00 Identifying Audience Targeting Issues
07:37 Understanding Conversion Metrics and Strategies
07:59 outro FINAL.wav
08:11 New Chapter
08:16 New Chapter 2
08:21 New Chapter 3
08:26 New Chapter 4
08:31 New Chapter 5
08:36 New Chapter 6

Grab my free resource to set up your Facebook ad account!

Transcript

Stacy Covitz (00:02)
Hey friends, I am back with another MetaAds Quick Tip. Today we are talking about are you targeting the wrong audience? So I get asked this question all the time. How do I know if I'm targeting the wrong audience? And of course, we want to blame a lot of things, right?

because we've spent our money and worked on creating the campaign and the creative and the copy and our results are not making us happy right now. So what can we blame? Well, we can start with the audience and let me go over three reasons why it could be your audience targeting. Okay, so.

Number one, people are clicking on your ad, but nobody's converting. So they're clicking, so that's a good sign. That means your creative is probably pretty good. People are interested. Maybe your headline is good, but then once they click, they land on your landing page and it doesn't speak to them. So it could be the wrong audience.

Okay, how about

And that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an audience. It's an audience targeting issue. It could be a lot of other things. It could be that the headline seemed to promise something that didn't necessarily align with the landing page that they landed on. So if there was a disconnect there,

or maybe the copy didn't speak to them. So it could be that. For example, your ad says, simple way or quick way to do this one, quick way to get this one transformation and they click on it and it's a 10 module course.

and they are thinking no so they don't convert. Okay, sign number two, you're getting clicks. Sign number two, you're not getting any clicks. You're not getting any engagement. That could be, again, that could be multiple things. It could be the copy. mean, again, that could be multiple things. Could be the creative.

The ad just isn't interesting anybody. But at the same time, the reason why it might not be interesting to anybody is because it's going out to the wrong people. So it very well could be an audience targeting problem.

And another reason is your CPM, that's a metric, that is your cost per thousand impressions, so it's CPM, is high. So what's high? A general rule of thumb for me personally.

for my clients, I like to see it under 30. But that doesn't necessarily mean over 30 is bad. If I'm getting conversions and I'm getting a great cost per lead, I kind of don't care what my CPM is. So with that said, if your CPM is high, it could mean that it is expensive for Facebook to show your ad to people.

because you're trying to show it to the wrong people and Facebook is confused and doesn't know who to show it to. And that could be for multiple reasons. Your audience targeting could be too complicated. Back in the day, we used to stack audiences on top of each other.

They need to be yoga lovers. They need to be engaged shoppers and also love Amy Porterfield. And we had all these layers and sometimes that's just too much. And in today's algorithm world, 2025, Metta is really smart and they don't necessarily need all of that. So you could try a few things. You could try to just add

gender, your product or service is gender specific, or age or location, really just simplify it and see if that helps. And you can always test side by side, use the same creative, the same ad and have a whole new audience and just let Meta do their thing and see what happens. And maybe it'll be better results.

So here's the real story. Yes, it could be your targeting. It could be your audience targeting. But at the same time, it could be your offer. It could be your offer isn't speaking to anybody. It could be your headline. It could be your copy. It could be your creative. It's hard to know really if you're targeting the wrong audience.

unless you just do a few of those little quick checks like I just mentioned. See if you're over-complicating. See if your audience is too narrow. It might not be large enough. So you'd want it to be at least, I mean, I like to say a million, but depending on, you know, that's not a make or break. ⁓ It could be too vague.

You could be going broad and maybe you do need to get a little bit more specific. So it could be your audience, it could be your copy, it could be your creative and all of that to say, it depends, right? So in answer to the question, am I targeting the wrong audience? It depends.

So hopefully, well, you know, to really get to the bottom of it, do some testing. Look at your entire funnel. Is your offer converting organically? Do people buy it if you're in front of the exact person? Are they buying it? So those are a few things to check. And I hope you learned something and I will see you next time.