When moving to new audiences or “unexploited” audiences you should be aware of the fact that Facebook will ask you for more money. Now don’t worry this is not a shakedown, and this isn’t the mob, this is normal. External and new audiences take more time and more money to find the conversions that you might see in your internal audiences.

You’ve probably noticed that lookalike targeting is more expensive than internal traffic source targeting, such as (website visitors, facebook engagers, instagram engagers, past purchasers). Although this audience looks like the audience you are trying to replicate, it, by definition is not, which is where the difference comes in.

Let’s follow an example:

When targeting external audiences, like lookalikes, the cost per result looks something like this. Of course it also depends on the number of conversions. When there is only one conversion, (like in July, in our example) the CPA is higher than the one in a month with more than 10 conversions.

However, when we analyze more closely the internal strategy, we’ll find some interesting things:

We hardly hit the 40.00$ CPA, because we are targeting people that have already heard of us, via website, or social media channels: Instagram and Facebook. These people know who you are, they may have even purchased from you before, the cost to convert those people will inevitably be less. There’s less work to do!

Also, the conversions look far better, and mostly are between 20-30 purchases. 

What to choose? Internal or external? One seems clearly better than the other, however...

We generally opt for a mix between these 2 strategies, splitting the budget 40% for internal and 60% for external, is a good place to start. If your budget is too low, and you want to have more conversions at a lower cost per acquisition, you should definitely opt for an internal campaign, as you’ll probably get better results than splitting the budget between an expensive strategy (lookalikes) and a more accessible one (internal). 

Either way, it’s a delicate balance you will only find with trial and error!