In this presentation, Hernan Vazquez of ScaleDriven shares a comprehensive update on Facebook advertising tactics, focusing on the comparative performance of lookalike audiences and interest targeting. He outlines the scale of ad spend (seven‑figure monthly budgets for clients and five‑ to six‑figure budgets for internal campaigns) and introduces a free 90‑minute training class. The core content explains the two categories of lookalike audiences—dynamic (pixel‑based) and static (list‑based)—and how iOS privacy changes have degraded the effectiveness of dynamic lookalikes due to reduced pixel data. Vazquez describes the historical swing between reliance on lookalikes and interest targeting, noting that recent data shows a resurgence of lookalike performance, especially when supported by high‑quality pixel data and third‑party tracking tools like AnyTrack and Hyros. He recommends a systematic testing approach: run parallel ad sets using lookalikes, interests, and layered combinations; experiment with 1%, 3%, 5%, and 10% lookalike sizes; ensure sufficient seed audience size for larger lookalikes; and regularly refresh static lookalike lists. The talk concludes with a call to action to join a free class that delves deeper into current challenges, opportunities, and tracking solutions for Facebook ads.
Chapters
interest targeting, which one is winning, what we're using right now. I want to give you guys the update on what's winning for our clients and for our own campaigns right now. I think that this is a topic that comes up a lot, and I want to make sure that we're on the same page, at least from our perspective, right? Right now we're spending 7 figures a month for our clients, and we're also spending 5, sometimes 6 figures for our own businesses and whatnot. And I want to tell you guys what's going on basically, right? Based on all of this stuff. So if this is interesting to you, if you want to learn what's working right now in Facebook, if you want to learn how the latest updates to, for instance, iOS or the latest update to the platforms are impacting Facebook ad campaigns, what I would recommend you do is you go to scaledriven.com/100m. scaledriven.com/100m. It's a free class. Telling you exactly what's going on with the platform right now and how you can actually surpass the challenges that are most prominent right now with the Facebook advertising platform so that you can make more money, you can get more performance, and all of that good stuff. All right. So that's the first thing. Now let's talk about lookalike audiences versus Facebook interest targeting. This is a topic that I talk a lot about in our 100 Million Method coaching program. And I talk a lot about, you know, in our, in our different programs and whatnot. And I talk— I definitely discuss this with the agency media buyers and all that. And the reality is that it fluctuates back and forth between what's working. All right. And we do this, we run tests all the time. For instance, for branding campaigns, sometimes engagement ads work better, sometimes video views ads work better. Right now I'm using engagement ads and it tends to work better in terms of consumption. But also sometimes we use video views ads and then we realize that they work better. So It kind of goes back and forth. Now here's what happened with lookalike audiences with the whole iOS, Apple iOS thingy and privacy and tracking and all of that stuff. The reality is that the lookalike audiences, there are 2 types of lookalike audiences, okay? The first lookalike audience are pixel-based and these are dynamic lookalike audiences. What do I mean is that let's say that if you're sending traffic to a landing page, you have people visiting that landing page, They're visiting your website and whatnot. And if you have the pixel installed in the page, then you can create a lookalike audience of Facebook page visitors, right? Or website visitors. You can create a lookalike audience based on that. Now, as more people start visiting your page, more people will be put in that custom audience, which are website visitors. And then that will automatically update your lookalike audiences. So those are dynamic lookalike audiences. What I mean by dynamic is again, that they will be updated as long as you keep on feeding them data, right? And those are usually tied to the pixel. Now the second type of lookalike audience are static lookalike audiences. Let's say for instance that you export your lead list and you upload that to Facebook and you create a lookalike audience out of that list. You export your buyers, you upload that to Facebook and you create a lookalike audience out of that list. What happens with those audiences is that they're usually static. What do I mean with static is that unless you manually update a new list every couple days or every couple weeks or every couple months, the lookalike audiences will remain the same, right? So just to, just to be clear, there are 2 types of lookalike audiences: what I call dynamic lookalike audiences, that they will always be updating based on pixel data, and the other type of lookalike audiences are static. Now what happened is that since iOS privacy issues, since all of that happened, what happened is that the dynamic lookalike audiences, they become— they became less and less and less viable, less and less accurate, less and less reliable. Why? Because of the simple fact that Facebook wasn't getting as much data into the pixel as it was before that. So again, if you were getting, let's say, 10 purchases a day and you were sending that data back to the Facebook Pixel and you had a lookalike audience tied to that custom audience, which were buyers, then that lookalike audience might not have been as good. In fact, a lot of advertisers saw a big drop of performance when it comes to lookalike audiences. Now, the other type of lookalike audiences, they still tend to work pretty well, right? Or they, they tend to work pretty well, right? Uh, static lookalike audiences— you will upload your list, you will create a lookalike audience and all that stuff. So for the longest time, for the longest time, again, uh, we kind of veered away from lookalike audiences and into Facebook interest targeting, right? And again, this is kind of a game that happens from time to time. They update the algorithm when it comes to lookalike audiences and they work a little bit worse for a while and then they come back up and now they're shining, right? Which is exactly what's happening right now. And then the same with Facebook interests, right? Like you might have a lot of interests and then Facebook, boom, they delete 2,000, 3,000, 10,000 interests and then they're not as viable anymore, but then they put back some. So it's always a game when it comes to targeting Facebook. Now what's working right now What's working right now is since the iOS issue with lookalike audiences and all of that, I saw the performance of lookalike audiences become worse and worse and worse. So we started spending more and more and more money on Facebook interests, right? Because they were still getting us a good cost per lead, good cost per call, good cost per schedule, cost per purchase, whatever our goal is at that time. So we kind of started spending less and less and less money on lookalike audiences and started spending more and more and more money on Facebook interest targeting, right? Now the trend at this point, again, I'm recording this on the 23rd of July, June, sorry, 2022. The trend right now is kind of reverting. I'm seeing some lookalike audiences out of buyers, out of leads, out of website visitors that are crushing and they're crushing it like big time, much better than interests. Okay, so right now what we're doing at our agency, and I'm also advising this to students, is to start spending more money on lookalike audiences and start spending less and less money on Facebook interests. Let's also remember that a couple months ago Facebook deleted a bunch of interests and now they're getting them back in, you know. So that's something that Facebook does from time to time is that they delete a bunch of interests and then a couple months later they put them back in and they delete another bunch and all of that good stuff. Right? So it's always a game. It's always a dance. You know the way I see it? It's like, okay, for the next six months, maybe lookalike audiences will work better than interest. And then as they start performing, as they start performing worse and worse and worse, then you may want to increase your budget on interest targeting and all of that. But right now, what I'm seeing is that Facebook lookalike audiences, whether they are dynamic or static lookalike audiences, they start to perform better and better and better based on our campaigns versus our client based on our clients' campaigns. And all that good stuff, right? So that's why we test everything. Whenever we launch a new campaign, whether it is for a client, we're scaling our own campaigns, or whether it is for our own business, or whether we tell students what to do, we basically tell them, hey, test everything, right? Because this again is based on my experience running ads for ScaleDriven.com, but also based on clients that we have, clients in different niches. So the option there is always to test, always, always test. When you're launching new ad sets, try with lookalike audiences and try with Facebook interests, right? And try with layering the two. Try a lookalike audience with a Facebook interest, see what happens, right? Clump a lot of interests together, see how that ad set performs. Clump a bunch of lookalike audiences together, see how that performs. Try with 1% lookalike audiences, 3%, 5%, 10%. Lookalike audiences. Now the caveat, uh, for larger and larger lookalike audiences is that you need to have good pixel data, okay? You need to have a long— a large enough seed audience so that a 10% lookalike audience makes sense, right? So at that point you will be scaling. So that's basically where we're at right now. I'm seeing lookalike audiences perform really well, especially lookalike audiences that we upload. Dynamic lookalike audiences, they're still there, you know, we're using third-party Tracking software like AnyTrack or Hyros to feed good pixel data back to Facebook. That's really important, really, really important if you want to have healthy campaigns but also healthy lookalike audiences. Static lookalike audiences are starting to perform really well based on the data that we are uploading, manually uploading to Facebook every single month or so. And then interest targeting is still working pretty well as well. So again, that's where we're at right now. Lookalike audiences versus Facebook interest targeting. If you're interested in learning more of these strategies, what's working right now, what are the main challenges that Facebook advertisers are going through, number one, but also number two, what's the number one opportunity that I see on Facebook ads? Because there's a big opportunity right now when it comes to Facebook advertising to get you more leads, get you more sales, get you more customers in general. Go to scale-driven.com/100m. You can register for that free class. It's completely 100% free. It's a long class, longish kind of, so it's like 90 minutes. So make sure that you save that or that you bookmark that link for the time that when you have time to watch it because it's pretty good. We're getting a lot of good stuff, good feedback out of that class. So make sure that you have at least 90 minutes to dedicate to that training. We go through again the biggest opportunity that's out there. We go through the challenges, how to surpass those challenges. One of them is tracking. So we go in depth in tracking in that class, and it's free. If you register, it will autoplay for you. Nothing to wait for. You don't have to wait for an email for a date or whatever. So go ahead and register, scaledriven.com/100m. I hope that this is helpful. I hope that this helpful increase the performance of your Facebook ads. If you have any questions. Feel free to reach out. I'll see you guys inside the class. Have an amazing weekend, everybody. Talk to you guys really soon. Bye-bye.
