Detailed interest targeting mattered enormously a decade ago. Today the algorithm generally finds buyers better than your guesses do, which changes what you should spend your attention on.
The three that still matter
- Broad: minimal constraints beyond country, age range, and language. Frequently the strongest performer now, because it gives the system room to work.
- Retargeting: people who visited, added to cart, watched most of a video, or engaged. Small, cheap, high-converting — and finite.
- Lookalikes: built from a real customer list. Still useful, especially seeded from your highest-value customers rather than all buyers.
Feed the system good seeds
A lookalike built from your best customers behaves differently from one built from everyone who ever bought. If you have purchase values, upload a list weighted to your top spenders — the input quality shows up directly in the output.
Retargeting has a size limit
Retargeting is the highest-converting audience and the easiest to overspend on, because it is small. Spending heavily against a tiny pool means showing the same people the same ad repeatedly, which annoys them and inflates your averages while adding little new revenue.
Exclusions are the underused tool
Exclude recent purchasers from acquisition campaigns unless repeat purchase is the goal. It is a small setting that quietly stops you paying to advertise to people who already bought.
Try it
Run one broad ad set against your current best-targeted one, same creative and budget, for two weeks. Most people are surprised by the result.