Do You Need Separate Ad Sets for Customer Personas?

Question

Hey Jon, it's Matt. I have a question for you about testing different audience segments. So how do you really test audience segments using the creative testing tool? Would you have like one ad per segment in your initial batch of testing ads or, option two, would be to tailor all ads from one batch to only one customer segment.

Answer

Hey, Matt, so this is a fascinating question, especially in today’s advertising.

So let me try to provide examples of what Matt is asking and the reasoning behind it. I’m not going to use the phrase “audience segment” because it can be too easily confused with Meta’s Audience Segments feature. I’m going to assume he’s using that phrase to describe what can otherwise be defined as customer personas.

So your business has multiple customer personas. These are different buckets or categories that your customers might fall into. Let’s just assume that two of your customer personas are soccer moms between 35 and 44 and empty nester moms between 55 and 64.

You would craft different ads for each group, reflecting different imagery and text, but also different pain points and solutions relevant to each group.

So in years past, you would test these in separate ad sets and you’d likely adjust the targeting accordingly.

But things are different now.

In the era of Andromeda, Meta says that the levers you pull related to targeting are found in the ads now. You don’t need to create separate ad sets to appeal to different groups of people. And I interpret this to mean not only for your main ad set, but for testing purposes.

Best practices for targeting these days is to be hands off in the ad set. And because of that, all of your various customer personas would exist within an ad set’s targeting pool.

So back to Meta’s push to creative diversification and how this impacts creative testing.

You can create multiple ads that appeal to different groups of people and place them in the same ad set. The point of creative diversification is that Meta will find the right audience for the right combination of ad copy and creative. The algorithm shouldn’t be confused because you are appealing to two separate groups. You don’t need to separate them.

There are exceptions to this, of course.

If your budget is so significant that you’re churning out new creative on a regular basis for each customer persona, you’re going to run into your 50-ad limit quickly. You can split them into separate ad sets, but this would be purely for organizational purposes. You should still use CBO, or Advantage+ Campaign Budget, so that Meta can distribute your budget optimally between ads.

There are other potential reasons to consider splitting up ads related to product line and value, but the customer persona doesn’t need to be one of them.

The main point is to prioritize avoiding unnecessary complexity, and this is certainly one of those choices where you can take a simplified approach.

Start simple and only split them up because your results say that you should.

Thanks for your question, Matt!