May 2, 2025 • 12 mins
Let's break down the best audience size to aim for when running Facebook and Instagram ads—and how to start testing with a lookalike of your email list once it’s big enough.
- Cut your lead gen costs in HALF with my $37 mini-course–NOW only $17!
- Visit The Art of Online Business website for Facebook Ads help
If your list is still small, no problem! I show you how to use Detailed Targeting by stacking interests and income filters to hit that sweet spot. I also explain why it’s so important to give your ads a few days to learn—because lead costs usually drop as the algorithm figures things out.
Remember, staying consistent matters… kind of like a toddler who keeps trying until they finally walk. If you want ad campaigns that bring in quality leads without wasting time or money, this is for you.
Watch this episode on YouTube!
Please click here to give an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes! Thanks for your support!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So what is the right audience size for you to target
on Facebook and Instagram ads?
Which audience of all of themshould you probably start off
testing first, and if you don'tqualify for that audience the
one that I go to to test firstin my clients' accounts then
what might you be able to doinstead?
(00:21):
That's what this episode isabout.
You want 1.2 to 3 million inaudience size, because that is a
big enough audience in myexperience, which is just
five-ish years of managing Idon't know around $4 million,
almost $4 million, of ad spendfor clients in meta and Facebook
(00:42):
and Instagram ads Hi, I'mQuwejo, by the way.
That's enough audience for thealgorithm to do its thing.
Now, what do I mean by algorithm?
Do its thing.
Think of this like a two-personLatin dance.
I live here in Mexico.
I have lived here in Mexicosince 2020, when I got stuck
outside of my 12-year home inChina.
That was fun, not fun Lots ofcrying, lots of praying.
(01:04):
But in bachata and salsa, I'mlearning bachata right now.
It's a cool partner dance,right, and you have to give and
you have to take.
I'm the guy, I'm usually theleader, and the lady who's
following me looks for my cuesand I have to make sure, as a
leader, not to be overbearingand to let her shine Well.
When you're running yourFacebook and Instagram ads, it's
(01:26):
like the same thing.
You have your ads managementtricks.
Hopefully you're learning moreand more tricks that can get you
high quality leads at low leadcosts.
Ie reading the signs of what'shappening and if things are
heading south, you can pull outyour trick and change up the ads
.
Right.
So you're doing your adsmanagement, but what a lot of
(01:46):
folks look over is the algorithmneeds to do its thing and you
need to give it time to do itsthing.
I usually give it three dayswhen I first launch ads to do
its thing.
And what is doing its thing?
Its thing is looking inside ofthe audience that you're
targeting for the right kind ofpeople to opt in.
(02:07):
It's what you know.
Facebook meta, if you will,collects like 52,000 data points
on every user, right?
So when you put an ad to work,as in when you publish a new ad,
the algorithm looks at whatyour ad copy is.
You know it sees your visuals,it crawls the website that
you're sending the ad traffic to, but then it also looks at the
(02:30):
data that it's collected aboutyou, your business, if you will,
in your pixel that youhopefully have already had
installed on your website andconnected to your various
softwares and connected to yourvarious softwares.
And then it goes and looks atthe folks in your audience and
begins its work of testing yourad out and seeing who responds
(02:50):
the best and taking note ifalgorithms can even take notes
on what kind of person would bethe best person to opt in for
your ad.
Right, this takes a bit.
Usually three days could befour days, and during that time,
that's why you'll usually seelead costs on day one start off
(03:11):
higher than you had hoped andthen on day two they should
trend downward and on day threethey should further trend
downward.
That's your dance partner doingits thing.
You're letting it shine, andthen you know, on day four and
five, you can start to.
Then you know, on day four andfive, you can start to tweak.
You know, turn off lowperforming ads, add in new ad
creative, add in new ad copy,whatever you'd like.
(03:32):
Well, not whatever you'd like.
There is a science to adsmanagement, and so the next
thing is what audience shouldyou start out testing?
Disclaimer I am just a Facebookand Instagram ads manager.
I am not your Facebook andInstagram ads manager.
Nothing I say will always workfor you, and you need to test
(03:55):
what I'm saying in your account.
That's what we do as admanagers.
We test a bunch of differentthings, but you always should
understand that with Facebookand Instagram ads, you are
taking a risk.
Nothing is guaranteed.
In fact, you are guaranteed tolose money because that's part
of testing through what doesn'twork so that you can find what
(04:16):
does work.
All that being said, when Istart up a client account, the
favorite audience I like to useis called a lookalike audience
of their email list.
Now, lookalike audience is acold audience.
Cold and warm just means thatwarm people know you already or
have entered your businessecosphere, interacted with your
(04:36):
social media accounts, seen yourvideos, been to your website or
even are already on your emaillist, whereas cold means they've
done none of those things.
And so I'll take a client'semail list and upload it to Meta
and say hey, meta, build me abig old cold audience.
Ie look at the folks on thisemail list and then give me, you
(04:58):
know, a million and a half tothree million more people who
share very similar attributes tothe folks said, kind of on
purpose, that your email listshould be at least 600 people
(05:20):
large before you upload it toMeta.
Why?
Because it's not that you'regiving the.
It's not that Meta's taking theemail accounts and building a
lookalike audience off of all ofthose email accounts.
What Meta is actually doing ismatching the names and emails
from that email list to actualFacebook and Instagram user
(05:44):
accounts that it already has andknows about.
Right, because then it can useall the data points it collects
on those Facebook and Instagramuser accounts in order to build
a lookalike audience.
But the thing is is it's neverlike upload 600 emails and you
get 100% match, as in metamatches up those 600 emails with
(06:06):
600 meta accounts.
Nope, it's usually like I don'tknow 40 to 60%.
So imagine uploading like I gotmy calculator here to figure
this out really quick.
But imagine uploading 600emails and then you only
actually Meta only actually canbuild an audience based off of
240 of those emails.
(06:26):
And so what we say in adsmanager world is you want your
email list to be about 600before you do this, and, of
course, the larger the emaillist, the better.
And now I'm going to tell youwhat to do if you do not yet
have an email list of 600.
Or maybe you have an email listthat you use for a previous
(06:48):
business and you're pretty surethat your current email list is
not the right kind of email listthat you want to build a new
audience off of, to target foryour new business.
And the secret here and beforeI tell you the secret, take a
moment please to head down tothe show notes below and click
on this little survey to fill itout and tell me what kind of
(07:12):
Facebook and Instagram topics ortopics for growing your online
course business do you need tohear the most?
Because this podcast thing Idon't like guessing episodes.
I would love to just create thecontent that helps you, because
then it helps you out.
Also, reward me by showing itto more and more people, because
(07:34):
it's exactly what you wantedand it's probably exactly what
the other folks who are coursecreators, membership owners, are
also wanting and needing helpwith.
So please tell me.
It'll take you 90 seconds tojust fill out like five little
itsy bitsy questions to give mea tip, a clue on what you need
(07:54):
help with.
Now let's jump back into whatyou do if your email list is too
small but you still want totarget ads, use something inside
of Meta Ad Manager calledDetailed Audience Targeting.
So you get to Detailed AudienceTargeting by opening up your ad
manager and creating a newcampaign and then coming to the
(08:16):
ad set level, and at the ad setlevel you can scroll down here
until you find detailedtargeting, and then what you
need to do is just put in thekind of interest that you
believe or that you know becauseyou've done your research and
taken surveys, and so put in theinterest that your ideal
(08:37):
clients have.
Now I'll just give you anexample.
I was coaching because I doFacebook ads coaching.
For those of you who, if forbecause I do Facebook ads
coaching.
For those of you who, because Ido Facebook ads coaching, like,
if you have ads that you needto work better, well then you
just have me do one-on-onecoaching with you for 28 days
and you will run a campaign thatworks way better than if you
(09:01):
had just, you know, done all thethings by yourself and tried to
figure it out by yourself,because you get to leverage my
like five-ish years ofexperience for your business
Link in the description below,by the way.
For that, now here's what wedid for a coaching client of
mine is the first step.
She knew who she was serving.
After I asked her who her idealclients were, because she had
(09:24):
already had plenty of customers,right.
So we went in here and we typedcollege grad, you know in the
United States and women, right.
So we went in here and we typedcollege grad you know in the
United States and women, right.
And we got this huge audience.
And then we went to definefurther, because we knew that we
didn't just need to targetcollege graduates.
We wanted to target moms whohad graduated college, that were
parents of older kids.
So what we ended up typing hereis parent.
(09:46):
So what we ended up typing hereis parent, partence, parent of,
and we picked parents withadult children.
Let's say this for now that'seasy enough.
We didn't pick that exact one,but you get the point.
And our audience got smaller.
But then we also knew that themoms who had graduated college,
(10:08):
who were parents with older kids, they tend to come from higher
income households.
So we narrowed it down furtherby going to find further to a
top income and we just stackedall of the top income targeting
options.
Now notice how that audienceshrunk down here.
Well, we could do that for thisclient because she already had
(10:32):
a bunch of paying clients, soshe knew specifically who she
needs to target.
If you don't have tons ofpaying clients already and
you're still exploring, thenyeah, do what I said and see how
I deleted that and we're rightaround 2 million Perfect
audience size.
By the way, right now I'mlooking inside of the ad account
, so click down in the shownotes below so you can hop over
(10:55):
from this audio only podcaststraight to this video on
YouTube and see what I'm lookingat.
And there are a ton ofdifferent audiences for you to
research.
If you spend the time doinggood research as long as, then
(11:16):
your detailed audience targetingby interest should perform well
, and if it doesn't, then test adifferent audience until you
find one that performs well.
But don't just stop and sayFacebook, instagram ads didn't
work for me.
That's like a baby stopping whenthey're trying to figure out
how to walk.
You know, have you ever seen alittle kid just like cry, like
(11:37):
you know this whole walkingthing?
Well, maybe they can't talk yet, but they're like, just this
just isn't for me.
I'm just not going to try towalk.
You know, I tried it and I knowother people can do it and I
see you doing it, mom and dadbut you know it's just too hard,
it didn't work out for me, soI'm going to do something else,
like crawl the rest of my lifeor just keep rolling around.
Now, that's not how it works.
(11:58):
Little babies and toddlers, ifyou will, are persistent until
they can walk and they'll grabon everything and clamor over
everything you know and pullyour tablecloths off the table
and knock over your lamps,trying to stand up and whine and
cry.
So you can kind of hold theirhands.
You know they won't give upuntil they do walk and I want
(12:21):
you to continue being persistentin the same way.
Thank you for telling me in thepodcast survey below what kind
of episodes would help you thebest.
And until the next time, beblessed, take care.
See you in the next one.
So what is the right audience size for you to target
on Facebook and Instagram ads?
Which audience of all of themshould you probably start off
testing first, and if you don'tqualify for that audience the
one that I go to to test firstin my clients' accounts then
what might you be able to doinstead?
(00:21):
That's what this episode isabout.
You want 1.2 to 3 million inaudience size, because that is a
big enough audience in myexperience, which is just
five-ish years of managing Idon't know around $4 million,
almost $4 million, of ad spendfor clients in meta and Facebook
(00:42):
and Instagram ads Hi, I'mQuwejo, by the way.
That's enough audience for thealgorithm to do its thing.
Now, what do I mean by algorithm?
Do its thing.
Think of this like a two-personLatin dance.
I live here in Mexico.
I have lived here in Mexicosince 2020, when I got stuck
outside of my 12-year home inChina.
That was fun, not fun Lots ofcrying, lots of praying.
(01:04):
But in bachata and salsa, I'mlearning bachata right now.
It's a cool partner dance,right, and you have to give and
you have to take.
I'm the guy, I'm usually theleader, and the lady who's
following me looks for my cuesand I have to make sure, as a
leader, not to be overbearingand to let her shine Well.
When you're running yourFacebook and Instagram ads, it's
(01:26):
like the same thing.
You have your ads managementtricks.
Hopefully you're learning moreand more tricks that can get you
high quality leads at low leadcosts.
Ie reading the signs of what'shappening and if things are
heading south, you can pull outyour trick and change up the ads
.
Right.
So you're doing your adsmanagement, but what a lot of
(01:46):
folks look over is the algorithmneeds to do its thing and you
need to give it time to do itsthing.
I usually give it three dayswhen I first launch ads to do
its thing.
And what is doing its thing?
Its thing is looking inside ofthe audience that you're
targeting for the right kind ofpeople to opt in.
(02:07):
It's what you know.
Facebook meta, if you will,collects like 52,000 data points
on every user, right?
So when you put an ad to work,as in when you publish a new ad,
the algorithm looks at whatyour ad copy is.
You know it sees your visuals,it crawls the website that
you're sending the ad traffic to, but then it also looks at the
(02:30):
data that it's collected aboutyou, your business, if you will,
in your pixel that youhopefully have already had
installed on your website andconnected to your various
softwares and connected to yourvarious softwares.
And then it goes and looks atthe folks in your audience and
begins its work of testing yourad out and seeing who responds
(02:50):
the best and taking note ifalgorithms can even take notes
on what kind of person would bethe best person to opt in for
your ad.
Right, this takes a bit.
Usually three days could befour days, and during that time,
that's why you'll usually seelead costs on day one start off
(03:11):
higher than you had hoped andthen on day two they should
trend downward and on day threethey should further trend
downward.
That's your dance partner doingits thing.
You're letting it shine, andthen you know, on day four and
five, you can start to.
Then you know, on day four andfive, you can start to tweak.
You know, turn off lowperforming ads, add in new ad
creative, add in new ad copy,whatever you'd like.
(03:32):
Well, not whatever you'd like.
There is a science to adsmanagement, and so the next
thing is what audience shouldyou start out testing?
Disclaimer I am just a Facebookand Instagram ads manager.
I am not your Facebook andInstagram ads manager.
Nothing I say will always workfor you, and you need to test
(03:55):
what I'm saying in your account.
That's what we do as admanagers.
We test a bunch of differentthings, but you always should
understand that with Facebookand Instagram ads, you are
taking a risk.
Nothing is guaranteed.
In fact, you are guaranteed tolose money because that's part
of testing through what doesn'twork so that you can find what
(04:16):
does work.
All that being said, when Istart up a client account, the
favorite audience I like to useis called a lookalike audience
of their email list.
Now, lookalike audience is acold audience.
Cold and warm just means thatwarm people know you already or
have entered your businessecosphere, interacted with your
(04:36):
social media accounts, seen yourvideos, been to your website or
even are already on your emaillist, whereas cold means they've
done none of those things.
And so I'll take a client'semail list and upload it to Meta
and say hey, meta, build me abig old cold audience.
Ie look at the folks on thisemail list and then give me, you
(04:58):
know, a million and a half tothree million more people who
share very similar attributes tothe folks said, kind of on
purpose, that your email listshould be at least 600 people
(05:20):
large before you upload it toMeta.
Why?
Because it's not that you'regiving the.
It's not that Meta's taking theemail accounts and building a
lookalike audience off of all ofthose email accounts.
What Meta is actually doing ismatching the names and emails
from that email list to actualFacebook and Instagram user
(05:44):
accounts that it already has andknows about.
Right, because then it can useall the data points it collects
on those Facebook and Instagramuser accounts in order to build
a lookalike audience.
But the thing is is it's neverlike upload 600 emails and you
get 100% match, as in metamatches up those 600 emails with
(06:06):
600 meta accounts.
Nope, it's usually like I don'tknow 40 to 60%.
So imagine uploading like I gotmy calculator here to figure
this out really quick.
But imagine uploading 600emails and then you only
actually Meta only actually canbuild an audience based off of
240 of those emails.
(06:26):
And so what we say in adsmanager world is you want your
email list to be about 600before you do this, and, of
course, the larger the emaillist, the better.
And now I'm going to tell youwhat to do if you do not yet
have an email list of 600.
Or maybe you have an email listthat you use for a previous
(06:48):
business and you're pretty surethat your current email list is
not the right kind of email listthat you want to build a new
audience off of, to target foryour new business.
And the secret here and beforeI tell you the secret, take a
moment please to head down tothe show notes below and click
on this little survey to fill itout and tell me what kind of
(07:12):
Facebook and Instagram topics ortopics for growing your online
course business do you need tohear the most?
Because this podcast thing Idon't like guessing episodes.
I would love to just create thecontent that helps you, because
then it helps you out.
Also, reward me by showing itto more and more people, because
(07:34):
it's exactly what you wantedand it's probably exactly what
the other folks who are coursecreators, membership owners, are
also wanting and needing helpwith.
So please tell me.
It'll take you 90 seconds tojust fill out like five little
itsy bitsy questions to give mea tip, a clue on what you need
(07:54):
help with.
Now let's jump back into whatyou do if your email list is too
small but you still want totarget ads, use something inside
of Meta Ad Manager calledDetailed Audience Targeting.
So you get to Detailed AudienceTargeting by opening up your ad
manager and creating a newcampaign and then coming to the
(08:16):
ad set level, and at the ad setlevel you can scroll down here
until you find detailedtargeting, and then what you
need to do is just put in thekind of interest that you
believe or that you know becauseyou've done your research and
taken surveys, and so put in theinterest that your ideal
(08:37):
clients have.
Now I'll just give you anexample.
I was coaching because I doFacebook ads coaching.
For those of you who, if forbecause I do Facebook ads
coaching.
For those of you who, because Ido Facebook ads coaching, like,
if you have ads that you needto work better, well then you
just have me do one-on-onecoaching with you for 28 days
and you will run a campaign thatworks way better than if you
(09:01):
had just, you know, done all thethings by yourself and tried to
figure it out by yourself,because you get to leverage my
like five-ish years ofexperience for your business
Link in the description below,by the way.
For that, now here's what wedid for a coaching client of
mine is the first step.
She knew who she was serving.
After I asked her who her idealclients were, because she had
(09:24):
already had plenty of customers,right.
So we went in here and we typedcollege grad, you know in the
United States and women, right.
So we went in here and we typedcollege grad you know in the
United States and women, right.
And we got this huge audience.
And then we went to definefurther, because we knew that we
didn't just need to targetcollege graduates.
We wanted to target moms whohad graduated college, that were
parents of older kids.
So what we ended up typing hereis parent.
(09:46):
So what we ended up typing hereis parent, partence, parent of,
and we picked parents withadult children.
Let's say this for now that'seasy enough.
We didn't pick that exact one,but you get the point.
And our audience got smaller.
But then we also knew that themoms who had graduated college,
(10:08):
who were parents with older kids, they tend to come from higher
income households.
So we narrowed it down furtherby going to find further to a
top income and we just stackedall of the top income targeting
options.
Now notice how that audienceshrunk down here.
Well, we could do that for thisclient because she already had
(10:32):
a bunch of paying clients, soshe knew specifically who she
needs to target.
If you don't have tons ofpaying clients already and
you're still exploring, thenyeah, do what I said and see how
I deleted that and we're rightaround 2 million Perfect
audience size.
By the way, right now I'mlooking inside of the ad account
, so click down in the shownotes below so you can hop over
(10:55):
from this audio only podcaststraight to this video on
YouTube and see what I'm lookingat.
And there are a ton ofdifferent audiences for you to
research.
If you spend the time doinggood research as long as, then
(11:16):
your detailed audience targetingby interest should perform well
, and if it doesn't, then test adifferent audience until you
find one that performs well.
But don't just stop and sayFacebook, instagram ads didn't
work for me.
That's like a baby stopping whenthey're trying to figure out
how to walk.
You know, have you ever seen alittle kid just like cry, like
(11:37):
you know this whole walkingthing?
Well, maybe they can't talk yet, but they're like, just this
just isn't for me.
I'm just not going to try towalk.
You know, I tried it and I knowother people can do it and I
see you doing it, mom and dadbut you know it's just too hard,
it didn't work out for me, soI'm going to do something else,
like crawl the rest of my lifeor just keep rolling around.
Now, that's not how it works.
(11:58):
Little babies and toddlers, ifyou will, are persistent until
they can walk and they'll grabon everything and clamor over
everything you know and pullyour tablecloths off the table
and knock over your lamps,trying to stand up and whine and
cry.
So you can kind of hold theirhands.
You know they won't give upuntil they do walk and I want
(12:21):
you to continue being persistentin the same way.
Thank you for telling me in thepodcast survey below what kind
of episodes would help you thebest.
And until the next time, beblessed, take care.
See you in the next one.
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