Solved: Refining IG Ads Targetting for Premium Brand Reach

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I've had a look at your situation with your Instagram ads, and it's a problem I see alot with premium and luxury brands. It's really common to fall into the trap of targeting what seems like the obvious interests, only to find you're attracting window shoppers instead of actual buyers. Happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of guidance on this. The issue here isn't just a simple tweak to your interest list; it's a bit more fundamental and has to do with the signals you're sending to Meta's algorithm and how you're defining your customer in the first place. You're right to feel like something is wrong, because your current approach is probably costing you a fair bit of money for very little in return.

We'll need to tear it down a bit and build it back up, but the result will be a strategy that actually seeks out people with purchasing power.

We'll need to look at why your current targeting is attracting the wrong crowd...

Okay, so let's be brutally honest about your current setup. On the surface, it looks logical. You're selling luxury, so you target luxury brands and lifestyles. But this is the single biggest mistake most brands in your position make, and it's the reason you're getting interactions from profiles that don't match your market.

Think about who "likes" the Dior or Louis Vuitton pages on Facebook or Instagram. Is it exclusively people who drop thousands on a handbag without a second thought? Of course not. It's millions of people. It's teenagers who dream of owning a piece one day, influencers who get sent free stuff, people who saved up for a year to buy a single wallet, and a huge mass of people who just admire the brand aesthetic but could never affford it. By targeting these broad, aspirational interests, you are deliberately putting your ads in front of a massive audience of non-buyers. You're fishing in a giant, muddy pond hoping to catch a prize fish, when you should be fishing in a small, clear, exclusive stream where you know they live.

The interest category "purchased high value goods" is also a bit of a red herring. Meta's definition of "high value" is incredibly vague and not tailored to the true luxury market. It might include someone who bought an expensive phone or a designer t-shirt on sale. It doesn't effectively seperate the truly affluent from the mass-market consumer who occasionally splurges. It's just not a reliable signal for the kind of customer you're after.

And then there's your campaign objective. You mention running an "awareness" campaign. Here's an uncomfortable truth about platforms like Meta: when you set your campaign objective to "Brand Awareness" or "Reach," you give the algorithm a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being very good at its job, goes out and finds the users inside your targeting who are the least likely to click, least likely to engage in a meaningful way, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because those users aren't in demand. Their attention is cheap. You are, quite literally, paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for a premium product. I remember working on a luxury brand launch where the initial temptation was to go for reach, but we knew it would be a waste. We generated over 10 million views, but we did it by focusing on objectives that lead to action, not just passive views. Awareness should be a byproduct of effective advertising that drives sales, not the goal itself.

The seperate campaigns for iOS and Android? It's a micro-optimisation. While there's some data to suggest iOS users might have a higher average spend, it's a minor detail that distracts from the core strategic flaw. You could have the most perfectly segmented device-level campaign in the world, but if you're feeding it the wrong objective and the wrong audience signals, you're just efficiently delivering the wrong message to the wrong people on different phones. It's like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. We need to fix the course of the ship first.

I'd say you need to redefine your customer, not just their interests...

This is the most important shift in thinking you need to make. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile for a moment. "Man in a big city, age 35-55, likes luxury cars" tells you almost nothing of value. It leads to the generic ads you're running now, which speak to no one in particular.

To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain, their desire, their status anxiety, or their specific, urgent, expensive problem. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. What is the *real* reason someone buys your luxury product? You don't sell a "premium handbag"; you sell the feeling of confidence and arrival walking into a high-stakes meeting. You don't sell a "fine watch"; you sell a legacy piece that quietly communicates success without saying a word. You don't sell "bespoke jewellery"; you sell the solution to the nightmare of giving a gift that feels generic and forgettable.

Once you've isolated that emotional core, you can find the real signals of wealth. Where do these people *actually* spend their time and attention, both online and off? It's not on the main Dior page. They're reading The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal. They're looking at property on Knight Frank. They might follow specific art critics, belong to exclusive golf clubs, or listen to niche business podcasts like 'Acquired' on their commute. They use services like AMEX Centurion (Black Card). Their interests aren't "luxury lifestyle"; their interests are polo, yachting, collecting rare art, angel investing, or attending specific charity galas. These are much harder signals for the average person to replicate and, therefore, much more powerful for targeting.

Your job is to become an expert in their world. This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You have to do this work first, or you have no business spending another pound on ads. Let's look at what this means in practice.

You see the difference? The first column is shouting "I'm a luxury brand!" into a crowded stadium. The second column is whispering an inside secret into the ear of the right person in a private club. That's the level of detail required.

You probably should rethink your entire campaign objective...

This is just as important as the targeting. Running "Awareness" campaigns is actively harming your efforts. You must switch your campaign objective immediately.

For a business selling products, even very expensive ones, your primary campaign objective on Meta should almost always be Conversions, with the conversion event set to Purchase. I know this sounds counterintuitive. You might think, "but my product is £5,000, no one will buy from a single ad, so I won't get any conversions and the campaign will fail." This is a misunderstanding of how the algorithm works.

When you optimise for Purchases, you are sending the most powerful signal possible to Meta. You're saying, "My only goal is to find the tiny fraction of people in this audience who actually buy things like this. Ignore everyone else. I don't care about likes, comments, or views from people who won't spend money. Find me the buyers."

The algorithm will then begin its work. It will show your ad to a small subset of your target audience it thinks is most likely to buy. Even if you don't get an immediate sale, you will get higher-quality traffic to your site. You'll get people adding to their basket, or initiating checkout. Each of these actions is a valuable data point. The algorithm learns from this. It sees that Person A (who has a history of high-end online purchases) clicked and added to cart, while Person B (the aspirational browser) just scrolled past. It learns to find more people like Person A.

Over time, this is how you build a profile of your actual customer inside Meta's system. You are training the algorithm with your own money to become an expert at finding your ideal customer. An awareness campaign trains it to be an expert at finding cheap impressions. It's a completely different task. We've seen this work for all sorts of ecommerce clients. I remember one women's apparel campaign where switching to a conversion-focused strategy took them to a 691% return on ad spend. It works because you align your business goal (sales) with the algorithm's goal.

Your lookalike audiences will also become infinitely more powerful. A lookalike of "people who engaged with my ad" is useless. A lookalike of "people who have purchased a £5,000 item from my website" is pure gold. It's the most valuable audience you could possibly build, and you can only build it by optimising for actual purchases from day one.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Once you have the right objective and the right targeting approach, you need to speak their language. The creative and the copy are the final, critical pieces of the puzzle. Generic "shop now" ads with a product photo won't cut it. Your ads must feel as premium and exclusive as your products.

This means investing in world-class photography and videography. The visuals must instantly communicate quality, craftsmanship, and the lifestyle your product enables. No shortcuts here.

Your copy needs to connect with that "nightmare" or "desire" we talked about earlier. A great framework for this is Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS). You don't sell the product; you sell the transformation.

This kind of copy connects on an emotional level. It's not about features; it's about the feeling, the status, and the outcome. This is what compels a high-value individual to stop scrolling and consider your brand seriously.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To pull this all together, this isn't about small adjustments. It's a complete strategic overhaul of how you approach paid advertising on social media. It requires more thought upfront, a commitment to quality, and patience as you train the algorithm. But it's the only way to build a sustainable and profitable customer acquisition engine for a luxury brand. This is the main advice I have for you, laid out as a clear plan.

Executing this strategy requires a level of discipline and expertise that goes beyond simply setting up ads. It's about understanding the deep mechanics of the platform and the psychology of the affluent consumer. It involves constant testing, analysis, and refinement. This is the difference between just 'running ads' and building a predictable system for growth.

This is where professional help can make a huge difference. An expert can navigate these complexities, implement this kind of advanced strategy correctly from the start, and save you a significant amount of time and wasted ad spend. It's about having someone who has made the mistakes before and knows how to build the machine correctly the first time.

If you'd like to discuss how we could implement a strategy like this for your brand in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can review your specific situation. Just let us know if that's something you'd be interested in.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh