When I think about reaching social consumers through Facebook advertising, a big point of contention comes to mind; the quantity vs. quality debate. Looking at traffic, it’s a no brainer that you’d only want quality consumers coming to your site, but what about when we’re looking at the paid reach metric?

Reach on Facebook is the number of people who saw your content in their newsfeed, and when we look at the objective of reach as an ad campaign, we know that we are paying Facebook to reach as many people as possible in our targeted audience. With the reach objective still being fairly inexpensive to marketers (we can look at it almost as a social billboard) the question that arises is, “Should I even be setting a targeted audience with a reach campaign?”

Here are my pros and cons to targeted reach vs. non-targeted reach to help you decide which approach to take:

Non-Targeted Paid Reach: Quantity

When looking at your Facebook ads as a social billboard, it can make sense to go with the objective “reach” to put a mile radius around your business to circulate to as many people in the area. When doing so, your goal should be to create an awareness of your business, and to get your name circulating as much as possible through the Facebook and Instagram newsfeed. As social consumers are scrolling through in that mile radius, your ad will be displayed to them. If your content is catchy, and interesting to their needs, they are likely to stop and take an action on your campaign. With this approach, your advertising dollars are being spent in a way to release your name as much as possible to the social consumer. A campaign like this can cost, for one month to run, anywhere from $50 to $1000 depending on your current ad spend and how many people you want to reach. This method, not only can be inexpensive, but great way to create awareness about your business.

Targeted Paid Reach: Quality

Facebook’s goal for your campaigns is to reach the right people at the right time, and through their advertising audiences and audience creation, marketers can do just that. Depending on where your social consumers are in your funnel, you can send specific messages to different targeted audiences. The Facebook advertising objectives that work best for the quality traffic are “clicks to website” and “conversions,” considering these objectives can have a higher CPM, or CPA (cost per action). With targeted reach, you are going after a smaller audience, who more likely to have a higher ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) due to the fact that these social consumers are going to be lower in your funnel. Using this approach, you have more options for content and messaging. For instance, you can be more creative with the message you are sending to these consumers because it’s more than likely they already know who you are as a business. The introduction is over, now it’s time for them to convert.

The quality vs. quantity debate is something that is ongoing in the social world. I feel you need to attack it based off of your own “goals” for your account. I hope this breakdown can help steer you to some new goals for your social advertising.  

About the Author

Denise Casagrande, Vice President of Marketing at PCG, is passionate about humanizing brands across social channels. She feels the connection businesses can make with their clients can be ever-lasting based off of the messages they're displaying through content. Creator of the Automotive Social Media Sales Funnel.