Audience & TargetingTargeting
What is Targeting? Types, How to Choose, and Common Mistakes
Also known as: ad targeting, audience targeting
Short answer
Targeting is how you decide who is eligible to receive your ads, based on things like location, age, interests, or past behaviour. Good targeting cuts wasted budget, but targeting that is too narrow drives cost up instead.
The types available
| Type | Based on | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Location | City, radius, country | Always, especially for local business |
| Demographics | Age, gender, language | When the product genuinely is limited |
| Interests and behaviour | Platform activity | For cold audiences, as a starting point |
| Custom audience | Your own customer data | Retargeting and exclusion |
| Lookalike | Resemblance to your customers | Widening out from a good example |
| Exclusion | Lists to remove | Almost always needed |
Common mistakes
- Stacking restrictions. Age plus interests plus a tight radius plus behaviour leaves an audience too small to run.
- Leaving location defaults alone. Make sure you selected people who live there, not everyone who passed through.
- Forgetting to exclude customers. Budget goes to people who already bought.
- Never checking overlap. Two campaigns on the same audience bid against each other and raise both their costs.
Frequently asked questions
- Is a narrow audience always better?
- No. A narrow audience raises CPM because you bid against other advertisers for the same people, and it drives frequency up fast. Broad audiences with clean conversion data often win.
- Which type of targeting matters most?
- Exclusion. Removing people who will not buy, such as existing customers on a new-buyer campaign, usually helps more than adding another interest.
- Why is interest targeting no longer as accurate as it was?
- Because the auction now learns from the conversion events you send. The quality of your conversion data matters more than the interest list you pick by hand.
Related terms
Your ad numbers are only as accurate as the data behind them
Konektor captures the Click ID and sends conversions that close on WhatsApp, over the phone, or in a shop back to the ad platform.