Everyone’s preaching GO BROAD

🔁 But broad targeting isn’t a strategy. It’s just a setting, and more!

Hello! You've arrived at What Actually Works 🤓

We break down the real strategies, decisions, and plays that actually move the needle in your marketing, and here it for today.


🔁 Broad Targeting Isn’t a Strategy. It’s Just a Setting.

Every media buyer on LinkedIn is saying the same thing right now. Go broad. Trust the algorithm. Let Meta do the work.

And they’re not wrong. Broad targeting works. The problem is what happens after you turn it on and walk away.

Meta’s job is to find the easiest person to convert. Not the best person. Not the most valuable person. The easiest. And in most accounts, the easiest person to convert is someone who already knows the brand, already visited the site, already engaged with an ad three times this week.

They’re warm. They’re cheap. They look great in the dashboard. They’re also not new customers.

This is the part nobody’s talking about. When you go broad without separating your audience segments properly, you don’t get a machine finding new customers at scale. 

You get a machine recycling the same familiar faces while your cold audience barely sees you at all. Two accounts audited recently told the whole story:

  • One had customers hitting 100+ ad touchpoints in 30 days
  • The other was sitting at 40
  • Both had the same budget. Almost zero new customer acquisition to show for it.

The algorithm wasn’t broken. It was doing exactly what it was built to do.

Here’s what changes everything. Meta needs to know, explicitly, who is new and who isn’t. Not assumed. Not hoped. Explicitly told. When your audience segments are set up with clear separation between net new, engaged, and existing customers, three things happen:

  • The algorithm stops recycling and starts prospecting
  • Frequency numbers across each segment start making sense
  • Budget that was quietly feeding warm audiences starts reaching people who’ve never seen the brand before

Broad targeting with clean segmentation behind it is a completely different machine than broad targeting without it. One finds new customers. The other just finds the same ones again.

So before the next conversation about creative strategy, campaign structure, or what Andromeda is doing to your account, pull the frequency breakdown by audience type for the last 30 days. New customers, engaged, existing. Look at the numbers.

If they’re close to each other, the algorithm isn’t prospecting.

It’s recycling.

And no creative strategy in the world fixes a distribution problem that was never set up correctly in the first place. 


🐥 Tweet Worth Saving


Thanks for being part of the WAW team 💃 We’d love to know if this was helpful so we can continue playing it smart with the right strategies.

Subscribe to What Actually Works

Don’t miss out on the latest issues. Sign up now to get access to the library of members-only issues.
jamie@example.com
Subscribe