Does Worldwide Targeting Actually Work for Sales?

Question

Hi, Jon. This is Matt. I have a question about a campaign in which I will be promoting a $29 digital copywriting product. The budget will be $100 a day and targeting will be worldwide. So how would you go about doing this in 2026? Cheers, man.

Answer

Great question, Matt.

So Matt provided some additional context there that I had to edit out that was really helpful, but let’s summarize the situation.

He’s running a Sales campaign to promote a $29 digital product. He has chosen to use worldwide targeting. And based on some advice he saw or heard from me at some point, he’s considering creating separate ad sets by similar countries, grouped by CPM.

And since he’s spending $100 per day, he’s concerned that he may water down his budget by splitting up the campaign into multiple ad sets.

So first, I love the way he’s thinking and that he’s flagging this potential problem.

I could be wrong, but I think he’s been inspired by a blog post I wrote three years ago called “Strategically Target Countries for Quality Leads with Meta Ads.”

In that post, I discussed how you could potentially target worldwide if done strategically. If you kept all of the countries in one ad set, Meta would obviously focus on the cheapest countries, which would likely result in low-quality leads. But a way to get around this would be to group similar countries by CPM to control how much is spent on each country group.

Now, this approach may not be necessary when running a sales campaign.

Unless you’re worried about low-quality purchases or getting too many purchases from certain countries, you probably don’t need to split them up.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to worry about here.

While I have seen advertisers experiment with worldwide targeting for sales campaigns with some success, the potential for problems is still there.

In theory, Meta shouldn’t waste a bunch of your budget on countries that aren’t producing optimized actions, in this case purchases, but that’s something you have to monitor closely.

While targeting worldwide wouldn’t be my first choice, I also don’t hate it as an experiment.

And you’re right to be concerned about watering down your budget if you’re splitting up $100 per day. But you may not need to split up country groups by ad set in this case since we’re talking about purchases, not leads.

With all that said, since targeting worldwide isn’t something I normally do, I would approach this very carefully.

I would try it with a single ad set. Then monitor how your budget is distributed by using the breakdown by country.

You will surely see a high volume of impressions in cheaper countries, but make sure that countries where you expect to get purchases are also represented.

Most importantly, you’ll want to monitor performance in aggregate. Are you getting better Cost Per Purchase or Return on Ad Spend using this approach?

My fear is that not enough budget will go to the more expensive countries, which will hurt results. But that’s only a fear, and I’ll be curious to see what actually happens.

If it becomes a problem, I wouldn’t split up countries by ad set. I’d either limit my targeting to certain countries or use value rules to adjust bids by country.

Value rules were something that I didn’t have available when I discussed this topic three years ago.

Ultimately, it’s worth trying out, but I wouldn’t be shocked if you end up with a more traditional approach that focuses on a small number of countries, particularly at the $100 daily budget.

Good luck, Matt!