The Interest Venn Diagram

I recently wrote a guest post on the Shoelace blog that was a think-piece about how you can discover previously hidden interest-targeting options for your prospecting campaigns. I call it the Interest Venn Diagram. I'll briefly explain how it works here, but for greater detail head over to the Shoelace blog to read it in full for yourself:

Since iOS14.5 hit the scene, audience testing has become much less fun. With less data to optimize with, once stellar audiences like lookalikes have fallen by the wayside in favour of more broad, open-ended, algorithm-reliant audiences.

That said, not all hope is lost - it is still possible to have fun with audience testing while still being efficient with your spend. But how? The answer lies in segmenting your broad audience using interests.

Not only is there a large library of interests to choose from for segmenting, but the signals that Meta bases these interests on come from on-platform behaviour. For example, if you ‘like’ a page about dogs, Meta knows you are interested in dogs without relying on pixel data.

To further illustrate this and to prove that this isn’t just a matter of opinion, I conducted a survey recently asking people which of the big three audience types they are finding the most success with, removing broad from the equation.

So, interest audiences are performing well for people, but how do we use them effectively? Well, there are two main ways to use interests in your targeting:

• Adding a single interest to your ad set, or the more popular option:

• Adding a ‘stack’ of interests to your ad set

To supercharge these interests we can dive into a thought experiment. Using the AND logic in the audience segmentation tool, we can quite granularly hone in on a subset of an audience that we can uniquely sell to. But how do we find the right interests to target?

Simply thinking about what interests to use can be difficult, so using audience characteristic data from your audience insight tools, such as Google Analytics, is very important here.

Let’s say, for argument's sake, there are only two types of runners, which are very different: those who work corporate jobs and workout to influence their social status and those who are in tune with their mind, body, and soul who workout to nurture this sense of self.

Now, what if your audience insights tools say that your average purchaser is primarily interested in ‘Home & Garden’? If we had drawn our own conclusions, we might have targeted those from the first group and potentially burned money where the real audience was the second group.

Using this example, we can use our Interest Venn Diagram to add in new, previously unseen adjacent interests such as ‘horoscopes’, ‘environmentalism’, etc.

Using this exercise, with all steps working in harmony, can be quite revealing about your audience, which can help you develop unique targeting strategies.

Here's how you win with the Interest Venn Diagram:

Step 1: Take your core audience interest Step 2: Find adjacent interests from audience insight tools‍ Step 3: Brainstorm interests that arrive at the middle of those two‍ Step 4: Profit

Again, if you want more detail, I went into much greater depth in this article on the Shoelace blog - while you're there, consider subscribing, so you don't miss more write-ups like this one.