The results of a recent study by social media analyst Sotrender have revealed that only a small amount of advertisements posted on Facebook and Instagram (platforms owned by Meta) are actually finding their target audience.
The research points out that while these campaigns are less pricey, they’re also less efficient as they have almost no effect, failing to provide any sufficient turnover for their businesses. As a result, all that leads to is a simple burn up of advertising budgets.
To reach these results, the Sotrender team covered thousands of advertising campaigns from within Meta’s platforms (both Instagram and Facebook) during the first quarter of 2022.
What they found is that over 80 percent of those ads reached less than 5 percent of their target audience, as they covered too wide a spectrum to be noticed or picked up by those they were originally intended for.
What that means is that most marketers simply aren’t proficient enough in the use of the Facebook Ads Manager or that they don’t know what their target audience looks like.
The research by Sotrender also noted a few other key findingings that marketers and agencies should take note of:
- 50% of all ad sets analysed were reaching less than 1% of the set target audience,
- Only 10% of all ad sets were reaching more than 12% of the set target audience,
- The maximum Facebook audience share among the analysed ad sets was 72%
A small sense of optimism can also be gauged by the results of this study however, as it showed that the smaller the target audience for an advertisement is, the easier it is to find them. Which should provide a further initiative for marketers to focus on who they want to create their online campaigns for.
Another thing that might trouble agencies which came out of Sotrender’s research was the rise in costs on Facebook ads. The reason behind this is that once an ad has already reached all the users which it was designed for by the advertisers, then the algorithm has to go into a greater effort into coming up with even more users who go under that specific category.
