There was a time when the majority of my ad budget was spent on remarketing in one form or another: Website visitors, email list, followers, post engagement, and more. I’ve abandoned much of this in favor of Meta’s algorithmic targeting, but there are exceptions.

There are times when remarketing continues to make good, smart sense.

Don’t misunderstand my intent. I still think advertisers use remarketing far too often. It’s not only less effective than it once was (and advertisers often misinterpret the effectiveness of their remarketing results), but it’s also often unnecessary.

Let me explain…

Why Remarketing is Mostly Unnecessary

Don’t confuse the message here. Reaching people who are most closely connected to your business remains valuable.

One of the primary reasons that a separate remarketing ad set is mostly unnecessary now is that algorithmic targeting will prioritize these people anyway. When using Advantage+ Audience, Meta prioritizes conversion history, pixel data, and prior engagement with your ads.

You can prove this with the help of audience segments. I’ve seen repeatedly that Meta spends in the range of 25 to 35 percent of my budget on my existing customers and engaged audience (those who are on my email list or have visited my website, but who haven’t yet bought from me).

Here’s an example, using Advantage+ Audience without suggestions…

I’ve also seen this when using original audiences going broad…

Here’s an example using two different ad sets: One using Advantage+ Audience without suggestions and one using only remarketing.

When using Advantage+ Audience without suggestions, Meta spent 45 percent of my budget on the same people that I otherwise targeted specifically in a separate ad set. By giving the algorithm more freedom, I found that it maintained a more reasonable frequency compared to when I only targeted the remarketing group.

Meta now combines remarketing and prospecting to create an optimal balance. It will otherwise be more expensive to reach your remarketing audience (which tends to also be the most likely to perform the action that you want), but the prospecting group is larger and cheaper.

For this reason, general remarketing (where you target broad groups of website visitors, email list, and people who have engaged with your page) is rarely necessary now. It happens automatically.

Misinterpretation of Results

I should also point out that one reason some advertisers continue to swear by remarketing is a misinterpretation or misunderstanding of their results. Whenever I see someone share conversion results or ROAS that seem too good to be true, it’s often because the results are inflated.

To be clear, remarketing results should be good. But they will also be inflated. This is a great opportunity to break down your results and test how good they actually are.

Use the Compare Attribution Settings feature and break down your results by attribution setting. It would also be good to use First Conversion reporting (or at least both First Conversion and All Conversions).

When remarketing, you can expect a disproportionately high concentration in the 1-Day View column. That’s usually because of two different scenarios:

1. You emailed people on the same day they were shown your ad.
2. Regular website visitors happened to visit on the same day they were shown your ad.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the ad didn’t do anything. In some cases, these customers saw it and it contributed to their buying decision. But a very common scenario is that they didn’t even see your ad. They would have made the purchase anyway.

View-through conversions are much more valuable when they come from new customers. They saw your ad or were impacted by it, but they didn’t click it. They remembered the product or brand and Googled you later. Then they made a purchase.

But when remarketing, at least a decent number of the view-through conversions are fluff.

When Remarketing Makes Sense

While remarketing is often unnecessary, there are some exceptions where it remains relevant.

Here are a few to consider…

1. A specific message for a specific group of people.

The most common example is an abandoned cart scenario. You want to show a different ad to people who have recently added your product to their cart but haven’t purchased. You may want to offer a discount to incentivize the sale.

Of course, it’s debatable whether this is necessary. Meta should prioritize people who have added to cart when determining who will see your ads. It will be more expensive to isolate those people in a separate ad set. It’s worth testing.

I’m actually using a variation of this right now. I have a special offer, but I only want a very specific segment of my email list to see it. While it’s open to the public, my preference for this higher-value offer is people who have bought from me before.

In this case, I am targeting the same people I am emailing about this offer. I even refer to the email in the ad copy.

With this approach, I understand that the ad is only part of the sales pitch. Since it’s a high-dollar commitment, I’m hoping that it will help motivate these people to complete the sale.

I know that my ads will only be partly responsible for the conversions that are reported in Ads Manager. But my hope is to optimize the total number of sign-ups. Since the audience is small, the total amount of ad spend will be reasonably small, too. And since the sticker amount is about $1,000, it’s a low-risk approach that makes sense.

2. Low budget and a challenge to get results.

You’re trying to sell a high-dollar product, but you’ve only been given $50 or less of budget per day. You don’t have the option of building leads and need to go straight to the sale. Remarketing should be an option.

Yes, remarketing will happen naturally if you target more broadly. But maybe the remarketing audience is relatively small. Regardless, you may struggle to achieve meaningful results.

Remarketing doesn’t guarantee results here, but it’s at least a lower-cost option.

3. Top of funnel optimization.

Optimizing for link clicks, landing page views, video views, post engagement, or anything other than a conversion can be problematic. It’s even more so when algorithmic targeting is at play because Meta will do all it can to find you the cheapest action that you want. This is often at the expense of quality. By remarketing, you can limit your audience to people you’ve already determined are higher affinity.

I’ve done this when promoting my blog posts or Reels. I know that I’ll get lots of low-quality clicks or plays if I allow the algorithm to search out anyone to engage with them. But if my goal is to get more of the people who have already proven to engage with my content, I will isolate them with a custom audience.

Beware of Soft Remarketing

While remarketing still has its place, there’s a specific strategy that you should avoid and it goes like this…

1. Run an ad that optimizes for link clicks, landing page views, or video views.

2. Create an audience of the people who engaged with the first ad.

3. Target the people who engaged with the first ad.

The reason this is problematic is the issue we’ve already discussed about top-of-the-funnel optimization. If you optimize for link clicks, landing page views, video views, or just about any other action other than a conversion, you can expect low-quality activity. You are creating a custom audience of low-quality activity. And then you are remarketing to a low-quality audience.

If you’re going to use remarketing, be sure that you’re actually targeting a high-quality group of people. Investigate how that audience was created in the first place. Organically-generated audiences or those built when optimizing for conversions will typically be your best bet.

Let Algorithmic Targeting Do Most of the Work

Remarketing still has its place, but you should allow algorithmic targeting to do the heavy lifting — especially when optimizing for purchases. “Algorithmic targeting” doesn’t only include going broad or using Advantage+ Audience. It includes any situation where your audience is expanded (and that covers a high percentage of our inputs now).

Broader targeting should take up the bulk of your ad spend. While remarketing zeroes in on the people who are already close to you, there’s limited incremental lift. You also want to bring in new people who would have never bought from you if not for your ads.

Remarketing is a good short-term, low-risk play. Broader targeting is a slower, long-term play that will help assure you have a remarketing audience to reach in the future.

Your Turn

Do you still use remarketing strategies? What specific examples of remarketing success or challenges can you share?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 3 Times You Should Prioritize Remarketing Over Meta’s Algorithmic Ad Targeting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of the challenges resulting from audience expansion and algorithmic targeting is the lack of visibility into who sees our ads. When the advertiser loses control over defining the target audience, how can we trust that our ads are shown to the right people?

Audience Segments can help.

Let’s take a closer look at this incredibly valuable tool…

What Are They?

When running Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, advertisers have very little impact on who sees their ads.

When using Advantage+ Audience, most targeting inputs are used as audience suggestions only.

Even when using original audiences, an advertiser’s targeting inputs are often expanded — either manually or automatically.

The resultant mystery about who sees your ads can be frustrating. A benefit of Audience Segments is that advertisers can get visibility into how budget and performance are distributed between important groups.

Audience Segments allow advertisers to define people who are connected to their business:

• Engaged Audience: People who have interacted with your business but have not made a purchase
• Existing Customers: People who have bought a product or signed up for your services

Anyone who falls outside of these groups will be considered a New Audience. You will then be able to see how much of your budget was spent on each group — as well as how performance varied between them.

Audience Segments were first made available for Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. In the beginning, advertisers were only able to define Existing Customers. Not only did this allow them to view breakdowns of results by customers and non-customers, but it could be used to set an Existing Customer Budget Cap for those campaigns.

The Engaged Audience segment would soon follow. Meta eventually rolled out Audience Segments for all sales campaigns — whether manual or Advantage+ Shopping. While it doesn’t allow for an Existing Customer Budget Cap on manual campaigns, these Audience Segments are enormously useful for reporting.

NOTE: You’ll know that you can leverage Audience Segments for manual Sales campaigns if you see this reporting section when creating a campaign.

Define Them

You won’t be able to leverage Audience Segments until you define them. To define your your Audience Segments, go to Advertising Settings in the All Tools menu. You may need to go to Ad Account Settings first.

Click the section for Audience Segments.

It will look like this…

1. Define Engaged Audience.

If you haven’t yet defined your Engaged Audience, expand this section and it will look like this…

You can select from existing custom audiences or create new custom audiences to define this group. You’ll want to use every method possible to help define people who have engaged with you. That includes Website, Customer List, App Activity, Offline Activity, Catalog, Lead Form, and Shopping.

Note that this will not include certain types of custom audiences like Page Engagement, Instagram Account Engagement, and Video View Engagement.

There will be overlap — not only between custom audiences within Engaged Audience, but between your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers. Do not worry about excluding people to prevent that overlap. People will only be counted once. If someone is shown your ad who exists in both the Engaged Audience and Existing Customers, they will only be counted as an Existing Customer.

Define this Audience Segment as throughly as possible. Here’s what mine looks like…

2. Define Existing Customers.

If you haven’t defined your Existing Customers, expand it and it will look like this…

You will want to define this based on people who have bought from you. There is a bit of confusion in Meta’s definition since it also includes “people signed up for your services.” I do not interpret that as being anyone who is on your email list (these people would be part of your Engaged Audience). A purchase needs to be made.

The most common ways to define this will be a segmented customer list of people who have made a purchase. I’ve created several Customer List Custom Audiences based on specific purchases as well as one that captures all purchases. I also use a Website Custom Audience based on the Purchase standard event that fired during the past 180 days.

Here’s what my Existing Customers Audience Segment looks like…

Depending on your business, you could certainly use Shopping, App Activity, Offline Activity, and and Catalog Custom Audiences, too.

Leverage with Breakdowns

Once your Audience Segments have been defined, you can leverage them for Ads Manager breakdowns going forward. How long will it take until it’s available? It could be as quick as a few minutes, or it could take longer.

Then click the Breakdowns dropdown menu in Ads Manager (between Columns and Reports).

You will have two different breakdowns that you can use.

1. Breakdown by Audience Segments.

This is found under “By Demographics.” When your Audience Segments are defined, your results will be broken down to include three separate rows:

• Engaged Audience
• Existing Customers
• New Audience

Here’s an example…

You may also see Uncategorized or Unknown. “Uncategorized” will appear when viewing campaigns that don’t qualify (not a Sales campaign). Keep in mind that not everyone has this for manual Sales campaigns.

“Unknown” may reflect that ads were delivered to people while your Audience Segments weren’t yet defined. I’ve also seen some results for Unknown temporarily before they eventually move to one of the two Audience Segments.

2. Breakdown by Country and Audience Segments.

This is found under “By Geography.” You will then get breakdowns by Audience Segments for each country where people were shown your ads. Here’s an example…

Examples of How I Use Them

I’ve had lots of fun using Audience Segments with both Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and manual Sales campaigns. This feature was central to a test I ran to determine how much our audience inputs matter (and how much remarketing happens) when using various targeting approaches.

1. Advantage+ Audience without Suggestions.

I was curious how much of my budget would be spent on remarketing without providing any suggestions at all. It was a lot!

2. Advantage+ Audience with Suggestions.

If that much remarketing happens without providing suggestions, what happens when I provide suggestions that match my Audience Segments exactly? Maybe surprisingly, the distribution was virtually unchanged.

3. Original Audiences Using Custom Audiences with Advantage Custom Audience Turned On.

If I use Original Audiences, would Meta respect my inputs more before going broader? Once again, the custom audiences I used matched my Audience Segments. Distribution was again about the same.

4. Original Audiences Going Broad.

What about using Original Audiences and going broad? Well, still lots of remarketing!

5. Advantage+ Shopping Campaign Optimizing for a Complete Registration.

And finally, I created an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign that optimizes for the Complete Registration event to be consistent with what I did in the other four tests. So far, this is looking a lot like Advantage+ Audience without suggestions.

Here are my main takeaways from these tests:

1. Algorithmic targeting and audience expansion do indeed result in remarketing. This is a good thing!

2. It is unclear how much our targeting inputs matter when audience expansion and algorithmic targeting are at play. The distribution of my budget and results were all within a similar range for each approach.

Feel free to use Audience Segments for your own tests!

Your Turn

Have you started using Audience Segments? What have you learned from using them?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Guide to Audience Segments appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

A long-running mystery in the era of algorithmic Meta ad delivery can finally be answered: How much do our targeting inputs matter?

I’ve run a test that reveals how much Meta distributes ad delivery between my remarketing audiences and prospecting while relying on algorithmic targeting and expansion. The results are surprising, encouraging, and enlightening.

This post is a bit of a rabbit hole, but it’s worth it. Let’s get to it…

Background and Historical Context

Years ago, targeting was simple. We made a series of selections using custom audiences, lookalike audiences, detailed targeting, and demographics. We then expected that our ads would reach people within those groups.

But, that all began to change with the introduction of Advantage audience expansion. At first, it was an option. Then expansion became the default for detailed targeting and lookalike audiences with certain objectives. And finally, Meta introduced the next level of hands-off, algorithmic delivery: Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and Advantage+ Audience.

Luckily, Meta made audience segments available to provide important visibility into how Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns were delivered. We could then see how much of our budget went to our engaged audience, existing customers, and new audience (or prospecting). This was critical since these campaigns didn’t allow for any of the audience inputs we typically expected.

Meanwhile, advertisers confronted with the unknown of how Advantage+ Audiences delivered their ads often chose the greater control found with original audiences. But even then, audiences often expanded. The mystery went unanswered.

And then Meta expanded access to audience segments for all campaigns that utilize the Sales objective (this feature is still rolling out). While this includes Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, it also applies to any manual campaign that utilizes the Sales objective. And this doesn’t require optimizing for a purchase.

This new option opened up a world of possibilities for testing and transparency. I recently wrote a blog post about the test I was starting. And now I’m ready to share my initial results.

My Test

The basis of this test was simple. I wanted to use audience segments to get a better sense of how my ads were delivered when using the following targeting setups:

1. Advantage+ Audience without suggestions
2. Advantage+ Audience with suggestions using custom audiences that match my audience segments
3. Original Audiences using custom audiences that match my audience segments — with Advantage Custom Audience turned on

This was all part of a single campaign that utilized the Sales objective and a website conversion location.

Since the purchase conversion event isn’t required for this objective, I used this test to promote a lead magnet that utilizes the Complete Registration standard event.

In terms of demographics, I used all ages in the countries of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. These are the four countries that make up the largest percentages of my customer base.

I initially started running the ad sets concurrently before I quickly switched gears and ran one at a time without distraction. I spent a modest $270 (or so, not exact) for each ad set.

I contend a large budget wasn’t necessary for this test since my questions were answered rather quickly. My focus wasn’t on whether any of these ad sets were “successful” in terms of generating conversions. Far too many factors impact Cost Per Conversion (the ad, the offer, the landing page), and that just wasn’t a concern here.

Granted, spending thousands of dollars would give me more confidence in these results. And I’ll certainly be monitoring whether what happened here continues with my advertising in the future. But, there were very clear learnings here, even with a modest budget.

My primary concern was simple:

1. How will ads get delivered?
2. How will my budget get spent?
3. How will it be distributed between my engaged audience, existing customers, and new audience?

We have answers.

Defining My Audience Segments

A critical piece to this test is how I’ve defined my audience segments. This is done within your ad account settings.

1. Engaged Audience. These are people who have engaged with my business but have not made a purchase. I’ve used a website custom audience for all visitors during the past 180 days and a data file of all of my newsletter subscribers.

2. Existing Customers. These are people who have made a purchase. I used website custom audiences and data file custom audiences for those who have bought from me before.

There will be overlap between these two groups, of course. A Meta representative confirmed that if anyone is in both groups, they will only be counted as an existing customer.

Once these are defined, we’ll be able to use breakdowns by audience segments in Ads Manager to see results of sales campaigns for each group.

Test Group 1: Advantage+ Audience Without Suggestions

This may have been the biggest mystery of all. When you use Advantage+ Audience without suggestions, who will see your ads?

Meta gave us some clues in their documentation, indicating that remarketing was likely a big part of where delivery starts.

But this passage isn’t definitive, and I wanted to prove this actually happens — or doesn’t. Well, it happens. Boy, does it happen.

I didn’t provide any audience suggestions, yet a very large chunk of my budget was spent on remarketing to my defined audience segments. More specifically, percentages dedicated to my engaged audience and existing customers…

1. 35.4% of amount spent
2. 23.7% of impressions

That’s incredible. I never would have expected the percentages to be that high. Note that the percentage of impressions is lower because the CPM to reach my audience segments is nearly twice as high as that for the new audience.

This is a relief. While I’ve trusted in Advantage+ Audience up until now, I generally provide audience suggestions because of that small amount of doubt in the back of my mind. But, this proves that Advantage+ Audience doesn’t require suggestions to reach a highly relevant audience.

Test Group 2: Advantage+ Audience With Suggestions

This got me thinking. If Advantage+ Audience without suggestions results in spending 35.4% of my budget on remarketing to my audience segments, what would happen if I provided suggestions? More accurately, what if I provided suggestions that were custom audiences that exactly match the definitions of my audience segments?

It’s reasonable to assume that even more of my budget would be dedicated to these groups. Once again, if we were to take Meta’s explanation of how Advantage+ Audience works, that’s a reasonable explanation. Meta says that if you provide an audience suggestion, they will “prioritize audiences matching your suggestions, before searching more broadly.”

Well, here’s what happened…

So that you don’t have to do any math, here are the percentages dedicated to my engaged audience and existing customers when using audience suggestions that matched those audience segments…

1. 32.4% of amount spent
2. 29.0% of impressions

By comparison, here are the percentages when not providing any suggestions:

1. 35.4% of amount spent
2. 23.7% of impressions

So, a higher percentage (by 3%, but still higher) of my budget was spent on reaching my audience segments when not providing suggestions than when using custom audiences that matched those audience segments as suggestions. While the percentage of impressions dedicated to those groups was higher, that’s because the CPM to reach my new audience was higher with this approach.

If we hadn’t first tested Advantage+ Audience without suggestions, we’d say that this test proved that Meta did in fact prioritize reaching the audience suggestions before going broader. But, since at best there was no difference in prioritization when not providing any suggestions at all, it’s inconclusive.

My take: Audience suggestions are optional, and in some cases they are unnecessary. If you have an established ad account with extensive conversion and pixel history like I do, you probably don’t need it. In fact, it may even be (slightly) detrimental.

Test Group 3: Original Audiences Using Advantage Custom Audience

Many advertisers have chosen to use original audiences instead of Advantage+ Audience because they don’t trust the lack of transparency of algorithmic targeting. So, I wanted to test one more thing that could be proven with audience segments.

Audience segments won’t help us with better understanding ad distribution with Advantage Detailed Targeting or Advantage Lookalike. While they will help us understand how many of the people reached were already connected to us, it won’t answer questions about how much the audience is expanded — and how that compares to using Advantage+ Audience with or without suggestions.

But, we can learn a lot from how expansion works with Advantage Custom Audience. In that case, Meta should prioritize the custom audiences we provide before expanding and going broader. Technically, it may not have to go broader, and we don’t know how much broader it goes when it does.

So, I ran a test that was similar to the one where I used Advantage+ Audience with suggestions. In this case, I used original audiences and provided the custom audiences that match my audience segments. And then I turned Advantage Custom Audience on.

Here are the results…

Here’s how that breaks down by budget spent and impressions towards the original custom audiences…

1. 26.4% of amount spent
2. 24.1% of impressions

Interesting! In this case, we’d assume that the audience would expand the least and a higher percentage of the budget would be spent on the custom audiences. But, this approach actually resulted in the lowest percentage of budget spent on those groups. The percentage of impressions dedicated to those groups is about the same as when using Advantage+ Audience without suggestions.

Another point to note is that the overall CPM was highest with this approach, though it’s not much higher than when using suggestions. That’s largely driven by a higher CPM to reach the new audience.

The Results: Overall Evaluation

To recap, here are each of those ad sets in one view…

There’s no reason to split hairs here about which approach led to spending more or reaching more of my audience segments. It’s within a margin of error related to randomness that could flip if we tested again — or continued the test.

The main takeaway is this: The overall breakdown in distribution between my remarketing audience segments and new/prospecting audiences was virtually the same for each approach. It made very little difference when using Advantage+ Audience without suggestions, Advantage+ Audience with suggestions, or original audiences using custom audiences and Advantage Custom Audience turned on.

This provides strong evidence that Advantage+ Audience does exactly what Meta says it does. At least in my case, there’s strong evidence that using suggestions is completely unnecessary — or marginally impactful.

I’m also a bit surprised that using the original audiences approach resulted in as much expansion as it did. I expected delivery to hold closer to the custom audiences that I provided — at least in comparison to using Advantage+ Audience.

I didn’t want Cost Per Conversion results to be a distraction in this test because they were not a priority when evaluating distribution. But in case you’re wondering, those results followed very similar trends. Each ad set generated virtually the same number of conversions (within a range of randomness). But, Advantage+ Audience without suggestions provided the most conversions, followed very closely by the other two approaches.

Contributing Factors

It’s important to remember that while these results are generally reflective of how algorithmic ad delivery distributes our ads, they are also unique to me and how this test was set up. There are several factors that may have contributed to what I saw, and you may get very different results.

1. Budget. As I’ve said before, a lower budget still gives us meaningful information here. But, it’s reasonable to expect that the more money I spend, the less will be spent on my audience segments, audience suggestions, or custom audiences. Those audiences will become exhausted and more would likely be spent on the new audience.

2. Audience segment sizes. Very closely related to budget, but this clearly impacts the volume of results I can see from remarketing to these groups. The total sizes of these groups for my test are roughly over 200,000, but closer to 100,000 when limited by the four countries I targeted. The smaller this pool, the less can be spent there.

3. Time elapsed. It’s reasonable to assume that the greatest distribution to these audience segments and custom audiences will happen in the beginning, prior to growing expansion to new audiences. This is again related to the sizes of the audiences and the rate of exhausting them. None of these ad sets ran for a full week, so those percentages would likely drop with time.

4. Conversion event. Since I’m still in the very early stages of analyzing results using audience segments, it’s not clear how much the conversion event used for optimization impacts distribution. We know it does — Meta will make algorithmic changes to find people willing to perform the action that you want. But, it’s not clear how much the event impacts distribution to audience segments, if at all. I used Complete Registration for the conversion event here. Distribution may be different for purchases or custom events.

5. Ad account history. There’s a strong argument that can be made that I should use Advantage+ Audience and there’s no reason to provide audience suggestions. But, that doesn’t mean that’s the case for everyone. It’s possible this is viable for me because of an extensive ad account history with pixel and conversion data to pull from. New accounts, new pixels, or websites that get minimal activity may not have the same advantage. They may see much different results here.

6. Campaign construction. I went back and forth on how to run this. I didn’t run this as an A/B test because I wanted to evaluate natural distribution, rather than forcing delivery without overlap. I also chose to run these ad sets at separate times, rather than concurrently. Even though they ran separately, overlapping delivery was likely (some people may have seen the same ad from multiple ad sets). These decisions likely impacted my results.

Overall, this has been a fun test, but it’s also incomplete. These are numbers I will continue to monitor with my ads going forward to see how it plays out in the future.

Your Turn

Have you run a similar test of manual sales campaigns to see how ads are distributed for you? What did you learn?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How Meta’s Algorithmic Audience Targeting Impacts Ad Distribution: A Test appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Now that audience segments are available for manual Sales campaigns, it opens up all kinds of fun opportunities for testing and learning. That’s what this post is all about.

If you’re not familiar with audience segments, they’re set within your Ad Account Settings. You can define your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers.

This information can then be used to provide greater insight into your reporting. Using breakdowns, you can generate separate rows for each of these groups — as well as “New Audience” (those who qualify for neither group).

This transparency was helpful, even necessary, for Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, which are driven almost entirely by algorithmic targeting without the advertiser’s input. These audience segments help answer questions about who is seeing our ads.

Now that audience segments are available for manual Sales campaigns, we can use this to answer some similar questions that have gone unanswered — until now.

Here are three ways you can leverage audience segments to get greater insights into your manual Sales campaign reporting. At the end, I’ll also provide some surprising results of what I’m seeing…

1. Advantage+ Audience without Suggestions

When you create an ad set that uses Advantage+ Audience, you have the option of providing an audience suggestion.

If you don’t, ad delivery will be entirely algorithmic. Meta says that their “AI uses lots of information to find your audience” — like past conversions, pixel data, and prior engagement with your ads.

Here’s a screenshot of that explanation…

That sounds a whole lot like remarketing, right? In other words, even if you don’t provide an audience suggestion, Meta’s AI should — in theory — prioritize showing ads to people you’d otherwise select to target.

I’ve long wondered whether using an audience suggestion mattered. I’ve decided that while it may not make a difference, it can’t hurt.

But, what actually happens? Does Meta’s AI prioritize remarketing audiences like their documentation claims?

Thanks to audience segments, we can test this. Define your audience segments as thoroughly as possible.

This is how I defined my Engaged Audience…

And my Existing Customers…

Next, create a Sales campaign with Advantage+ Audience without providing an audience suggestion. You will then be able to use Breakdowns by Audience Segment to see how many of the people you reached fall within Engaged Audience, Existing Customers, or New Audience.

2. Advantage+ Audience with Suggestions

We can also use audience segments to help answer our questions about whether providing audience suggestions makes a difference.

As I said in the prior section, I tend to use audience suggestions. It’s partly out of habit. But it’s also out of a belief that, at best, it can help the algorithm get started. At worst, it shouldn’t hurt.

Back to Meta’s documentation. If you provide an audience suggestion, Meta says that they will “prioritize audiences matching your suggestions, before searching more broadly.”

Again, let’s screenshot this for emphasis…

In theory, if we were to provide suggestions matching our Engaged Audience and Existing Customers, we should see Meta’s explanation above reflected in our breakdown by audience segments.

So, let’s do that! Create a Sales campaign using Advantage+ Audience. Provide audience suggestions that match your definitions of Engaged Audience and Existing Customers exactly.

The reason for this approach is simple. There’s no reason to provide detailed targeting or lookalike audiences as suggestions since we can’t use those to define our audience segments. Because of that, we’ll never know for sure whether people in those audiences saw our ads.

Since we’re told that Meta AI will prioritize our audience suggestions before going broader, we can prove that one way or another by using the exact custom audiences for suggestions that we used to define our audience segments. When we breakdown our results, we should see that reflected.

In theory, of course.

3. Original Audiences with Advantage Custom Audience

I’ve mostly abandoned original audiences (and Advantage expansion tools that go with them) since the rollout of Advantage+ Audience.

Original audiences feel like old strategies, and we should use Meta’s new and improved tools. Advantage+ Audience works in much the same way that Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage Lookalike, and Advantage Custom Audience, but Meta says that Advantage+ Audience is better and more advanced.

Back to Meta’s own documentation on Advantage+ Audience, this is spelled out:

Meta’s original audience options, including Advantage options (Advantage detailed targeting, Advantage custom audience and Advantage lookalike), can limit the potential of Meta’s AI which can be less effective.

Based on Meta’s own words, we assume that these work similarly, but Advantage+ Audience has the ability to go much broader (and lead to better results). So, the assumption is that if you turn on audience expansion with original audiences, the audience will expand — but your original inputs may be more respected.

Once again, we need to stick with the topic of custom audiences since these are what can be verified with audience segments. If we provide all of the same custom audiences that were used in our audience segments and turn on Advantage Custom Audience, what would happen?

How many of the people reached would be from our custom audiences? How many would be from expansion? And how does this compare to when using Advantage+ Audience?

We can test this! Once this is set up, use the breakdown by audience segment to see how your ads are distributed.

Initial Learning

I actually started part of this test already. The early results represent a small sample size, and in some cases they have been surprising.

It’s not clear how much the conversion event matters. Will your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers be used differently depending on whether you optimize for a purchase, lead, or something else?

Other factors like the sizes of the audience segments, sizes of the custom audiences used for suggestions, budget, and time may all contribute.

My initial test used a custom event for 60 second website views as the conversion event. The results were staggering. When providing audience suggestions, less than 1% of my budget was spent on them. When providing no suggestions, it was only slightly better.

But, I started a new test and the results have (thankfully) adjusted. Distribution to my Engaged Audience and Existing Customers has increased significantly, regardless of which approach I’m taking. These results have increased my faith in Meta’s claims that remarketing happens, regardless of whether you provide audience suggestions.

I’ll hold off on sharing specifics until I’m done. Until then, I encourage you to test this, too.

A Note on “Sales” Campaigns

Something that flies a bit below the radar is that you don’t technically need to optimize for purchases when running a Sales campaign. Because of that, you could run tests like I describe in this post while optimizing for any website conversion event (leads, registrations, custom events, and whatever else you use).

Sales is simply how you defined your campaign objective.

It doesn’t determine how your ads are optimized. This is defined by your performance goal and conversion event.

This is the case with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, too. Yes, it’s super confusing. You don’t need to optimize for SALES when running Advantage+ Shopping or manual Sales campaigns.

Your Turn

Have you run a test like this? What have you seen?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Leverage Audience Segments for Manual Sales Campaigns appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There have been several recent changes to Meta Sales campaigns that could be hugely impactful, if not transformational. It only makes sense to dedicate a post to highlight them.

In some cases, these are official changes or new features. In others, they are updates that have been spotted in the wild, but Meta hasn’t yet declared them as official changes.

Additionally, I should point out that some of these only apply to Sales campaigns while others apply to one or more other objectives.

In this post, you’ll learn about the following:

1. Audience Segments for ALL Sales Campaigns
2. A New Learning Phase
3. Scale High Performing Ad Sets
4. Schedule Individual Ads
5. Ad Sources and Site Links

Let’s go…

1. Audience Segments for All Sales Campaigns

I spotted this one when creating a Sales campaign recently, and I’m pretty excited about it.

I included the option to turn on Advantage Campaign Budget in the screenshot so that you can see that this is for a manual Sales campaign, not for Advantage+ Shopping. That’s what makes this novel.

One of the benefits of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns is this special reporting feature. Once you define your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers audience segments, you can get deeper insights into your reporting. More on that in a moment.

There is an Audience Segments portion of your Ad Account Settings (it may be in your Advertising Settings). This is normally for Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns only, but now it explicitly states that “these settings apply to all sales campaigns in this ad account.”

You’ll need to define your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers.

Your Engaged Audience should be people who have engaged with you but have not bought. I use my email list and website visitors to define this group. Do not worry about excluding people who have purchased from you (I’ll get to that in a minute).

Your Existing Customers are those who have bought from you. I use specific website custom audiences and email segments to define this.

If a person is found in both audience segments, they will only be considered among Existing Customers.

Now, here’s what’s so great about it. One of the potential issues with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns is that since targeting is entirely algorithmic (you don’t provide targeting inputs), there can be a lack of trust regarding who sees your ads and how they’re delivered. Once you define these groups, you get transparency in your reporting.

When you use the Breakdowns dropdown menu and select By Demographics > Audience Segments…

…you’ll get a separate row for Existing Customers, Engaged Audience, and New Audience.

Back to manual Sales campaigns. This same transparency was needed when using Advantage+ Audience or any of the Advantage audience expansion products. How much is spent on reaching my remarketing audience? How much is spent on existing customers? How much on prospecting to completely new people?

This will not only give you a breakdown of how your money is spent, but where the results come from. That’s insanely helpful.

I’m still holding out hope that Meta will eventually make this available for all campaign objectives. It’s necessary.

2. A New Learning Phase

There are actually two changes related to the Learning Phase that advertisers have spotted recently that could be enormously helpful.

You’re probably familiar with the Learning Phase as the period of time, after publishing a new ad set or making a significant edit, when Meta’s ad algorithm is learning how best to deliver your ads for optimal results.

Typically, that has meant needing 50 optimized actions within a seven-day period (usually the first seven days since publishing). If you are unable to reach that volume, you’ll find yourself in “Learning Limited,” which may prevent you from getting optimal results.

While this might be reasonable for most actions, it’s going to be difficult for the typical brand or advertiser to get 50 conversions in a week when that conversion is a purchase — especially if it’s a high value purchase. As a result, advertisers either avoid optimizing for purchases or they get what is likely sub-optimal results.

That could be changing. Many advertisers have reported seeing a new Learning Phase that requires 10 conversions in three days.

This is huge. While the window is shortened, this only requires getting a little more than three sales per day — rather than the seven that were required previously. If you struggled to exit the Learning Phase in the past, this gives you a very reasonable chance now.

Note that I haven’t seen anything indicating that this is an official change yet. As I type this, Meta’s documentation still reflects the need for 50 conversions. But, this is at least a test.

I should also note that I’ve noticed some of my ad sets never enter the Learning Phase at all now. They immediately enter Active status. It’s not clear to me when or why this is the case, but it seems that the Learning Phase is much more forgiving now and may require less data to exit than it once did.

What’s happening here? Why is it that the Learning Phase is shortening — and in some cases not happening at all? This appears to reflect that Meta has more or better data to more quickly determine how to optimally deliver your ads. This is more than likely related to improved machine learning and AI.

3. Scale High-Performing Ad Sets

The Learning Phase is the source of a great deal of frustration, and even fear, among advertisers. They’re reluctant to make any significant changes, including scaling the budget, because it may restart the Learning Phase.

The reason for that frustration is that “learning” typically means unstable and less predictable results. If you’re getting great results that are consistent from day to day, it’s reasonable to not want to rock the boat.

Well, one of the updates allows you to increase your budget without restarting learning. If you ever see “High Performing” in the delivery column of an ad set, it qualifies for budget increases that immediately return to Active.

Meta will even give you a scale of recommended increases and the projected number of results you should expect.

While you’ll see diminishing returns the more you spend, it’s good to know that you won’t see any negative impact to the stability of performance.

This added transparency should help advertisers better plan their ad spend and take advantage of high performing ad sets without the fear of restarting the learning phase.

4. Schedule Individual Ads

Normally, the schedule to run your ads is determined within the ad set. This means that your ad schedule applies to all ads within it. But, you can change that with a new update that is rolling out.

When you create a manual Sales campaign with the Website conversion location, you may see a “Show More Options” link below Multi-Advertiser Ads within the Ad Setup section.

Click it and you’ll see a “Schedule” option.

Hover over this area to get the option to edit. You can then set a start and optional end date for your ad.

The ability to schedule individual ads was previously a unique option found within Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. But, now we’re seeing this surface in manual Sales campaigns, too.

This allows you to schedule individual promotions for ads rather than manually stopping and starting them or creating separate ad sets. If you created an ad set to promote a specific product, you could schedule an ad that reveals a sale price that coincides with a promotion. This could especially be helpful for seasonal promotions, like during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

There are many ways you might use this. You could conceivably create an ad set that promotes various similar products, but schedule when each product gets promoted.

5. Ad Sources and Site Links

Meta is rolling out the ability to include links to other important information under your ad creative. The end product looks like this…

Notice the scrollable links below the ad creative? Those are controlled by the advertiser.

The following settings are required:

• Sales, Traffic, Engagement, or Leads objective
• Website conversion location
• Manual upload using single image or video

Within ad creation, you should see an Ad Sources section.

You can optionally provide a website URL and Meta will automatically attempt to source some site links.

Click “Review and Confirm.” You can review the site links that Meta found.

In the example above, Meta automatically pulled links to two of my products and three subscriptions. While they are great suggestions, Meta also uses the full page title, which I wouldn’t want to use.

Click “Set Up Manually.”

You need at least three site links to display them on your ad. Include a display label and URL. When you’re done, click Save.

You should then see confirmation that the site links were added.

You can also use your product catalog to display individual products or categories of products.

You can view what this will look like by pulling up the Advanced Preview and filtering by Advantage+ Creative enhancements. There should be one for “Add Site Links.”

How should you use site links? Meta has a recommendation:

You can use the site links feature to highlight different categories, products, deals, sign-ups, and your other most visited landing pages within one campaign. Ads with site links can help provide more opportunities for people to learn about your business, products, and services and achieve conversions more easily.

Don’t feel like you need to be boxed in by this recommendation as a guideline. Get creative.

Something that immediately came to mind for me was promoting blog posts and videos on my website. Normally, the entire focus is getting that traffic and engagement. But, now I can add site links to get a secondary registration or purchase because it’s highlighted in the ad.

Something that isn’t yet clear to me is how easily conversions from site links can be tracked to these ads. It’s like any other situation related to attribution, except that the “results” won’t necessarily be tied to the site links. This is where adding extra columns for execution of conversions related to your site links could be necessary.

Your Turn

Lots going on right now, and these are all some pretty amazing updates for Meta Sales campaigns. Do you have any favorites?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 5 Big Updates to Meta Sales Campaigns appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.