Hey there,

This week, let’s talk about the evolution of ad targeting.

You used to build your ad audiences in Ads Manager. You probably remember those days. It was the wild west of media buying. You could target users by insane attributes, like income levels by zip code, spending patterns, or sensitive health interests. 

But those days are no more. Audience targeting has been eaten by AI.

I know this because — before Motion — I tried to build an app to create more elaborate journey mapping in ad audiences.

We quickly realized that we were fighting the evolution of the algorithm and we needed to go a different direction.

So we turned to the best of the best, media buyers for the biggest Shopify ecommerce brands in the world. People like Connor MacDonald who were managing multi-million dollar ad budgets on razor-thin margins.

We discovered that the biggest lever these advertisers were pulling to drive results was in creative testing. 

It’s almost a return to the days of billboard advertising. You rent a billboard if you know that your target buyer/ICP will be walking/driving by it. You advertise on Meta to a broad audience and can pretty much trust that your ICP will see your ads.

That’s because your audience are the most likely people to engage with your ads and those engagement signals help Meta find more people who look like those that are already engaging. Before you know it, Meta is serving ads almost exclusively to your ICP.

So your focus should be singular: what message do I want to deliver to my ICP through my creative?

You might have theories about what the best message will be, but the only way to find out for sure is by running creative tests. Produce different statics, videos, gifs, carousels, and more. Run these with different ad copy, headlines, and CTA variants, and wait for your winners to emerge.

When they do, you’ll now have insights to inform the direction of new creative iterations and new concept development.

This is the beginning of your creative strategy flywheel (the bridge between step 7 and step 1).

There are a few ways to conduct this creative analysis:

1. Ads Manager: With a good account setup, you’ll find some ad-level data easy to digest, like ROAS, CPA, and more.
2. Spreadsheets: Export your account data, build pivot tables, and run comparative analyses across your entire body of ads.
3. Motion: If you’re spending $50k+/month on ads, Motion simplifies this process dramatically—saving you time and giving you much deeper insights.

Once you’ve run your analysis, a new problem is typically born: you need to turn your data points into qualitative feedback that your creative team can leverage to build more winning ads.

In my next chapter, I’ll share some tactics you can leverage to break down this communication barrier and bring creative and analytics into harmony.

Reza Khadjavi

Founder & CEO | Motion

reza.khadjavi@motionapp.com

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