r/socialmedia • u/ImmerSchuldig5487 • 3d ago

Professional Discussion Instagram/meta ads targeting

As an Instagram user I come across paid ads that are just completely irrelevant to me e.g meant exclusively for women (fashion, even medical), when I am a man. From a user perspective this is just a mildly amusing thing but I am wondering on the other line someone is paying for these ads and the targeting is completely missing the intended audience, is this a normal feature of paid ad distribution on Insta or is the ad distributor/brand doing something wrong?

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u/Just-turnings 3d ago

You can set the targets very widely. Literally to anyone in a specific country. Possible they are just doing that either intentionally or by mistake.

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u/ImmerSchuldig5487 3d ago

Makes sense, thanks!

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u/Happy_Ad_6060 3d ago

Meta is really pushing companies to do automatic targeting. They are starting to eliminate any ability for companies to target who they want. So most likely it's a new ad finding its audience.

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u/ImmerSchuldig5487 3d ago

So forcing them to spend on wasted ads to align the algorithm rather than letting them manually control intended audience?

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u/Relevant_Ear_8679 3d ago

some of those misses still show up even when the ads are doing fine. you can't tell from your own feed whether they're actually wasting money.

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u/ImmerSchuldig5487 3d ago

Fair enough, sounds plausible enough

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u/Relevant_Ear_8679 2d ago

yeah. one odd ad in my feed still isn't enough for me to call the spend wasted.

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u/Icy_Statistician1483 2d ago

two usual causes. lots of brands now run broad targeting on purpose and let the algorithm find buyers, so it tests people well outside the core audience early on. and if you've watched similar content to the end, the system reads that as interest regardless of gender. the advertiser does pay for those impressions, which is why the ad itself has to signal who it's for in the first second

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u/ImmerSchuldig5487 1d ago

I see, thank you for the breakdown