Does the Optimize Targeting button work for 𝕏 ads?

It feels so good to be back behind the keys for another edition of 𝕏vertising.

It has been some time.

I have been busy as hell leaning out my business, leaning out my calendar, and my tech stack. Have also been busy working with clients, in the trenches, every day… to scale their X ads accounts.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working with:

• A politician who’s using 𝕏 ads to win his primary.

• A DTC brand who wanted to diversify their media spend off Meta, given the issues they’ve been having with their ad platform.

• A software company, who’s looking to acquire more customers and build their MRR.

I’m happy to report that:

• The politician’s ads are crushing. Getting insane engagement rates and reach.

• The DTC brand’s 𝕏 ads are acquiring customers at about half the cost of their Meta ads.

• The software company just booked a meeting with one of their biggest leads, ever.

Things are going pretty well so far.

I will hopefully be granted permission from said clients to publish these results as case studies in the future. But for now, I can give you some high level insights into what was working.

Maybe in the future, I’ll be able to show you specific ads and break them down.

For now, I have something else I want to discuss…

This button right here:

The mother fucking Optimize Targeting button.

What even is this thing?

Does it work?

Should you turn it on?

Well, I have some theories about this button. I’ve been playing with it myself. Let me tell you the story:

When I first start researching 𝕏 ads, I came across a video from a guy who said to NEVER push this button under ANY circumstances.

Because once you set your targeting pool, if you turn that button on, it starts shooting the ads out to a much larger audience.

For example:

Now, if you carefully constructed an ideal audience, you might watch in horror as you click this button and see your audience shoot up to 20x it’s size.

Won’t that fuck everything up?

Well…

Here’s my understanding of this little button.

Sure, you can use the audience you compiled and roll out your initial test. If you find that you’ve built a good audience, you can let those ads run. At some point tho, if you don’t have enough creative, your frequency might get too high and your performance might drop.

Possibly. Maybe. Gotta test and find out for yourself. For some people, more frequency is a good thing.

Anyway…

You can turn this button on and it’ll start performing more like Meta’s broad targeting features.

It’s not a 1=1 comparison, in terms of how the algos work, but I’d imagine it’s somewhat similar. It uses machine learning to find more people like the ones who are completing your target objective.

At first, I was a bit hesitant to use this button.

I feared that it was a “traffic sinkhole.”

Similar to a “collateralized debt obligation”… where they’d start bundling in shit traffic with your good traffic, because they need to monetize more of their inventory.

So, for a while, I didn’t use this button.

And I don’t use this button for ALL my campaigns, either.

I spoke with a few people inside 𝕏 and they were a little surprised to hear that I heard from people that you should never use this button.

Were they trying to trap me?

Trying to get me to monetize their junk inventory by using this button?

Well…

After doing a bunch of testing, I haven’t found that to be true.

I think this button is, in fact, useful.

Again, I don’t use it in all campaigns. If you’ve compiled a smaller audience (only a tens of hundreds of thousands of people), it probably makes sense to use this button.

I just built a new audience for a client where we’re going to hit about 9.9 million profiles. At the start, I’m not going to use this button because I want to see if we were accurate in our assumptions going after this broader market.

After the launch, I’m going to monitor performance. If I think we have room to run within this audience, I’ll leave the button off.

If performance falls off after some time, I’ll flick it on and see if the ML can kick in and find more of our people.

After all…

𝕏 has been making a big push toward integrating more ML & AI:

Holy fuck, it’s about to get crazy.

I’m excited to test out this feature once it drops.

Plus, there’s this…

What’s going to happen when you can pay for products with the click of a button on 𝕏?

I could be wrong… but it seems like that’s the direction things are headed.

Very exciting times to be an 𝕏 advertiser.

Anyway…

If you’re finally ready to jump in and start scaling your business with 𝕏 ads, then hit reply to this email and say SCALE.

We can come up with a game plan to help you start acquiring more customers and clients fast.

Chris Orzechowski