Targeting

Smaller audiences lifted returns.

Dec 2024 Audience Strategy

The brief was scale. The answer was narrow.

What Changed

Audience architecture replaced audience size.

The winning move was to focus on better buyers, not bigger reach.

01

Best buyers first

The best customers were the people who bought again.

Repeat buyersSourceSpend

02

Smaller seed

Audience building started from repeat buyers, not all buyers.

Repeat baseLookalikeSmaller set

03

Better retargeting

Retargeting was split by how interested people really were.

VideoProduct viewsPage depth

Audience redesign

quality before scale

Core groupbest-buyer audiencebehavior and location aligned

Lookalikerepeat purchasers onlynot all purchasers

Retargetingengagement depthnot one generic pool

Creative stayed strong; the audience stopped diluting it.
Higher CPMs were offset by cleaner purchase quality.
Repeat orders became a core metric.

The starting point

A skincare brand kept spending more on Meta and seeing returns fall. The audience was too broad.

What we found

The best customers were repeat buyers. The targeting was built around anyone who might buy once.

What we changed

We rebuilt targeting around repeat buyers, better retargeting, and a much smaller audience.

What happened

Ad return rose from 2.1x to 3.4x. Revenue went up. Repeat orders also improved.

Real work. Results vary.