Facebook optimizes and makes little changes to its platform every day. The apps get a new update every single week and all of the Facebook platforms’ developments can sometimes make your head spin. All of these changes (big or small) can sometimes easily be left unnoticed until you happen to stumble upon them by accident. Like the new targeting suggestions in Power Editor. A playful little tool I feel you should play with at least once.

Making use of the recently used targeting option###

You can find this option in the Power Editor when you create a new ad set in an account that you frequently make use of. When I set up a new ad set a couple of days ago and went to set my targeting preferences I stumbled upon one of these little nifty Facebook options:

To make the text easier to read I’ve copied it below:

Recently Used

We’ll show your recently used targeting options in order of how well they performed in past campaigns. Performance is calculated from the relative number of conversions and cost per conversion attributed to each interest, behavior or demographic. See more details by hovering over “Recently Used” options. Add high performers to use targeting that has worked well for you before.

Suggested

We’ll suggest interests, behaviors and demographics based on your previous selections or popularity with similar advertisers. Suggestions are a good place to start if you want to quickly find relevant options to define your audience, but aren’t sure what to search for.

So, when adding your targeting preferences you now get the option to pick from a set of interests that you’ve used before, called the Recently Used targeting option. When you hover over the different interests you used in previous campaigns/ad sets you get an insight into which of these interests performed well in the past:

In one of our campaigns, we’ve used the interest targeting to target people with an interest in ‘De Wereld Draait Door’ (a Dutch television show). You can see that the performance of this interest group was average, so definitely not one I would necessarily include in future campaigns ;).

How are the interests rated?

The grading is as follows:

1. High
2. Above average
3. Average
4. Below average
5. Low

It’s funny to see that some keywords I’ve added don’t perform well at all, while others that I wouldn’t have expected to perform a lot better. This is also a legit metric to take back to your clients, who persist on using a certain target interest time and time again. If Facebook tells you it doesn’t work, it must be true! You’ve now got evidence to show you that some interest perform less well than others. Keep in mind though: this is probably not a foolproof method by far. It seems as though Power Editor takes an average from a bunch of campaigns in the past & targeting you’ve previously worked, which doesn’t mean that an interest doesn’t work at all, bus maybe not in the combination with the creatives or message you used.

Still, it’s a funny little tool to click through and see what Facebook has to tell you about your targeting, to add the high performing ones (and new ones!) to see of things change. I wouldn’t go and optimize all of your campaigns based on this one tiny feature, but just taking a look might give you some insights you could actually work with.

Also, I don’t think there will ever only be ‘average’ performing interests, because out of all your average performing targeting, one will still come up on top ;).

Happy clicking!