If you run lead ads, either using Instant Forms or sending people to your website, you may be experiencing low-quality leads. Why?
There’s one potential explanation. Do this…
Breakdown by Age
Click the Breakdown dropdown menu and select Age.
This will generate separate rows for each age group. Where was most of your budget spent?
In this example, 44 percent of my budget went to people over 65.
Why Did This Happen?
This is yet another example of the Meta ads algorithm being literal, and when that can be a problem. The performance goal defines what I want. When optimizing for a lead or registration, Meta only cares about one thing: Getting you as many leads as possible within your budget.
For whatever reason, the algorithm found a weakness among people over 65. I was able to get a ton of cheap leads this way. Meta thinks they got me what I want.
Now, I’m fine spending some money on people over 65. But this split simply isn’t representative of my typical customer. I also found that many of these were low-quality leads who didn’t go beyond this subscription.
I care about quality, too, so this is something that I need to address.
How to Prevent It
How you control age ranges to fix this will be important. This specific issue is something to watch when using Advantage+ Audience while optimizing for leads. Any age maximum you set is only a suggestion.
When it’s a suggestion, I’ve seen Meta completely ignore it to get me more cheap leads. That’s what happened here.
This won’t always happen to you, so check this breakdown first before making changes. If you’re seeing this happen, turn Advantage+ Audience off and set a strict age limit.
I wrote a blog post that explains all of the times you should switch from Meta’s defaults. This scenario qualifies.
