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.

Complaints about Meta’s algorithmic targeting are mostly misguided. Meta’s ability to find the people who are most willing to perform your desired action is extremely effective. But there is a fatal flaw that impacts optimization for any event that isn’t a purchase event.

Before you come at me about the issues with algorithmic targeting, I get it. I say that it’s “effective” because it’s efficient at doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. The flaw prevents it from being far more valuable.

Some advertisers will spend without seeing it. They see the results and don’t ask questions. Others will reject algorithmic targeting entirely without understanding why they aren’t getting the results that they desire.

There is a problem that is frustratingly difficult, if not impossible, for advertisers to solve. It’s Meta’s problem to fix, and I’ve been complaining about it for years.

I know, I’m being cryptic. It’s not easy to explain in an opening paragraph.

Let’s back up…

Who Sees Your Ads?

First, it’s important to understand that the definition of “targeting” has changed. I’d say that this evolution is part of what confuses advertisers. We don’t know how to communicate what “this” is now.

Not long ago, I asserted that targeting was the most critical factor to the success of your ads. Good ad copy and creative couldn’t recover from a bad targeting pool.

Of course, our inputs are only kinda sorta considered now when it comes to the audience that sees our ads.

1. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns allow for virtually no targeting inputs at all. No detailed targeting, lookalike audiences, custom audiences, or much of anything.

2. Advantage+ Audience is the default option for defining your audience now. You can define a few things like location and age minimum, but your inputs are otherwise seen as suggestions (and it’s questionable how much they’re considered at all).

3. Original Audiences tend to be the fall-back for advertisers who want to retain targeting control. But, most don’t realize that their audience is usually expanded, especially when optimizing for conversions.

The primary lever that controls who sees your ads is the performance goal.

If you’re able to strictly define your audience (which is rare), Meta will find the people within that audience who are most likely to perform the action that you want.

If your inputs are seen as suggestions, your audience is expanded, or you don’t provide any inputs at all beyond the basics, Meta will find those people within the largest pools of people.

Is this targeting? Not really. It’s providing some initial suggestions and constraints and defining what you want so that Meta can find the people who will lead to results.

Like I said at the top, Meta is actually very good at this. Fewer constraints will almost always lead to more and cheaper results. But, that’s not without some problems.

When Optimization is Most Effective

Meta is best at generating high-quality results with minimal guidance when you are able to clearly articulate what you want. There are three primary examples of this…

1. Maximize Conversions (Purchase Event).

This requires that you’ve set up conversion event tracking and have defined purchase events. Meta will focus on getting you the most purchases within your budget.

2. Maximize Value (Purchase Event).

This requires that you pass value with your purchase events and have a variety of purchase prices. You may get less volume of purchases in this case, but Meta will focus on generating the highest Return on Ad Spend.

3. Maximize Conversion Leads.

Conversion Leads optimization is possible when using instant forms and requires several months of setup to define your funnel. Meta will then optimize to show your ads to people who will most likely become high-quality leads.

It doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed to get great results when using any of these three approaches (so many factors contribute to that). But these are the times when you and Meta are on the same page regarding what you want.

Where Optimization Struggles

The reason the above three approaches to optimization work is that there is agreement over what a quality result looks like. You’ve defined that you want more purchases, more value, or more conversion leads, and Meta will focus on getting you those things. If successful, there shouldn’t be a dispute about the quality of those results.

Where this goes wrong is when using virtually any other performance goal. It includes some performance goals that are notorious for quality issues:

• Link Clicks
• Landing Page Views
• ThruPlays
• Post Engagement

But it can also include conversions that don’t result in a purchase. If you choose the performance goal to maximize conversions and select Lead or Website Registration as your conversion event, you likely run into a regular battle.

In all of these cases, you’ve only begun to define what you want. But you and Meta aren’t going to be on the same page.

If you choose to maximize link clicks or landing page views, Meta will focus on getting you as many link clicks or landing page views as possible. But you want quality traffic, not just any traffic.

If you maximize ThruPlays, Meta will show your ads to people most likely to watch at least 15 seconds of your video. But, that’s going to include people who are forced to watch your video. You want quality views of people who choose to watch, not just any views.

If you maximize conversions where the focus is on leads, Meta will try to get you as many leads as possible. But you want quality leads who are likely to buy from you, not just any leads.

In each case, Meta doesn’t care at all about quality. The algorithm’s only focus is on getting you as many of the action that you said you want.

This has always been an issue. But it’s less of an issue when you can tightly define your audience. When you can’t, Meta has fewer constraints to find results — and the likelihood for quality issues increases.

Exploited Weaknesses

This is the perfect storm for quality issues.

1. An inability to strictly define your audience.
2. An inability to define a quality action.
3. Weaknesses that can help Meta generate a high volume of the actions that you want

Understand that Meta’s delivery algorithm knows where to look to find the action that you want. This isn’t always good.

This can be as simple as going after people who are likely to act because they’ve visited your website or engaged with your ads. It can also be going after people who have engaged with similar products or businesses.

But, it can also be due to weaknesses that are exploited to get you more results.

1. Placements.

If you choose a performance goal to maximize link clicks or landing page views, expect that a large percentage of your impressions will be focused on Audience Network. Meta knows that it can get clicks there. It’s not clear whether these are from accidental clicks, bots, or click farms (before they’re detected), but you can bet you’ll get lots of low-quality clicks.

If you choose to maximize ThruPlays, a large percentage of your impressions will go to placements where people are forced to watch at least 15 seconds of your video. Audience Network Rewarded Video, which incentivizes people to watch videos in exchange for virtual currency or something else of value, is notorious for this. I’ve had cases where I’ve had more ThruPlays than people reached for this reason.

2. Countries.

If you target multiple countries at once and there’s an imbalance of cost to reach people in those countries, you may then see an imbalance in distribution. Especially if you choose to maximize top-of-the-funnel actions, Meta will try to get you the most actions possible within your budget. While this doesn’t guarantee lower quality results, it can be a contributing factor — particularly when a country is known for bots and low-quality accounts.

3. Ages.

If you aren’t able to restrict by age, this can be a weakness that will be tapped to generate more results. I can only speak from personal experience on this, but it seems that older people are much more likely to click on and engage with ads. But that doesn’t mean that they are a likely customer. If you are generating a high number of low-quality leads, it’s possible that Meta is focusing impressions on older people because it’s leading to more results.

4. Genders.

Let’s say that your business caters to women. In theory, you may not need to limit your audience when maximizing conversions when the conversion event is a purchase. The algorithm will try to get you more purchases and should adjust when men don’t buy.

But that’s not the case if you optimize for link clicks, landing page views, post engagement, or ThruPlays. Even though they may not be your target customer, men may engage at a high rate. And that will lead to low-quality results.

5. Low-Quality Accounts.

This is a big bucket that includes bots (before they’re detected), spam accounts, and real people who want to click on everything. If they perform the action that you’ve defined in your performance goal, these are going to be some of the primary people who see your ads. They’ll get you a bunch of cheap results, but that doesn’t mean those results are the quality that you desire.

NOTE: These five weaknesses aren’t nearly as big of an issue when optimizing for conversions when your conversion event is a purchase. The reason is that if it doesn’t lead to the action that you want (a purchase), the algorithm adjusts. But this is why these weaknesses are so problematic for any other performance goal.

Age and Gender and Advantage+ Audience

One of the primary complaints about Advantage+ Audience is that age maximum and gender aren’t audience controls. You can provide an age maximum and gender, but they are only audience suggestions.

Once again, this should not be a big deal if you can accurately define the action that you want, like a purchase. But it otherwise has the potential to make Advantage+ Audience unusable when using any other performance goal.

Earlier, I mentioned having this challenge with leads. It’s not always a problem, but I’ve found that when I begin to get “surprisingly good results,” it’s usually because a high percentage of my budget is getting spent on an older audience.

There’s unfortunately no easy way around it. I’ve tried an age maximum suggestion, but Meta immediately ignores it because I can get more of the results I “want” by reaching an older audience. You can switch to original audiences and define the age maximum, but that’s not necessarily a great solution either. I don’t necessarily want to cut off all ad spend to an older audience. I just don’t want it to monopolize my budget.

The Fatal Flaw

The fatal flaw in Meta ads targeting and optimization is that, except in rare cases, Meta doesn’t know what we want. We’ve defined what we want in very general terms (link clicks, landing page views, leads, ThruPlays, etc.).

It’s the combination of this weakness in optimization and the growing reliance on algorithmic targeting that makes the problem worse. Meta’s systems are powerfully good at finding people who are willing to perform the action that you want.

Unfortunately, the action that “you want” isn’t necessarily exactly what you’ve defined with the performance goal. And that’s what leads to low-quality results and wasted ad spend.

The Solution: It’s Complicated

To a point, it’s simple. We don’t necessarily need more targeting control. It shouldn’t be necessary to require the ability to restrict by age or gender. The solution also isn’t to eliminate Advantage+ Audience or audience expansion through the various Advantage Audience tools.

The solution hasn’t changed since I first complained about it years ago: We need to be able to more precisely define what we want.

Instead of any old traffic, we want people who are going to spend time on our website, perform several actions, and make return visits.

Instead of any views of our videos, we want people who signal interest (willingly watch without being forced, search out more videos, and provide other engagement).

Instead of any leads, we want people who perform other actions that prove that they are quality leads — even if it’s not an eventual purchase.

I’m not sure how exactly Meta would implement this. It could be by providing a secondary performance goal. Or maybe it would be providing options of “volume” and “quality” actions where other factors are considered.

But the current flaws in optimization are old and primitive. Not only were they unacceptable years ago, they enhance the problem with the development of algorithmic targeting.

This needs to be fixed.

Your Turn

What are your thoughts?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Meta Ads Targeting and Optimization’s Fatal Flaw appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Today’s targeting is a combination of advertiser inputs and Meta’s algorithmic distribution, with the aim to get you as many of your desired actions as possible within your budget. But advertisers have a common misunderstanding of how much control they actually have.

What I often hear from advertisers who want control is that they switch from Advantage+ Audience to original audiences because they don’t trust Meta’s algorithmic distribution. But more often than not, they’re dealing with algorithmic distribution there, too.

As someone who is focused on educating advertisers on how the systems work, it’s been an incredibly frustrating discussion. While it makes sense to me, it simply does not to most.

That’s why I wrote this post. And, more importantly, why I created the following grid.

Grid Comparison

Are your targeting inputs respected? Or they viewed as merely suggestions? Will your audience be expanded?

The grid above is a summary of how much your targeting inputs matter, depending on the setup. When you use Advantage+ Audience, your inputs are treated the same in all cases, regardless of the performance goal. But there are some contributing factors to how much your inputs matter when using original audiences.

An important point here is that we don’t know how much your audience suggestions matter, though my tests have indicated that they matter very little. We also don’t know how much your audience is expanded when expansion happens with original audiences, though my tests again suggest that it’s similar to when using Advantage+ Audience.

The problem here is that Meta provides little to no transparency on this matter. It’s entirely solvable, of course. I’ve long asked for a breakdown that would generate separate rows of results for our targeting inputs and those who were reached beyond them. Until that exists, we’re left guessing.

Still, we can approach this as if audience suggestions are as impactful to Advantage+ Audience as your targeting inputs that can be expanded when using original audiences. And when we do, we can provide a bit more clarity regarding what we can control and what we cannot.

Advantage+ Audience (Any Performance Goal)

Advantage+ Audience is largely algorithmically driven. That means that regardless of the performance goal, Meta will search out the people who are most likely to perform the action that you want. This freedom can help lower costs and improve results (not without some risk).

Respected Inputs:

Anything entered into Audience Controls within the ad set is a tight constraint that will be respected. Meta will not show ads to people outside of these controls.

When you make customizations here, the following are respected…

Location

I often hear complaints that location isn’t actually respected, but that’s a misunderstanding of how location is controlled from the beginning.

You will reach people who are either “living in or were recently in” your selected location. If a city, that will also include a radius of 10+ miles beyond it. You cannot isolate people who only live in a certain area.

Yes, location targeting is messy. But it doesn’t get messier as a result of using either Advantage+ Audience or original audiences. The same rules apply.

Minimum Age (18-25)

You can set a minimum age, but it can’t be any lower than 18 or higher than 25. How low you can go will depend upon the targeted country.

Note that age maximum is not an audience control option.

Excluded Custom Audiences

You can also exclude people who are within a certain custom audience. An example would be excluding those who bought the specific product that you are promoting.

As is the case with locations, this method is not perfect. Custom audiences are almost never complete for various reasons, and you’re most likely to notice this with exclusions. If you reach a current customer while excluding them with custom audiences, it’s not because of whether you are using Advantage+ Audience or original audiences. These exclusions are treated the same in either case.

Languages

This control is unlikely to be used all that often.

As it says in the tooltip, Meta recommends specifying languages only when they aren’t common to your selected locations.

Audience Suggestions:

You can provide audience suggestions with Advantage+ Audience, but it is purely optional.

Meta says they will “prioritize audiences matching this profile before searching more widely.” So, that means that nothing you provide here is a tight constraint.

That includes settings for:

• Custom Audiences
• Age Range
• Gender
• Detailed Targeting (interests and behaviors)

Note that there is an audience control for age minimum that is respected, but there is also an age range that is only a suggestion. In other words, the range here (minimum and maximum) will only be seen as a suggestion and your ads can be shown to people outside of it if Meta believes it will lead to more of the actions that you want.

The age minimum within audience controls will be respected. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be the same setting as what is in audience suggestions. If you do set an age minimum in audience controls, you won’t be able to set a suggested range below it.

For example, when setting the audience control age minimum at 25, you can’t set the suggested minimum range below 25.

A key takeaway here is that there are no audience controls for age maximum or gender.

Original Audiences (Conversions Performance Goal)

If you switch to original audiences while using the performance goal to optimize for conversions or value, algorithmic expansion will be significant. This is when distribution is likely to be most similar to what you get when using Advantage+ Audience.

Understand that this has nothing to do with your campaign objective. For example, you can use the Sales objective but select the performance goal to Maximize Impressions. The factor that impacts these differences is the performance goal.

Respected Inputs:

• Minimum Age
• Maximum Age
• Gender
• Location
• Custom Audience Exclusions
• Language

Audience Expanded:

• Lookalike Audiences
• Detailed Targeting

This is where I’ve found advertisers are most surprised. When optimizing for conversions or value and you provide a lookalike audience for targeting, Advantage Lookalike is automatically turned on and cannot be turned off.

The same is the case for detailed targeting. If you provide detailed targeting, Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically turned on and cannot be turned off.

In theory, your audience will only be expanded if it will lead to more or better results. But all indications I’ve had is that your audience expands significantly in these cases.

It Depends:

You can provide custom audiences with original audiences, but whether your audience expands will depend upon whether you leave the box for Advantage Custom Audience checked. It will be checked by default.

If it’s unchecked, you can run remarketing ads that only target people in your selected custom audiences. If you check that box, you’ll reach people well beyond that group. Based on my tests, that expansion is similar to what happens when providing custom audiences as suggestions with Advantage+ Audience.

Original Audiences (Link Clicks/Landing Page Views)

Of course, what is expanded and what isn’t by default — and whether you can turn that expansion off — varies depending on your performance goal. If you select a performance goal to maximize link clicks or landing page views, things are slightly different.

Respected Inputs:

• Minimum Age
• Maximum Age
• Gender
• Location
• Custom Audience Exclusions
• Language

Audience Expanded:

Here, only Advantage Detailed Targeting is on by default without an option to turn it off.

This was a change that rolled out in early 2024.

It Depends:

When using original audiences, you will always have the option of turning Advantage Custom Audience off (assuming you remember to uncheck the box). When optimizing for link clicks or landing page views, you will also have the option of turning off Advantage Lookalike to focus on your selected lookalike audiences.

Original Audiences (Any Other Performance Goal)

For any other performance goal (Reach, Impressions, Post Engagement, ThruPlays, etc.), you’ll have slightly more control over whether your audience is expanded when using original audiences.

Respected Inputs:

• Minimum Age
• Maximum Age
• Gender
• Location
• Custom Audience Exclusions
• Language

Audience Expanded:

Nothing is expanded by default.

It Depends:

In this case, Advantage Detailed Targeting can be turned on if you so desire.

Advantage Custom Audience and Advantage Lookalike are both optional.

What Should You Do?

So now you should understand that algorithmic distribution beyond your targeting inputs is likely to happen regardless of your decision to use Advantage+ Audience or original audiences. There are times when original audiences do give you more control. But that added control isn’t always required, or even beneficial.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to this. But here is how I approach it…

1. When Using the Conversions Performance Goal and Purchase Conversion Event

Keep in mind that you can select conversion events other than Purchase. But when using Purchase as your goal conversion event, I recommend using Advantage+ Audience (if not Advantage+ Shopping). The algorithm will adjust in real-time to show your ads to people most likely to purchase. That flexibility should only help you.

Even if your clients are primarily women and you can’t set gender as an audience control, the algorithm should adjust when Purchase is your goal event. Meta doesn’t want to waste money on people who don’t lead to that action (this could be an issue for other types of optimization).

2. When Using the Conversions Performance Goal and Other Conversion Events

If you select a conversion event other than Purchase, I’d still recommend that you use Advantage+ Audience. However, you should monitor it closely to make sure that the algorithm doesn’t exploit weaknesses that may lead to low-quality results.

Once again, understand that the algorithm’s focus is getting you as many of the goal action that you want within your budget. That’s not an issue when the goal event is a purchase. You’re not in danger of getting low-quality purchases this way. But that could be an issue for leads or other actions.

But I emphasize the word “could.” Don’t assume it. I’ve actually seen it go both ways. I’ve used Advantage+ Audience to generate leads at a lower cost that are also at a high quality. And I’ve also seen the algorithm suddenly favor the highest age bracket, resulting in low-quality leads. And the issue, of course, is that we can’t set an audience control for age maximum.

3. When Using Any Other Performance Goal

This is a bit of a loaded hypothetical because I don’t recommend using other performance goals generally since there is always the potential for low-quality results. The reason is that the algorithm will always look to exploit weaknesses in placements or the user pool to get you as many of the action you want. That can be a big problem when optimizing for clicks or engagement.

The truth is that switching from Advantage+ Audience doesn’t solve this problem. But you can at least limit your audience pool by age maximum or gender, if that is important. And this is where it can be an issue if your business serves primarily women or a specific age group.

Why is it a problem? If you want post engagement or video views, Meta’s delivery algorithm only cares about getting you more post engagement or video views. It doesn’t care whether potential clients see your ads. If men click on your ads or watch your videos, Meta will take that as a signal that more men should see your ads.

Your Turn

How do you approach audience inputs and expansion?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post When Do Targeting Inputs Matter? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

To suggest that my perspective on Meta ads targeting has changed during the past year is an understatement. It’s completely transformed. This evolution wasn’t immediate and was reinforced through a series of tests.

Understand that it wasn’t easy to get here. It’s reasonable to say that my prior advertising strategy could have been boiled down to targeting. It was the most important step. Great ad copy and creative couldn’t overcome bad targeting.

It’s not that I don’t care about reaching a relevant audience now. It’s that the levers we pull to get there are no longer the same.

I’m getting ahead of myself. This post will help explain how I got here. I’ve run a series of tests during the past year that have opened my eyes to just how much things have changed. They’ve helped me understand how I should change, too.

In this post, we’ll discuss the following tests:

• Test 1: How Much Do Audiences Expand?
• Test 2: How Much Remarketing Happens When Going Broad?
• Test 3: Do Audience Suggestions Matter When Using Advantage+ Audience?
• Test 4: Comparing Performance and Quality of Results
• Test 5: Understanding the Contribution of Randomness to Results

Let’s get to it…

Test 1: How Much Do Audiences Expand?

One of my primary complaints ever since Advantage Detailed Targeting (then Detailed Targeting Expansion) was introduced is the lack of transparency.

We know that Meta can expand your audience beyond the initial targeting inputs, but will this always happen? Will your audience expand a little or a lot? We have no idea. I’ve long asked for a breakdown that would solve this problem, but I don’t anticipate getting that feature anytime soon.

The same questions about how much your audience expands also apply to Advantage Lookalike and Advantage Custom Audience. It’s a mystery.

This is important because we can’t always avoid expansion. If your performance goal aims to maximize conversions, value, link clicks, or landing page views while using original audiences, Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically on and it can’t be turned off.

The same is true for Advantage Lookalike when your performance goal maximizes conversions or value.

Are we able to clear up this mystery with a test?

The Test

I don’t believe that there’s any way to prove how much our audience is expanded when Advantage Detailed Targeting or Advantage Lookalike are applied. But, there is a way to test this with Advantage Custom Audience. While it won’t definitively prove how our audience is expanded with the other two methods, it could provide a roadmap.

This test is possible thanks to the availability of Audience Segments for all sales campaigns. Once you define your Audience Segments, you can run a breakdown of your results to view the distribution of ad spend and other metrics between three different groups:

• Engaged Audience
• Existing Customers
• New Audience

For the purpose of this test, this breakdown can help us understand how much our audience is expanded. All we need to do is create an ad set using original audiences where we explicitly target the same custom audiences that are used to define our Audience Segments.

So, I did just that, and I turned on Advantage Custom Audience.

I used the Sales objective so that the necessary breakdown would be available.

The Results

My only focus with this test was to uncover how my budget was distributed. Performance didn’t matter.

In this case, 26% of my budget was spent between my Engaged Audience and Existing Customers.

Since the custom audiences I used for targeting matched how I defined my Audience Segments, we can state definitively that, in this case, Meta spent 74% of my budget reaching people outside of my targeting inputs.

What I Learned

This was groundbreaking for my understanding of audience expansion. Up until this point, whether or not Meta expanded my audience — and by how much — was a mystery. This test lifted the curtain.

These results don’t mean that the 74/26 split would apply in all situations universally. Many factors likely contribute to the distribution that I saw here, not limited to…

• Performance goal
• Conversion event
• Budget
• Size of remarketing audiences

We also don’t know if a similar split happens when applying Advantage Detailed Targeting or Advantage Lookalike. While we don’t know, this at least gives us a point of reference rather than having to make a blind guess.

Read More

Check out the following post and video to learn more about this test:

How Much Do Audiences Expand Using Advantage Custom Audience?

Test 2: How Much Remarketing Happens When Going Broad?

Even before we had Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and Advantage+ Audience, some advertisers swore by using original audiences to “go broad” (no inputs for custom audiences, lookalike audiences, or detailed targeting). While unique, this approach was largely based on gut feel, with limited ways to prove how ads were getting distributed. They could only provide results as evidence that it was effective.

The addition of Audience Segments to all sales campaigns would allow us to provide a bit more insight into what is happening when going broad.

The Test

I created a campaign with the following settings…

• Campaign Objective: Sales
• Performance Goal: Maximize Conversions
• Conversion Event: Complete Registrations
• Targeting: Original Audiences using only location and custom audience exclusions
• Placements: All

The Results

Recall that we already had a remarketing distribution benchmark with the prior test. In that case, we explicitly defined the custom audiences we wanted to reach within targeting. In this case, I didn’t provide any such inputs.

And yet…

Even though no inputs were provided, Meta spent 25% of my budget on reaching prior website visitors and people who were on my email list (both paid customers and not).

What I Learned

I found this to be absolutely fascinating. While we will struggle to get any insight into who the people are that Meta reached outside of remarketing, the fact that 25% of my budget was spent on website visitors and email subscribers is important. It shows that Meta is prioritizing showing my ads to people most likely to convert.

This realization helped improve my confidence in a hands-off approach. If the percentage were closer to 0, it may show disorder. It could suggest that the broad targeting approach is based in smoke and mirrors and your inputs are necessary to help steer the algorithm.

What was most shocking to me is that the remarketing distribution was nearly identical, whether I used Advantage Custom Audience and defined my target or went completely broad. This was a whole new realization.

While the first test helped me understand how much Meta expands my targeting inputs, the second made me question whether those inputs were necessary at all. I’d spend about the exact same amount reaching that desired group in each case.

Read More

Check out the following post and video to learn more about this test:

25 Percent of My Budget Was Spent on Remarketing While Going Broad

Test 3: Do Audience Suggestions Matter When Using Advantage+ Audience?

While you have the option to switch to original audiences, the default these days is Advantage+ Audience. Meta strongly encourages you to take this route, warning that switching to original audiences can lead to a drop in performance.

When using Advantage+ Audience, you leverage Meta’s AI-driven algorithmic targeting. You have the option to provide audience suggestions, but it’s not required.

Meta says that even if you don’t provide suggestions, they will prioritize things like conversion history, pixel data, and prior engagement with your ads.

But, is this true? And how pronounced is it?

The Test

We could test this by again leveraging a manual sales campaign with Audience Segments. I created two ad sets:

• Advantage+ Audience without suggestions
• Advantage+ Audience with suggestions that match my Audience Segments

Since I can use custom audiences that exactly match the custom audiences used to define my Audience Segments, we can get a better idea of just how much (if at all) these audience suggestions impact delivery.

A reasonable hypothesis would be that while Advantage+ Audience without suggestions will result in remarketing (potentially in the 25% range, as we discovered when going broad). But, it’s likely to make up a smaller percentage of ad spend than when providing suggestions that match my Audience Segments.

But, that didn’t play out…

The Results

Once again, quite shocking.

The ad set that used custom audiences that match those used to define my Audience Segments resulted in 32% of my budget spent on that group.

By itself, this seems meaningful. More is spent on remarketing in this case than when going broad or even using Advantage Custom Audience (wow!).

But, check out the results when not providing any suggestions at all…

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you. When I used Advantage+ Audience without suggestions, 35% of my budget was spent on remarketing.

What I Learned

Every test surprised me. This one shook me.

When I provided audience suggestions, I reached the people matching those suggestions less than when I didn’t provide any suggestions at all. Providing suggestions was not a benefit. It didn’t seem to impact what the algorithm chose to do. That same group was prioritized either way, with or without suggesting them.

It’s not clear if this would be the case for other types of suggestions (lookalike audiences, detailed targeting, age maximum, and gender). But, the results of this test imply that while audience suggestions can’t hurt, it’s debatable whether they do anything.

As is the case in every test, there are several factors that will contribute to my results. Budget and the size of my remarketing audience are certainly part of that. And it’s also quite possible that I won’t always see these same results if I were to run the test multiple times.

It remains eye-opening. Not only is Advantage+ Audience without suggestions so powerful that it will prioritize my remarketing audience, it’s possible that Meta doesn’t need any suggestions at all.

Read More

Check out the following post and video to learn more about this test:

Audience Suggestions May Not Always Be Necessary

Test 4: Comparing Performance and Quality of Results

I’ve encouraged advertisers to prioritize Advantage+ Audience for much of the past year. It’s not that it’s always better, but it should be your first option. Instead, it seems that many advertisers find every excuse to distrust it and switch to original audiences.

Advertisers tell me that they get better results with detailed targeting or lookalike audiences. And even if they could get more conversions from Advantage+ Audience, they’re lower quality.

Is this the case for me? I decided to test it…

The Test

I created an A/B test of three ad sets where everything was the same, beyond the targeting. Here are the settings…

• Objective: Sales
• Performance Goal: Maximize Conversions
• Conversion Event: Complete Registration
• Attribution Setting: 1-Day Click
• Placements: All

The three ad sets took three different approaches to targeting:

• Advantage+ Audience without suggestions
• Original audiences using detailed targeting (Advantage Detailed Targeting)
• Original audiences using lookalike audiences (Advantage Lookalike)

Since the performance goal is to maximize conversions, Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage Lookalike would automatically be applied for the respective ad set, and it could not be turned off. The audience is expanded regardless.

The ads were the same in all cases, promoting a beginner advertiser subscription.

The Results

In terms of pure conversions, Advantage+ Audience led to the most, besting Advantage Detailed Targeting by 5% and Advantage Lookalike by 25%.

Recall that this was an A/B test, and Meta had 61% confidence that Advantage+ Audience would win if the test were run again. Maybe as important, a less than 5% confidence that Advantage Lookalike would win.

But, one of the complaints about Advantage+ Audience relates to quality. Are these empty subscriptions run by bots and people who will die on my email list?

Well, I tracked that. I created a separate landing page for each ad that utilized a unique form. Once subscribed, these people received a unique tag so that I could keep track of which audience they were in. The easiest way to measure quality was to tag the people who clicked on a link in my emails after subscribing.

Once again, Advantage+ Audience generated the most quality subscribers.

Is this because Advantage+ Audience leaned heavily into remarketing? We can find out with a breakdown by Audience Segments!

Nope! More was actually spent on remarketing for the Advantage Detailed Targeting ad set. Advantage+ Audience actually generated the fewest conversions from remarketing (though it was close to Advantage Lookalike).

What I Learned

This test was different than the others because the focus was on results and quality of those results, rather than on how my ads were distributed. And, amazingly, Advantage+ Audience without suggestions was again the winner.

Of course, we’re not dealing with enormous sample sizes here ($2,250 total spent on this test). It’s possible that Advantage Detailed Targeting would overtake Advantage+ Audience in a separate test. But, what’s clear here is that the difference is negligible.

There just doesn’t appear to be a benefit to spending the time and effort required to switch to original audiences and provide detailed targeting or lookalike audiences. I’m getting just as good results (even better) letting the algorithm do it all for me.

As always, many factors contribute. I may get better results with Advantage+ Audience because I have extensive history on my ad account. But, as mentioned in the results section, it’s not as if it led to more results from remarketing.

The fact that Advantage+ Audience won here isn’t even necessarily the main takeaway. There could be some randomness baked into these results (more on that in a minute). But, this test further increased my confidence in letting the algorithm do it’s thing with Advantage+ Audience.

Read More

Check out the following post to learn more about this test:

Test Results: Advantage+ Audience vs. Detailed Targeting and Lookalikes

Test 5: Understanding the Contribution of Randomness to Results

There was something about that last test — and really all of these tests — that was nagging at me. Yes, Advantage+ Audience without suggestions kept coming out on top. But, I was quick to remind you that these tests aren’t perfect or universal. The results may be different if I were to run the tests again.

That got me thinking about randomness…

What percentage of our results are completely random? What I mean by that is that people aren’t robots. They aren’t 100% predictable when it comes to whether they will act on a certain ad. Many factors contribute to what they end up doing, and much of that is random.

If there’s a split test and the same person would be in all three audiences, which audience do they get picked for? How many of those random selections would have converted regardless of the ad set? How many converted because of the perfect conditions that day?

It might be crazy, but I felt like we could make an example of randomness with a test.

The Test

I created an A/B test of three ad sets. We don’t need to spend a whole lot of time talking about them because they were all identical. Everything in the ad sets was the same. They all promoted identical ads to generate registrations for my Beginners subscription.

I think it’s rather obvious that we wouldn’t get identical results between these three ad sets. But, how different would they be? And what might that say about the inferences we make from other tests?

The Results

Wow. Yes, there was a noticeable difference.

One ad set generated 25% more than the lowest performer. If that percentage sounds familiar, it’s because it was the exact same difference between the top and bottom performer in the last test. But in that case, that difference “felt” more meaningful.

In this case, we know there’s nothing meaningfully different about the ad sets that led to the variance in performance. And yet, Meta had a 59% confidence level (nearly the same as the level of confidence in the winner in the previous test) that the winning ad set would win if the test were run again.

What I Learned

Randomness is important! Yet, most advertisers completely discount it. They test every detail and make changes based on differences in performance that are even narrower than what we saw here.

Think about all of the things that advertisers test. They create multiple ad sets to test targeting. They try to isolate the best performing ad copy, creative, and combination of the two.

This test taught me that most of these tests are based in a flawed understanding of the results. Unless you can generate meaningful volume (usually because you’re spending a lot), it’s not worth your time.

Your “optimizing” may not be making any difference at all. You may be acting on differences that would flip if you tested again — or if you let the test run longer or spent more money.

It’s even reasonable to think that too much testing will hurt your results. You’re running competing campaigns and ad sets that drive up ad costs due to audience fragmentation and auction overlap — all for a perceived benefit that may not exist.

I’m not saying that you should never test anything to optimize your results. But be very aware of the contributions of randomness.

Read More

Check out the following post to learn more about this test:

Results: Identical Ad Sets, a Split Test, and Chaos

My Approach Now

You’re smart. If you’ve read this far, you can infer how these tests have altered my approach. My strategy is drastically simplified from it once was.

I lean heavily on Advantage+ Audience without suggestions, especially when optimizing for conversions. Of course, Advantage+ Audience isn’t perfect. If I need to add guardrails, I will switch to original audiences. But when I do, I typically go broad. I rarely ever use detailed targeting or lookalikes now.

I also rarely use remarketing now, which is insane considering it once made up the majority of my ad spend. Since remarketing is baked in, there are few reasons to create separate remarketing and prospecting ad sets now. Especially when I’d normally use general remarketing (all website visitors and email subscribers) because I felt these people would be most likely to convert.

This also means far fewer ad sets. Unless I’m running one of these tests, I almost always have a single ad set in a campaign.

It doesn’t mean I’m complacent in this approach. It means that the results of these tests have raised my confidence that no targeting inputs will not only perform just as well, but oftentimes better. And I know that there are exceptions and factors that contribute to my results.

Maybe things will change. But, I no longer feel the need to micromanage my targeting. Based on the results of these tests — and of my results generally — it’s no longer a priority or a factor that I worry about.

And that, my friends, is quite the evolution from where I was not long ago.

Run Your Own Tests

I’m always quick to point out that my results are at least partially unique to me. Whether you’re curious or skeptical, I encourage you to run your own tests.

But, do so with an open mind. Don’t run these tests hoping that your current approach will prevail. Spend enough to get meaningful results.

Maybe you’ll see something different. If you do, that’s fine! The main point is that we shouldn’t get stuck in our ways or force a strategy simply because it worked at one time and we want it to work now.

Replicate what I did. Then report back!

Your Turn

Have you run tests like these before? What results did you see?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 5 Meta Ads Tests that Transformed My Perspective on Targeting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I’ve been a Facebook-then-Meta advertiser since close to the beginning. This site exists (for 13 years strong now) because of my passion and deep understanding of how everything works. It’s been my pleasure sharing tips over the years to help keep you ahead of the curve.

That’s why the current path of Meta ads targeting pains me. My only goal is to help you understand where things are now and where they are heading so that you are best prepared. I’ve published several videos and posts to help explain what’s happening with targeting. The most common response I’m receiving is disbelief, if not outright defiance.

I am not trying to convince you that Advantage+ Audience is always effective or that you should go targeting-free with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. I want you to understand that your targeting inputs matter less than they ever did before. Knowledge of this is power because it helps advertisers better understand their role and where they can be most impactful.

Some of the things I’ve said and will repeat here aren’t up for debate. It’s how things work now. Too many advertisers simply don’t have a full understanding of how targeting works in the current environment. They are tweaking things and turning dials that have little or no connection to results.

But, the defensiveness runs deep, and I understand this. If you believe that the value you add as an advertiser is found, partially or entirely, within your targeting strategy, you will hate everything that I’m saying on the topic. It’s an attack on your way of life, and that’s scary.

This post may not fix that. It took me longer than I care to admit to accept it, and I was surely angry and defensive at first. But, I hope that this at least sends you in the direction of understanding.

Interests, Behaviors, and Detailed Targeting

First, Interests and Behaviors is the same category of targeting as Detailed Targeting. I include them all here because advertisers often misunderstand what Detailed Targeting means and lump it in with remarketing, lookalike audiences, and demographic adjustments.

This is the oldest method of targeting. It was a big deal when advertisers were given the ability to target people based on their interests and behaviors. It allowed us to isolate people based on specific interests that were related to what we were promoting.

It allows me, for example, to target people who may be interested in online-advertising content and products.

This was powerful since it would give me confidence that my ads were being shown to people who cared about, and were more likely to respond favorably to, my ad.

But, the current environment is not the same as that of 2014. The value of these inputs is not the same.

1. Inaccuracies.

I encourage you to take the time to go through the interests and behaviors that can be used to target you. Some of it is accurate. Some of it is outdated. And some of it is straight-up random.

I was originally going to list out all of the most random ways that advertisers can waste their money targeting me, but I honestly don’t know where to start. There are a lot of them. I wrote about this four years ago.

North Carolina State University ran a study in 2022 that estimated 30% of interests and behaviors used for targeting are inaccurate or irrelevant. These categories are far from perfect. We should treat them accordingly.

We assume that when we use detailed targeting that our ads will reach people who have an interest or experience directly related to that thing, but it’s not that simple. Meta seems to make inferences from random engagements that are far less meaningful.

2. Expansion.

This is a big one. It’s not new. But, advertisers continue to act surprised by or completely oblivious to this.

If you optimize for conversions, link clicks, or landing page views and you provide detailed targeting inputs, Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically turned on. It can’t be turned off.

This means that your ads will reach people beyond those interests and behaviors if it can improve results. Your audience is expanded.

We don’t know how much your audience is expanded. We don’t know how much of your budget will be spent on the interests you listed and on people beyond those groups. But, this uncertainty matters.

There’s a very wide range of possibilities here. Maybe only a small percentage of your budget is spent on reaching people beyond your intended interests. Maybe most was spent on people you didn’t plan to target.

You should have concerns regarding the accuracy of detailed targeting inputs. You should also assume that there’s a distinct possibility that the results you get have more to do with the expansion of your audience than the inputs you provided.

While we can’t say definitively that interest targeting doesn’t matter at all, the amount of positive impact they can make is certainly in question.

Bottom line: My point isn’t that you can’t get good results while using detailed targeting. A common response I get from advertisers is that they get good results when they use interests. The point is that it’s questionable how much your selections of interests and behaviors impacted your results.

Lookalike Audiences

Like interest targeting, lookalike audiences are not new. When they were announced, lookalikes presented an enhancement from using interests only. Instead of guessing about what your customer was interested in, you could have Meta find people who were most similar to your customers.

While they made sense at one time, it’s questionable whether they remain relevant today. At the very least, they’re certainly less useful than they once were.

1. Expansion.

Once again, there’s a bit of fuzziness about the parameters you’re providing. When optimizing for conversions, Advantage Lookalike is automatically turned on and it can’t be turned off.

This means that you may reach people beyond the percentage of lookalike that you selected. We won’t know how much this is expanded or how much of your budget is spent on this expansion versus your selected audience.

2. Algorithmic Targeting.

I generally find it curious that advertisers will favor lookalike audiences over Advantage+ Audience (which we’ll cover in more detail shortly). Lookalike audiences are algorithmically driven. Meta will search for people similar to those in your source audience and compile an audience that is much, much larger.

Instead of using a lookalike audience based on your current customers, let’s instead assume you use Advantage+ Audience without suggestions. By definition, Meta will use signals like pixel activity, conversion data, and prior engagement with your ads to determine who should be in your audience.

It seems odd to be okay with Meta’s development of lookalike audiences but not with algorithmic targeting. There are very obvious similarities between the two.

How much impact do the lookalike audiences that you provide have on your results? Due to expansion, we don’t know. And why should we prefer it over Meta’s more recent algorithmic targeting developments?

Targeting Inputs are Deprioritized

You may not like it, but it’s clear what Meta is doing. If you use original audiences and optimize for conversions, your detailed targeting and lookalike audiences will be expanded. Those inputs are less important than they once were.

Of course, Meta doesn’t want you to use those approaches anyway. Meta wants you to use Advantage+ Audience.

While you can provide targeting inputs, it’s pretty darn obvious that Meta doesn’t think this is necessary. Otherwise, those inputs would be immediately available.

If you provide custom audiences, lookalike audiences, detailed targeting, age maximum, or gender, they will be used as audience suggestions.

This is the default way to impact targeting. While the option to provide targeting inputs using original audiences still exists, Meta works hard to discourage you. When you click to use original audiences, you’ll get an alert asking if you’re sure.

Meta’s tests show that you can improve your results by up to 33% if you use Advantage+ Audience over original audiences. It’s in Meta’s best interests that you get those superior results.

When it comes down to it, Meta may not even prefer that you use Advantage+ Audience. When creating a sales campaign, you are defaulted to Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.

You still have the option of creating a manual sales campaign, but Meta clearly wants you to go this route.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns take algorithmic targeting even further. Your targeting inputs are virtually non-existent.

It’s not that you will always get better results using Advantage+ Audience or Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. But, Meta has found that advertisers do get better results with these methods, on average. And your impact on targeting in either case is minimal.

Remarketing

I still remember how excited I was when advertisers were given the ability to target website visitors. It changed the entire industry.

You don’t need to convince me of the value of reaching people who are deeply connected to us. I lived primarily off of remarketing for a very long time. The question is whether much of the remarketing that we once did is still necessary.

Audience Segments for sales campaigns opened my eyes to this possibility. Once you define your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers (essentially your remarketing audiences), you can see how much of your budget is spent on remarketing while not even trying.

In my tests, it doesn’t matter whether I use Advantage+ Audience (with or without suggestions) or original audiences. I regularly see a similar distribution between remarketing and prospecting.

If Meta is going to prioritize your remarketing audience anyway, why is it necessary to create separate ad sets to reach your remarketing audience — especially a general remarketing audience (all website visitors, for example)?

The primary argument for remarketing now is if you have a unique message for a very specific group of people that would only be relevant to them. Minus such a message, it just doesn’t feel necessary.

Exceptions and Caveats

I’ve been careful to specify that the situations when detailed targeting and lookalike audiences are least impactful are when those audiences are expanded. The end result is likely more like Advantage+ Audience than you think.

But, there are times when you can turn expansion off — and it may even be recommended. If your performance goal is post engagement, ThruPlay, or just about anything other than a conversion (or link clicks and landing page views for detailed targeting), Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage Lookalike are options that can be turned on or off.

I’m not suggesting that turning off expansion will give you better results. Instead, your inputs obviously mean more if targeting is restricted to what you provide.

There are also times when using original audiences instead of Advantage+ Audience may be preferred, especially when optimizing for top-of-the-funnel actions. Not only do you get more control over detailed targeting and lookalike audiences, but age maximums and gender become tight constraints. If you’ve seen that your budget is wasted outside of your demographic preferences when using Advantage+ Audience, this is always an option.

That said, this still doesn’t have anything to do with your detailed targeting and lookalike audience selections.

How Much Does It Matter?

If I’m successful at nothing else with this post, I hope that you at least walk away with a new skepticism about your impact on targeting.

I said it before, but it requires repeating: This isn’t about whether Advantage+ Audience is superior to using interests and lookalikes. It’s that any difference between the three approaches has the potential of being completely random.

If you’re getting great results using a certain group of interests, it may be partially due to the interests you’re using. It may be mostly due to the expanded audience. We don’t know. The main thing is that the inputs you provided aren’t likely to be the main or only reason you’re getting those results.

Results from test after test are showing me this. Surface level metrics are nearly the same. Distribution between remarketing and prospecting are nearly the same. Results are nearly the same.

And when there’s a wider difference, it’s a disparity that often can’t be replicated when I recreate the test. It was random.

That’s why I want you to obsess less over these things. It’s not that I demand you stop using original audiences with interests and lookalikes. I just want you to stop obsessing over them. It’s unlikely that you found the perfect combination of targeting inputs.

Advertisers are superstitious creatures. Even if we know that something we’re doing isn’t why we’re getting great results, we don’t want to rock the boat. And that’s perfectly fine.

But, I encourage you to resist the need to over test your targeting. If you continue to create multiple ad sets for different groups of people, hoping to isolate the best performing selection of targeting inputs, you are likely doing more harm than good.

It’s also a potentially colossal waste of time that could be better spent on things that matter, like your ad copy, creative, landing page, and attribution.

The Direction We’re Heading

This should be obvious…

1. In a very limited number of situations, you can avoid having your detailed targeting and lookalike audiences expanded. In those that remain, they may be expanded by default, but you can turn it off. Meta wants you to turn it on.

2. When optimizing for conversions (and sometimes link clicks or landing page views), your ads can be delivered to people outside of the interests and lookalikes that you provide.

3. The default approach to targeting is Advantage+ Audience. Meta doesn’t want you to use original audiences and tries to discourage you from using them.

4. Meta doesn’t even seem to care if you provide any targeting at all with Advantage+ Audience. When you do, it’s merely a suggestion.

5. If you’re creating a sales campaign, it defaults to Advantage+ Shopping, which allows for virtually no targeting inputs at all. This is what Meta wants you to do.

Your targeting inputs matter far less than they ever did before. More importantly, Meta doesn’t seem to want or even need them. And the trend line is towards eliminating them entirely.

You can be upset about this, but I simply ask that you acknowledge it. Repeat after me:

“My targeting inputs mean less than ever before. Meta doesn’t want or need my targeting inputs. One day, I will likely lose all ability to control these things.”

Once you accept it, you can prepare.

How to Impact Who Sees Your Ads

This may seem like you’re placed in a helpless situation, but you’re not. Your targeting inputs may not matter much, but you can still impact who sees your ads.

1. Performance Goal. Think about it. This might be the most impactful control of all. Whether your audience is expanded or you’re using Advantage+ Audience, the algorithm is driven by finding people who will perform the action that you want, as defined by the performance goal. This includes the conversion event that you choose when optimizing for conversions.

What you define as your goal will drastically alter who sees your ad. Meta’s focus will be on helping get you that action.

2. Ad Copy, Creative, and Offer. A common claim is that the ad does the targeting now, and I don’t know that this is literally true. I haven’t seen Meta specify that the algorithm scans your copy for keywords to determine who sees your ad. But, it’s mostly semantics.

Your initial audience is likely determined by pixel activity, conversion data, and prior engagement with your ads. After that, it learns from who performs the action that you want. So, you want your ad copy, creative, and offer to attract your ideal audience.

You don’t want to attract a general audience. You want to attract very specific people. In a sense, you want your ad to repel people who aren’t your ideal customer.

These aren’t small things. Crafting effective copy, creative, and offers isn’t easy to do. Don’t feel as though a light-touch approach to targeting is somehow the easy way out. You still have work to do.

Your Turn

What’s your approach to reaching your ideal audience? Has it evolved?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Meta Ads Targeting and an Advertiser’s Role, Explained appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Are you still running Meta ads strategies that you used years ago? Do you ignore Meta’s best practices and recommendations because you swear that they don’t work?

My view of ad strategies isn’t absolute. There isn’t one approach that will always work for everybody in all situations. If you’ve found what works for you, great. Even if it’s inconsistent with what works most often, there are exceptions.

But, you also shouldn’t do this blindly. Don’t be stubborn about it. Don’t take an approach based on gut feel, a lack of trust in automation, or because something did or didn’t work a few years ago.

If you’ve been taking the same approach for the past year or longer, it’s important that you test your assumptions about what works and what doesn’t. And when you do, make sure it’s a scientific test that will provide meaningful results.

Running these tests can only be productive. It could reinforce what you believed to be true. Or the results may make you question whether what you’re doing is actually effective. You may see an alternative approach in a new light.

My advertising approach has changed dramatically over the years. I did not immediately embrace an evolving set of best practices. I was stubborn. But, my own tests have helped me understand that I was wrong. They also helped improve my confidence in another approach.

In this post, we’ll cover a handful of old school advertising targeting strategies and how you should test them against a more modern approach. Once you’ve tested, you can decide whether your stubbornness was right all along.

Testing Basics

Before we get to the old school strategies, it’s important to provide a framework for testing.

1. Use A/B Test.

I prefer to create A/B Tests in Experiments. Create the campaigns or ad sets that you want to compare first. Then go to Experiments and click to create an A/B Test.

Select the campaigns or ad sets that you want to compare. I ask you to test ad sets in two of the three examples below. In the third, you’d compare campaigns.

2. Focus on a Single Variable.

Everything about the two campaigns or ad sets should be identical except for a single variable. Since this post is about testing targeting strategies, everything beyond targeting should be the same. Make sure that there aren’t any other variables like placements or ad copy and creative that could result in differences in performance.

3. Your Key Metric

The Key Metric is what determines which campaign or ad set “wins” in an A/B test.

Make sure that this metric isn’t frivolous. What ultimately determines which ad set was better? If your goal is sales, then the key metric should be Cost Per Purchase. Do not use secondary metrics like CTR or CPC.

If your key metric is Cost Per Lead, you may want to take steps to measure the quality of those leads. Make sure that you send these leads to different forms so that you can keep track of them in your CRM.

4. Strive for meaningful results.

Your goal isn’t to find a winner quickly, it’s to find convincing results that actually mean something. Make sure that the budget dedicated to each competing campaign or ad set, combined with the length of the test, are enough to produce the volume that you need.

The longest you can run a test is a month. This would be my preference for a test that will help define your strategy going forward. Do not end the test early if a winner is found.

If the results become more convincing with time, that’s a good thing.

1. Interests and Lookalikes

There was a time when the ability to target people by interest, behavior, or lookalike audience was revolutionary. It gave advertisers targeting control and your ads were more likely to reach a relevant audience.

That isn’t always the case now. If you use Advantage+ Audience, any inputs you provide for detailed targeting or lookalike audiences will be suggestions.

This is why many advertisers have resorted to using original audiences. Targeting inputs in that case are more than suggestions — or we assume.

But, the reality is that even when using original audiences, your targeting inputs are rarely tight constraints. If you’re optimizing for conversions, link clicks, or landing page views, Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically on.

If you optimize for conversions, Advantage Lookalike is automatically on.

In other words, we have no idea how much your selection of those interests and lookalike audiences actually matter. And based on my tests, they matter very little — if at all.

It’s not even clear that your audience suggestions matter when using Advantage+ Audience. They may actually be a detriment. This is why I recommend testing your current strategy with interests and lookalike audiences versus Advantage+ Audience without any suggestions at all.

Compare:

• Version 1: Original Audiences using Detailed Targeting or Lookalike Audiences
• Version 2: Advantage+ Audience without Suggestions

Key Metric: Cost Per Conversion (whichever event is most relevant)

Are you actually better off using original audiences to target interests or lookalikes? Maybe. But, prove it.

2. Gender and Age Control

One of the complaints I’ve heard from advertisers about Advantage+ Audience is the lack of control over age and gender.

You are only able to provide an age minimum within Audience Controls when using Advantage+ Audience.

Any age maximum or gender inputs you provide are audience suggestions. If Meta can get you more or better results by delivering your ads outside of those ranges, it will.

As a result, advertisers who feel these inputs are critical have favored original audiences. In that case, age and gender are tight constraints that will be respected.

Let’s assume that your customer is predominantly women aged 25-49. If Advantage+ Audience works the way that it should, whether or not ads are delivered to men or people outside of those age ranges will depend upon whether you can get your optimized actions from those other groups.

I’ve seen examples where businesses that serve women used Advantage+ Audience and 99% of the budget was spent on reaching women — even though gender is only a suggestion.

The key, though, is that you should optimize for conversions for this to be effective — preferably purchases. If reaching people who fall outside of expected gender and age range won’t lead to conversions, you’ll likely spend very little there.

Can you trust Advantage+ Audience without these controls? It’s worth testing for any type of conversion, especially purchases. Leads can be problematic since it’s possible you may get cheaper and lower quality leads this way — but, it’s worth testing. Engagement optimization is likely to go off the rails using Advantage+ Audience without those controls, but top-of-the-funnel optimization is problematic at its core.

Compare:

• Version 1: Original Audiences with Age and Gender Restrictions
• Version 2: Advantage+ Audience with Age and Gender Suggestions (if at all)

Key Metric: Cost Per Conversion (whichever event is most relevant)

Is it critical that you only reach people within your preferred demographic? Is it possible that Advantage+ Audience will waste money by reaching people outside of those groups? Maybe. But, prove it.

3. Remarketing

Look, my whole thing years ago was remarketing. I was generating a high volume of daily organic traffic, and ads allowed me to leverage this with highly relevant targeting.

But, things have changed. You can still target remarketing audiences. Those groups of people are surely just as relevant as they were years ago. What changed is the cost.

Targeting small groups of people is much more expensive than targeting large groups. Even though your website visitors may be three times more likely to convert, it may cost three (or five or 10) times more to reach them.

The other development is that Meta’s ad delivery algorithm has improved. Even if you use Advantage+ Audience without suggestions or go broad with original audiences, the algorithm will almost always prioritize a percentage of your budget to remarketing. We now know this due to Audience Segments.

When running Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (or any Sales campaigns, if you have the update), you can breakdown your results by Audience Segments. I’ve often seen that between 25 and 35% of my budget is spent on people who have engaged with me (visited my website or subscribed to my email list) or bought from me.

Many advertisers continue to create campaigns with separate ad sets for prospecting and remarketing. But, since these two things happen at once without us even realizing it, is it still necessary?

For this test, we’ll need to compare campaigns since the old school approach is to use two ad sets. I would also use an attribution setting that is click only to prevent the remarketing ad set from inflating results with view-through conversions.

Also make sure that the combined budget of each campaign is the same. In other words, Version 2 using Advantage+ Audience should be the same as the sum of the two ad sets in Version 1.

Compare:

• Version 1: Campaign with Remarketing and Prospecting Ad Sets
• Version 2: Campaign with one Ad Set using Advantage+ Audience

Key Metric: Cost Per Conversion (whichever event is most relevant)

In addition to comparing the Cost Per Conversion, use your Breakdown by Audience Segments to see how your spend and results from remarketing compare.

Test Your Assumptions

I want you to test these because what I’ve seen from my own tests is quite clear. I’ve seen that…

1. Detailed targeting and lookalike audiences are rarely beneficial. Advantage+ Audience almost always gives me the same or better results.

2. Gender and age restrictions are rarely necessary. Especially when optimizing for purchases, the algorithm figures it out.

3. Remarketing is not the advantage it once was. It’s expensive to run stand-alone remarketing ad sets. Remarketing and prospecting happen together in the most optimal way now.

There are always exceptions, and I’ve even mentioned some of those cases in this post. But, if you are still utilizing some of these old school targeting strategies, I encourage you to run these tests yourself and allow for the possibility that more modern approaches may be more beneficial.

Your Turn

These are the types of tests that I often run to challenge my own assumptions. Once you’ve run these tests, I’d love to see your results.

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Test Meta Advertising Targeting Strategies appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There was a time when asking the question in today’s title would have been considered ridiculous. But, we can no longer ignore the trends. As much as we may want to fight it, targeting doesn’t matter nearly as much as it once did.

The way I phrased that was a soft landing. It left some wiggle room. Maybe it still matters, but not as much as before, right? But, let’s take it further.

It’s possible that targeting no longer matters at all.

Whoa, don’t come at me like that! I know. There are so many advertisers who still use the same strategy they’ve used for years. They insist it still works — and that it’s necessary. I know because I hear from them often.

I was one of those advertisers. If you were to go back far enough on this website, you’d begin to find quotes from me like this:

There are many factors that lead to success or failure of your Facebook ad campaign. But spoiler alert: Nothing is more important than targeting.

Or this:

Facebook ad targeting is one of the primary reasons why ads fail or succeed. You could have the perfectly crafted ad, but you shouldn’t expect it to work if it’s targeting the wrong people.

Things have changed. Our inputs mean less due to the move towards audience expansion and algorithmic targeting. In most cases, you can provide audience suggestions or inputs, but it’s questionable how much those inputs impact delivery.

And now that we have audience segments for sales campaigns, we can start to get more visibility into whether what we change matters at all.

Through my tests during the past month using four different ad strategies, it’s pretty clear: The strategy I chose did not seem to make any noticeable difference.

Allow me to explain…

Targeting Before

My quotes in the section above came from 2017, and I stand by them as being applicable at that point in time. Our targeting inputs absolutely did matter.

We defined the precise pool of people who should see our ads based on location, age, gender, custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and detailed targeting. Meta’s ad delivery optimization would then show ads to people within that pool who were most likely to convert.

If that initial targeting pool was flawed, we would not get results. Our inputs were important.

They were so important that Meta’s algorithm couldn’t fix broken targeting for us. It didn’t look at our inputs as suggestions. It didn’t prioritize our inputs initially before expanding to help us get better results.

We defined who could see our ads, and performance relied heavily on it.

Targeting Now

Of course, that’s no longer the case. The introduction of features like Advantage audience expansion and Advantage+ Audience means that we have various levels of control when it comes to who sees our ads:

• Things we definitively control
• Things we sorta control
• Things that have inconclusive impact and may not matter at all

The point of this article isn’t to say that today’s algorithmic targeting is better — or even that the control of the past was superior. Rather that it is what it is, and it’s possible that we’re paying far too much attention to factors we have little control over.

As we discuss control, I am going to focus only on cases when we’re optimizing for conversions. Otherwise, the factors that contribute to control will vary.

But, truthfully, if you’re able to optimize for conversions (and have conversion data available via the pixel or Conversions API), conversion optimization should be your priority. Top-of-funnel optimization is largely flawed, whether you control the audience or not.

What We Definitively Control

For each of these sections, we should differentiate between whether we’re using Advantage+ Audience or Original Audiences.

Advantage+ Audience: Factors We Control

• Minimum Age
• Languages
• Excluded Custom Audiences

These are within your Audience Controls. Meta will not serve ads to people under your set minimum age, within excluded custom audiences, or who don’t speak your selected language.

You may assume that location should fall here, too, but I omitted it intentionally. We’ll get to it.

Original Audiences: Factors We Control

• Minimum and Maximum Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Excluded Custom Audiences
• Custom Audiences (if Advantage Custom Audience is turned off)

There’s a bit more control here, but it’s minimal. When using Original Audiences, you can set a tight control on age range (both minimum and maximum) as well as gender. When using Advantage+ Audience, gender and custom audiences are suggestions (we’ll get to that). But when using Original Audiences, they are tight constraints.

What We Sorta Control

There’s one item that we omitted from above that we sorta control, and this applies to both Advantage+ Audience and Original Audiences: Location.

Way back in 2023, Meta changed our control over location targeting. Originally, we had four options:

• People living in or recently in a location
• People living in a location
• People recently in a location
• People traveling in a location

But, now it’s only “living in or recently in.” That means that you can’t isolate locals or travelers. This is why location is something we only sorta control.

No, Meta will not deliver your ads to people who don’t either live in or were recently in your selected location. You have control over that.

But, that doesn’t mean you have full control. If you want to only reach locals or travelers, you can’t. And that’s been a major frustration for advertisers.

What We Do That Has Inconclusive Impact

There’s a growing list of targeting inputs that we provide that may not matter at all. Or maybe they do. But, it’s not entirely clear whether they matter a lot, very little, or somewhere in between.

Advantage+ Audience: Inconclusive Impact

• Custom audiences
• Lookalike audiences
• Age maximum
• Gender
• Detailed targeting

All of these things are audience suggestions. It is entirely unclear whether they matter. Maybe they help give the algorithm initial direction. Maybe these suggestions are completely inconsequential.

Ultimately, your ads will be delivered to people who are likely to perform the action that you defined with your performance goal.

Original Audiences: Inconclusive Impact

• Custom audiences (if Advantage Custom Audience is turned on)
• Lookalike audiences
• Detailed targeting

When optimizing for conversions, Advantage Lookalike and Advantage Detailed Targeting are on by default and can’t be turned off. This means that your audience will be expanded and ads can be shown to people beyond those audiences.

In the case of custom audiences, you have the option of turning on Advantage Custom Audience.

Does that mean that if you get great results from your targeting inputs, expansion won’t happen? Does it mean that expansion always happens? Or does it mean that your inputs are no more than suggestions, like with Advantage+ Audience — this is simply a softer repackaging?

We don’t know. But, it’s entirely possible that inputs for audiences that can be expanded have minimal impact on delivery.

Here’s why I think that…

Look At This! (Targeting Test)

The image above is a summary of a test that I ran recently. It’s a sales campaign with four separate ad sets using a different targeting strategy:

1. Advantage+ Audience without suggestions
2. Advantage+ Audience with suggestions
3. Original Audiences using custom audiences with Advantage Custom Audience turned on
4. Original Audiences with no targeting inputs beyond country (going broad)

This test wasn’t about comparing performance (Cost Per Conversion) because too many factors impact that. But, if you’re curious, those results were almost exactly the same.

I was more concerned about whether my ads were delivered differently. I used audience segments to get an idea of how much of my budget was spent reaching my engaged audience and existing customers (in other words: Remarketing).

The difference was negligible and could be due to randomness, rather than the specific strategy.

Without getting too in the weeds of that test, my inputs or targeting strategy didn’t seem to have any impact on the distribution of my budget between remarketing and prospecting. At the very least, there’s strong evidence that at least 25% of my budget will go to remarketing, no matter what my approach.

The question we can’t answer is whether my strategy or targeting inputs impacted the prospecting audience. Since results are essentially the same, it would be logical to assume the difference is minimal. But, there’s no way to say for sure.

Does Remarketing Matter?

There was a time when remarketing made up a very large percentage of my advertising efforts. But, that’s no longer the case. More accurately, I no longer create ad sets that isolate custom audiences.

In the section about targeting we definitively control, custom audiences is listed under Original Audiences (assuming you turned Advantage Custom Audience off). You can still run remarketing campaigns. But, the question is whether you should.

As you can see in my pie charts above, between 25 and 35% of my budget was spent on remarketing using all four strategies. This includes using Advantage+ Audience without suggestions and Original Audiences while going broad.

I should also mention that it’s possible, if not extremely likely, that even more than that is spent on remarketing. Audience segments for engaged audience and existing customers do not include engagement custom audiences. So, we don’t know how much of my budget is spent on people who engaged with my ads, but didn’t click to my website, make a purchase, or join my email list.

While I don’t explicitly run remarketing campaigns, I’m still remarketing. And that’s kind of the beauty of how Meta is distributing my budget. Prospecting and remarketing happens all within a single ad set.

What This Could Mean

If what I’ve found in this limited test scales and isn’t a random blip, it should make you think about how you run ads.

It may not matter whether you use suggestions with Advantage+ Audience.

It may not matter whether you use Advantage+ Audience or Original Audiences and go broad.

It may not matter if you use Original Audiences with one of the targeting options that expands your inputs.

It’s quite possible that in all cases, Meta’s ad delivery algorithm will dedicate a similar percentage of your budget to remarketing and the rest to prospecting.

When I discovered this possibility, it was freeing. When you realize that none of your inputs make that much of a difference, you stop obsessing over how you do it. It allows you to focus more of your time on ad copy and creative.

But, just as importantly, you realize that all of those separate ad sets to segment your targeting were probably completely unnecessary. Because each ad set, assuming the audience was impacted by expansion, likely reached a very similar group of people. You’re better off consolidating your budget.

My takeaway is that Advantage+ Audience without suggestions is likely sufficient for me. And there’s no reason to run multiple ad sets in one campaign at the same time for the purpose of segmenting targeting groups.

The main exception to this could be if you need to tightly control the ads that are shown to individual audience segments, but that should not be the norm for most advertisers. And ultimately, you could hurt your performance by forcing such control.

So… Does Targeting Still Matter?

I don’t have a definitive answer for you. There’s still too much we do not know about the impact of our inputs and how our ads are delivered.

At the very least, our targeting inputs certainly mean far less than they did before. Remarketing isn’t necessary, in many cases. It’s possible that you only need to use Advantage+ Audience without suggestions now, assuming you’re optimizing for conversions.

I’ve seen enough to decide that these inputs are no longer impactful enough (if at all) to be all that concerned about them. Because it seems that no matter what approach I take, my ads get delivered in a similar manner.

Summary Grid

I put together a grid to summarize the level of audience control advertisers have over targeting, broken down by approach. I’ve been told that people like summary grids. So, here you go…

Your Turn

What’s your feeling about targeting these days? Does it still matter?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Does Targeting Still Matter? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There is no single aspect of Meta advertising that has been impacted more during the past year than targeting. The change has been dramatic.

The problem is that advertisers aren’t so quick to move with these changes. They resist, and they’re mostly determined to apply their tried and true targeting strategies from years past.

In some cases, these strategies still work — or work well enough. In others, they fail miserably, and advertisers who misunderstand the current environment can’t figure out why.

During the course of the past year, I’ve published about 30 pieces of content related to the evolution of Meta ads targeting. I highlight the 20 cornerstone pieces below.

Consider this post a deep resource to help walk you through how to approach targeting now and in the future.

On a Macro Level

Let’s begin with a group of posts related to targeting, where we were, where we are now, and what we can expect in the future.

Where we’ve been…

1. The Ultimate Guide to Meta Ads Targeting: Some targeting methods are new and others have been around forever. This post provides a thorough overview of how you can control who sees your ads with targeting inputs.

Where we are now…

2. 6 Targeting Mistakes Advertisers Make: When ads fail due to the decisions made by advertisers related to who should see their ads, it’s usually due to one of these six things.

3. The Evolution of Who Sees Your Ads: So much has changed during the past few years. It’s important that we reframe how we look at “targeting.” It’s now more about who sees our ads, and that’s not always something we determine with targeting inputs.

4. Your Targeting Matters Less Now: This is something that advertisers need to understand and embrace. It’s not that targeting doesn’t matter at all. It’s not that going broad or audience expansion will always work better. It’s that, quite simply, our targeting inputs make less of an impact now than ever before.

5. How to Approach Meta Ads Targeting Now: Accept that things are different now. You can’t approach targeting the same way that you once did. You need a new strategy.

Where we’re going…

6. The Future of Meta Ads Targeting: I don’t have a crystal ball, but I do think I’m a good judge of where we’re going based on trends. And it’s pretty darn obvious.

7. Meta’s Removal of Detailed Targeting is a Reminder of What’s to Come: Meta rarely adds new targeting options. Instead, the news is almost always that targeting options have been taken away. This should be a sign of what is to come.

8. Targeting Will Get More Difficult: If you struggle to embrace the new world of ad targeting and your role in it, there is no relief in sight. If you don’t adjust, it will only get tougher.

9. Will Meta Remove All Interest Targeting? It’s not a crazy question. After all, Advantage+ Shopping strips away virtually all targeting inputs. Interest targeting also gets Meta in trouble at times due to misuse. So, might interest targeting eventually disappear?

Audience Expansion

The biggest changes to targeting during the past year and more are related to the expansion of who sees our ads beyond our targeting inputs — if we provide them at all.

10. Advantage Targeting: How Meta Audience Expansion Products Work: It all started here. I’ll candidly admit that I resisted. I didn’t like the idea that Meta could expand beyond my targeting inputs. Here’s how Advantage audience expansion works in three different forms.

11. Advantage Detailed Targeting Updates: Audience expansion isn’t perfect, and there are times when you should avoid it. Unfortunately, Meta is starting to limit how often you can avoid it.

12. Meta is Forcing Expanded Audiences for Top of Funnel Optimization: In this post, I make the case for why this is a bad change and what Meta needs to do to make audience expansion for top-of-funnel optimization viable.

13. Advantage+ Audience Best Practices Guide: Advantage expansion products may eventually be a thing of the past, replaced by Advantage+ Audience. This approach applies to any objective and uses your targeting inputs — if you provide any — as mere suggestions. This post outlines how this works and how you should approach it.

Today’s Strategies

Most people misunderstand my feelings about Advantage+ Audience and audience expansion. While I truly believe you should embrace and use it in specific situations, it’s also counterproductive in others. It’s a matter of understanding how these things work, what makes them powerful, and when they might fail.

14. Are Audience Suggestions Necessary?: We’ve reached an interesting point where it may make sense, based on on Advantage+ Audience works, not to provide any audience suggestions at all.

15. Should You Restrict by Demographic Group?: Some of these tools force us to confront our approach to targeting. This is a primary example. In the past, it’s been a must to restrict by demographic group to help the algorithm. But there are specific cases now when that may no longer be the case — but others when that restricted is necessary.

16. Ads Reaching the Wrong People?: Advertisers often make claims about ads reaching the wrong people based on comments, but that’s not a good gauge of whether you actually paid to reach them. Here’s what you should do instead.

17. No Gender in Audience Controls: One interesting quirk of Advantage+ Audience is that there are no controls for gender. You can provide gender as an audience suggestions but not as an Audience Control. In some cases, this actually isn’t a big deal. But there are exceptions.

18. When Broad Targeting Fails: While I’m generally looking forward and an advocate for the advancements in Meta ads targeting, there are specific cases when it’s still not ready for prime time. There are reasons it fails, and it’s something that Meta could fix.

19. Going Broad Isn’t Always the Answer: Whenever I write about the newer targeting options, it does not fail. I’ll get comments from people telling me how going broad, using Advantage+ Audience, or turning on audience expansion doesn’t work for them. That might just be the case!

20. When to Switch to Original Audiences: There are times when it does not make sense to use Advantage+ Audience due to weaknesses in how it works. Be aware of these examples because you may find yourself throwing money away. The expansion of your audience will only make what was already a problem much worse.

Your Turn

How have you adjusted to the evolution of Meta ads targeting?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Comprehensive Guide to Meta Ads Targeting: 20 Resources appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta launched Advantage+ Audience in August of 2023, but the vast majority of advertisers still struggle to leverage it properly. Most either resist it whenever possible or use it without knowing how it works.

Both are wrong.

Advantage+ Audience is a powerful improvement over original targeting methods. That said, it also shouldn’t be used in all situations. Additionally, you should reconsider campaign construction strategies due to how it works.

There are strengths and weaknesses to consider. With this post, I hope to provide clarity on when you should use Advantage+ Audience, when you shouldn’t, and how it impacts your overall approach.

The Basics

When you create an ad set, the default targeting method is Advantage+ Audience.

This is meant to streamline targeting, leveraging Meta’s ad technology to automatically find your audience for you. You can optionally provide an audience suggestion, and Meta will prioritize it before going broader.

Audience Controls

Audience Controls are your tight constraints. While the algorithm has mostly free rein to find your audience, these controls set a few strict guardrails.

Note that Audience Controls only consist of the following:

• Locations (people living in or recently in)
• Minimum age
• Excluded custom audiences
• Language (if it isn’t common to your selected location)

It’s important to note that there is no Audience Control for a maximum age or gender. This allows the algorithm more ability to find people who are likely to perform your desired action.

Of course, that could be an issue in specific circumstances. We’ll get to that.

Audience Suggestion

This is a unique approach, so advertisers may be inclined to provide an audience suggestion. While it can’t hurt, you should understand how Meta finds your audience if you don’t provide one.

Meta uses AI to find your audience, evolving as it learns. That audience may be based on:

• Past conversions
• Pixel data
• Interactions with previous ads

These are many of the sources you’d provide for an audience suggestion anyway. In other words, Meta’s AI should prioritize what is essentially a remarketing audience before going broader (there is evidence of this).

Another critical aspect of how Meta finds your audience will be the performance goal (and conversion event, if applicable). Understand that this is how performance is measured, so what you select will impact delivery.

But, maybe you want to provide an audience suggestion.

Remember that the Audience Controls act as a tight constraint that Meta won’t deliver beyond, but your audience suggestion is just that — a suggestion. Meta can deliver ads to people who aren’t part of the custom audiences, lookalike audiences, or detailed targeting inputs that you provide here.

The age ranges and gender are also merely suggestions. Meta won’t show your ads to people who are younger than the age minimum that you provide in Audience Controls, but ads may be shown beyond your age maximum since it’s a suggestion. And since there isn’t a control for gender, ads may be shown to people beyond your gender suggestion.

Switching Back

If you don’t want to use Advantage+ Audience, you can switch back to original audience options. There’s a link at the bottom of Advantage+ Audience to do this.

Meta discourages this. In fact, you’ll get a warning message that requires you to confirm that you want to switch back.

Here, Meta highlights the 33% lower cost per result based on an experiment run from March to June 2023.

Within Meta’s documentation, they also highlight the following stats:

• 13% lower median cost per product catalog sale
• 7% lower median cost per website conversions
• 28% lower average cost per click, lead or landing page view

The first two are the most meaningful. The third is actually a potential red flag, depending on your performance goal. We’ll address that when discussion when to consider using the original audience options later in this post.

If you switch back to original audiences, you’ll have all of the old options you’re used to.

Similarities and Differences

Trying to differentiate between Advantage+ Audience and the original audience options can be a challenge, especially when audience expansion using the original method is in play. But, let’s break it down…

Similarities

Going Broader. Whether you’re using Advantage+ Audience or the original audience options, targeting may be expanded beyond your targeting inputs.

When using the original audience options, Advantage Detailed Targeting audience expansion is automatically turned on and can’t be turned off when optimizing for conversions, link clicks, or landing page views. Advantage Lookalike is automatically on when optimizing for conversions.

If you don’t like the fact that your inputs are only suggestions for Advantage+ Audience, just know that your audience is often expanded using the prior methods, too.

Differences

Expansion Exceptions. As noted, Advantage+ Audience will apply to any objective or optimization, unless you switch back to the original audience options. When using that original targeting, you will have the option to turn on Advantage expansion depending on the optimization — and in some cases, you won’t have the option to turn it on.

Custom Audiences. Your custom audience inputs will always be an audience suggestion when using Advantage+ Audience. When using the original audience options, you’ll always have the option of turning expansion off.

Tight Constraints. When using original audience options, your inputs for age (minimum and maximum), gender, locations, and languages are all tight constraints. When using Advantage+ Audience, you can only provide Audience Controls for age minimum, locations, and languages. Any inputs you provide for age maximum or gender are only suggestions.

Going EVEN Broader. It’s easy to miss the differences between Advantage+ Audience and the original audience options, especially when optimizing for conversions. But, Meta says that “Advantage+ Audience creates the broadest possible audience” and that the original audience options (including Advantage expansion options) “can limit the potential of Meta’s AI which can be less effective.”

When You Should Use It

If you’re optimizing for conversions — especially purchases — you should use Advantage+ Audience over the original audience options.

The objections to Advantage+ Audience don’t hold much water in this case.

1. Going broader. Whether you use Advantage+ Audience or the original audience options, targeting will be expanded beyond your detailed targeting and lookalike audience options when optimizing for conversions. While you don’t have to expand beyond your custom audience when using the original options, the typically small sizes of custom audiences aren’t ideal for conversion optimization anyway.

2. Tight constraints. You can’t set gender or maximum age as an Audience Control when using Advantage+ Audience, but that shouldn’t be an issue when optimizing for most conversions (again, especially purchases). The algorithm learns and will adjust based on who is performing these actions and who isn’t.

Advantage+ Audience provides less control but fewer restrictions on the algorithm to help find more of the actions that you want.

When You Should Use Original Audience

There are a few cases when you should consider using the original audience options due to potential weaknesses in Advantage+ Audience.

1. Top-of-Funnel Optimization. Keep in mind that top-of-funnel optimization (link clicks, landing page views, post engagement, ThruPlay, etc.) can already be problematic due to quality concerns. The algorithm’s primary focus is getting you as many of that action within your budget, and there’s no concern for whether these people do anything else.

You can limit this, to a point, with tighter targeting constraints. Using original audience options, you can define your targeting audience with more specificity — and without turning on audience expansion. This could help assure that anyone who sees your ads will at least be in your target group (even if limiting expansion might increase costs).

2. Gender and Age Focus. This can especially be an issue if your customer is only a specific gender or age group. Women serving women entrepreneurs is an example. If optimizing for a purchase, the algorithm should sort out that your paying customers are only (or primarily) women and adjust delivery when using Advantage+ Audience. But if you optimize for something top-of-funnel, there’s little preventing men from engaging and commenting, which will only convince the algorithm that men should see your ads.

This can also be an issue with lead quality and it’s something worth monitoring. It’s not that Advantage+ Audience is especially susceptible to low-quality leads. This is a potential issue, regardless of your approach. But if you find that you’re getting low-quality leads, and especially if they fall outside of your target age and gender demo, you may consider switching back.

Should You Provide an Audience Suggestion?

This is something you should test and find what works for you. But based on my experience, there’s little to no risk in providing an audience suggestion. It’s just a matter of whether it’s necessary.

As discussed earlier, Meta will automatically find your audience based on a combination of your performance goal, conversion history, pixel data, and prior engagement with your ads if you don’t provide a suggestion. These are all things you’d likely focus on when entering that suggestion.

But here are a couple of situations to consider…

1. New Pixel or Ad Account. If you lack that historical data that Meta can leverage to find your audience, it will likely help to provide some suggestions as a starting point.

2. Different Demo. Maybe your content serves several distinct groups or there are various categories of customers. That history would theoretically be lumped together when Meta builds your initial audience. If you want to be sure that Meta focuses on a unique group that you serve, it may make sense to start with a suggestion.

How It Impacts Campaign Construction

Most advertisers miss this, and it’s a behavior I’m determined to help change.

The old school approach to campaign construction involved multiple (sometimes several) ad sets for cold targeting. You can make the argument (and I do) that this isn’t ideal even when using the original audience options when expansion is on. But it definitely doesn’t make sense when using Advantage+ Audience.

Assuming you are using the same optimization and ad creative, what would differentiate each ad set? While you can provide unique audience suggestions for each one, this is only the starting point of targeting before going much broader.

Even if these ad sets generate distinct audiences from your suggestions, that uniqueness disappears when Advantage+ Audience goes broader. In each case, the algorithm will attempt to get you more of the actions that you want. That original suggestion no longer matters (or likely matters very little).

The result: The overlap between audiences once Meta has moved beyond the suggestions will be significant. This auction overlap will unnecessarily drive up your costs.

It’s simply inefficient. Not only can you expect your costs to go up due to auction overlap, but creating separate ad sets can also prevent you from exiting the learning phase.

The eventual audience leads to the same place. Combine these ad sets for better results.

Bottom Line

There’s a lot to digest here, but keep it simple…

1. If you’re optimizing for any type of conversion, you should prioritize using Advantage+ Audience.

2. You may not need an audience suggestion, but feel free to experiment with them. They shouldn’t hurt you.

3. Advantage+ Audience isn’t ideal for top-of-funnel optimization (link clicks, landing page views, post engagement, ThruPlay, etc.), especially if your primary demo is limited by age or gender. This could even be an issue when optimizing for leads.

4. Reconsider your tried and true campaign construction strategies when using Advantage+ Audience. In most cases, only one ad set per campaign is necessary, otherwise you’re bound to generate overlap that will negatively impact results.

Don’t be afraid of Advantage+ Audience. It’s powerful and can help improve results. But be aware of both its strengths and weaknesses.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too. Watch it below…

Your Turn

How do you use Advantage+ Audience?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Advantage+ Audience Best Practices Guide appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

While pondering the changes related to targeting and optimization over the years, it struck we why so many advertisers struggle with understanding how their role has evolved with targeting: There’s a messaging problem.

I know there’s a messaging problem because I was dealing with it myself while I was trying to communicate it. The processes of targeting and optimization are beginning to blend into one. I think I found the solution.

We need to shift our focus to who sees our ads.

Sometimes people see your ads because they were included in your targeting inputs. Sometimes it’s due to Meta’s optimization for delivery. Both have been important. But the importance of both are changing.

Targeting and optimization were previously very different things. Now they are converging.

Maybe this doesn’t make sense yet. But once it does, it will help you better understand the systems at play which determine who sees your ads — and your role in them.

How People Saw Your Ads Pre-Expansion

Previously, advertisers had a critical role when it came to who saw their ads. They provided the initial targeting inputs.

Facebook (before there was Meta) then optimized to show your ads to people within that initial audience who were most likely to perform your desired action. This was “Optimization for Ad Delivery.”

Both were critically important. But optimization couldn’t fix bad targeting. If you provided a flawed pool of people to work with, you would not get good results.

For years, I contended that targeting was the most important advertiser responsibility. It could make or break your advertising.

How People See Your Ads with Expansion

That started to change pretty dramatically once Meta introduced Detailed Targeting Expansion (which eventually became Advantage Detailed Targeting).

Advantage Lookalike and Advantage Custom Audience soon followed.

The advertiser provides the initial targeting inputs. Just as important, they indicate a performance goal.

In some cases, the advertiser has the option to turn expansion on. In others (like when optimizing for conversions), it’s on by default and can’t be turned off.

When on, your initial inputs will be prioritized. But if Meta believes that you can get better results (determined by your performance goal) by expanding the audience, people who would not have qualified within your targeting inputs can see your ads.

The level of transparency has mostly been zero. Until recently, advertisers had no way to know how many of the people reached were via targeting inputs how how many were due to expansion. That’s at least partially corrected with the introduction of Audience Segments.

How People See Your Ads with Advantage+ Audience

While the mechanics of Advantage+ Audience sound very similar to expansion via Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage Lookalike, and Advantage Custom Audience, there are some very important differences.

Any inputs you provide when using Advantage+ Audience are mere audience suggestions.

If you don’t provide any suggestions, Meta will start with your prior conversions, pixel data, and previous engagement with your ads. In other words, the targeting will prioritize remarketing without providing inputs.

Another difference from Advantage expansion is that after prioritizing that initial audience, it can go much broader. The focus will be showing your ads to people most likely to perform the action that you want (defined by the performance goal).

As is the case with Advantage expansion, there is minimal transparency regarding a breakdown of performance between your inputs and the algorithmically generated audience. But one can assume that a much larger percentage of those reached are found by the algorithm — especially since you don’t need to provide inputs at all.

How People See Your Ads with Advantage+ Shopping

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns take this even further. The targeting inputs you can provide are virtually nonexistent. No interests, custom audiences, or lookalike audiences. You can restrict by country and set a current customer cap by defining your current customers in your ad account. But that’s it.

Otherwise, the people who will see your ads are determined via machine learning. All Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns utilize a conversions performance goal (either “most conversions” or “value of conversions“), and the conversion event will define which specific action determines success. This was previously locked in as Purchase, but you can now select any standard or custom event.

Who will see your ads? This is determined using machine learning based primarily on the conversion event.

The Performance Goal is Your Targeting Now

There’s a very good argument (okay, it’s my argument) that the performance goal is more important to who sees your ads than your actual targeting inputs. Especially now that your inputs are only suggestions with Advantage+ Audience and no inputs are provided with Advantage+ Shopping, it’s difficult to make the case that these inputs are as important as they once were.

But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have any role when it comes to determining who sees your ads. Even when you have no targeting inputs at all, like with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, there remains one very critical step.

Your performance goal is the targeting now.

If you want purchases, set a conversions performance gaol with Purchase as your conversion event.

If you want post engagement, set that as your performance goal. But don’t expect purchases.

This will automatically include some of the people you would normally target manually via remarketing audiences. The rest are filled in algorithmically based on the performance goal.

But here is something you need to understand: The audience won’t always be the same.

The people who see your ads when the performance goal is Conversions (with Purchase conversion event) will not be the same as the people who see your ads when your performance goal is Post Engagement. Your performance goal determines what you care about — and that is the central lever for determining how Meta optimizes and makes adjustments.

If your performance goal is for anything top of funnel (link clicks, landing page views, Post Engagement, or ThruPlay), you are very likely to run into quality issues. The reason is that Meta doesn’t care whether these people do anything else — because the assumption is that you don’t either. So your ads will be shown to people most likely to perform that action, which could be because they click on everything or a placement often results in that action.

The Role of Ad Copy and Creative

It’s popular to say that targeting has moved to your ad copy and creative (I even said it). While what you do with the ad is absolutely important, I contend it remains secondary to the performance goal.

That’s not to diminish the importance of ad copy and creative. It may be splitting hairs to say that one is more important than the other.

If you pick the wrong performance goal, you’ll need the perfect ad copy and creative to get any results.

If you create a sub-par ad, the right performance goal can help get you some results.

In both cases, your potential is limited. You’ll get the best results by setting the appropriate performance goal and being on top of your game with ad copy and creative.

The Future of Who Sees Your Ads

If you’re following the trends outlined here, it shouldn’t be all that difficult to predict the future of targeting. The continued focuses on privacy, tracking, and malicious uses of targeting (discrimination and manipulation of elections) makes the continuation of this trend a near certainty.

You may argue that your inputs still mean a lot because you use the original targeting options and don’t always optimize for conversions. You regularly find ways to avoid audience expansion.

But do not expect these options to remain. Meta clearly wants advertisers to use Advantage+ Audience. It couldn’t be more obvious that the original methods are on the way out.

And we’ll very likely see the hands-off targeting approach of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns expanded to other objectives. Meta already hinted at this related to leads.

If you haven’t already started to shift from “targeting” to “people who see my ads,” it will be forced on you eventually. Might as well get used to it.

Your Turn

How do you see your role in who sees your ads?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post The Evolution of Who Sees Your Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta advertising has changed rapidly the past few years, and that leads to several common targeting mistakes. These errors are largely due to a combination of ignorance and stubbornness.

I admit that I miss the old days of Facebook advertising — before it was Meta advertising. More than anyone, I preached the gospel of targeting and the art of finding your ideal audience. I found great success with micro-targeting and I found great enjoyment in all of the levers I could pull with targeting to find what works and what doesn’t.

But things are changing. And while I was initially resistant to much of the change, I’ve grown to embrace it. You should, too.

If you’re making mistakes with targeting now, it’s likely one of these six things. And it’s impacting your results…

Improper Use of Exclusions

The improper use of exclusions can go two ways.

1. Nonexistent or incomplete use of exclusions.

The use of exclusions is a fundamental way to avoid wasted ad spend. It’s a step that’s often missed by beginner advertisers.

If you’re promoting a product that can only be purchased once, there’s no need to show ads to people who have already purchased it. If I’m promoting my Power Hitters Club – Elite membership, I will excluded current members using a custom audience exclusion.

While that customer list custom audience is a start, it’s unlikely to exclude all current members due to matching incompleteness. When an exclusion is required, you should exclude that group in as many ways as possible.

An example is if you ever run lead ads using instant forms while also having a landing page on your website, there are at least three different ways you can exclude people who already performed this action: Lead form custom audience, website custom audience, and customer list custom audience.

2. Overuse of exclusions.

While you should use exclusions, you can overdo it. It’s not uncommon for advertisers to exclude all current customers when promoting a product that current customers can buy. They consider it a “true prospecting” campaign and only go after completely new customers.

This is missing a golden opportunity. Your satisfied customers are the ones who are most likely to buy again and again. Excluding them eliminates the least challenging sale.

The response from those who take this approach is that they have a separate ad set for remarketing. But if you have one ad set for broad remarketing and one for prospecting, you’re going to drastically increase the costs to reach your remarketing audience. Remarketing audiences are small audiences, which translates to higher frequencies and CPMs.

It’s inefficient and unnecessary now. Don’t exclude current customers unless those customers can’t buy the product you’re promoting.

Expansion Ignorance

Many advertisers hate hearing this, but your targeting inputs mean less than ever before. This isn’t to say you should remove all targeting inputs and go completely broad (though it’s something to try). But even when you do provide inputs, the targeting is often going broader.

Either advertisers don’t know or they’re willfully ignorant about the role of audience expansion. And it doesn’t necessarily matter whether you’re using the original audience options or Advantage+ Audience.

1. Original audience options.

You’re resistant to the newfangled targeting of Advantage+ Audience and insist on kicking it old school. So you opt-out of it by making a couple of extra clicks to use the original audience options. You even click past the “Are you sure?” message about how it could lead to higher costs.

You enter in a bunch of interests and behaviors. This is how to go after your ideal customer, you think. These detailed targeting options define the exact person you want to reach. You’re doing something super smart.

But, you’re also optimizing for conversions, link clicks, or landing page views. And when you do that, your audience is automatically expanded using Advantage Detailed Targeting.

2. Advantage+ Audience.

It’s possible you may not even know there is a “new way” and “old way.” You spend significant time and budget trying to find the ideal targeting using custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and detailed targeting.

But, guess what? This targeting is only a suggestion.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re optimizing for conversions, link clicks, or landing page views. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using custom audiences, lookalike audiences, or if you click a box to expand the audience.

Your inputs are only suggestions and people well beyond this group will see your ads.

Your inability to understand and appreciate that targeting is expanding beyond your inputs may not be a mistake in and of itself. But this will lead to mistakes as well as wasted budget and time.

Too Narrow When Optimizing for Conversions

Many advertisers treat targeting like it’s 2017. There’s no better example than when optimizing for any type of conversion.

There was a time when a critical step was picking the targeting. Which interests, behaviors, lookalike audiences, or custom audiences made a huge difference to your results?

But when you’re optimizing for conversions now, your targeting inputs aren’t nearly as important as they once were. This is seen in the examples above when running manual Sales campaigns using either Advantage+ Audience or the original audience options, as described in the previous section.

But Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns go even further. You don’t provide any targeting inputs in this case. Meta does it all automatically.

There are two important factors that contribute to how your audience is chosen…

1. Performance goal optimization.

In the case of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, it’s typically a purchase (though it can be any standard or custom event now). The algorithm’s primary focus for delivery is to get you as many of that goal action as possible within your budget.

Success is determined by the ability to satisfy that goal. Adjustments will be made to delivery to get you more of those actions where possible.

2. Prior activity.

Whether you’re using Advantage+ Audience without targeting inputs or creating an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign, the initial focus of targeting is determined for you based on your pixel activity, conversion history, and prior engagement with your ads.

The mistake is that advertisers go far too narrow when optimizing for conversions when it simply isn’t necessary. Your biggest obstacle to success is limited budget and audience size. The more you limit the audience, the more you will restrict the algorithm and drive up your costs.

It’s also not as easy to go narrow as it once was, for the reasons already described. In some cases, your attempts are futile and the audience will expand anyway.

But, if you provide broad custom audiences while using the original audiences and turn off Advantage Custom Audience, you are likely doing more harm than good. You may get some short-term results. But you’ll exhaust that audience and run into a ceiling quickly.

It’s an obstacle that’s easily avoidable since Meta will automatically go after relevant people based on pixel activity, conversion data, and ad activity anyway — if you simply allow it.

Overdoing Demographic Granularity

Once again, there was a time and place for this. Especially when optimizing for any type of conversion, those times have passed.

We all did this years ago, and it was smart advertising at the time. We constructed the profile of our ideal customer. Their likes and dislikes, age range and gender, even their incomes and zip codes.

You may have even run breakdowns to find the groups of people by age and gender that lead to the best results so that you can then focus only on them.

You think that’s necessary now, but it just isn’t.

I’ve written before about how this may be necessary when optimizing for top of the funnel actions. But if we’re to be honest, nearly all top of funnel advertising is flawed anyway.

It’s one thing if you are unable to sell to customers under a certain age. Or your product is for women. There’s no reason to get cute messing with these settings simply because you believe that your product appeals more to men between the ages of 35-44.

If your goal is to drive more purchases, don’t try to outsmart the algorithm. It will learn. By restricting options, you are likely driving up costs unnecessarily — and limiting your pool of potential customers.

Too Broad When Optimizing for Top of Funnel

I alluded to it above. Avoid restricting your audience unnecessarily when optimizing for any type of conversion (especially a purchase). But that changes when optimizing for top of funnel actions.

Why? Because ad set optimization is literal. The algorithm’s only goal will be to get the action that you want. And while that is why you should limit restrictions when optimizing for conversions, it’s why top of funnel optimization can fail spectacularly.

Let’s say you’re optimizing for post engagement. You are a women’s clothing brand. You are hoping to attract potential customers by showcasing your new line.

Because you optimized for post engagement, the algorithm will only care about getting you engagement. It doesn’t matter (to Meta) whether that engagement is from a potential customer or not.

So, you’ll get plenty of engagement if you don’t limit by gender. Comments, video views, reactions, and image clicks. But you can bet that the vast majority of this engagement won’t be helpful.

You have to put guardrails on targeting when optimizing for these top of funnel actions because after all of these years, there are still very few ways to optimize for high quality actions that aren’t conversions.

I realize this sounds like a contradiction. I’ve given two very opposite sets of advice: 1. Stop restricting your targeting, and 2. Restrict your targeting. But the important context is whether you’re optimizing for the top or bottom of the funnel.

On one hand, I’d tell you it may be best to avoid running campaigns for engagement or clicks at all. But if you do, you’d better use some strict targeting — and make sure that the audience can’t be expanded.

Unnecessary Extra Ad Sets for Cold Targeting

This is connected to expansion ignorance. It’s also related to advertisers’ refusal to evolve with how things work now.

I avoid making absolute statements like “you should never create multiple ad sets for cold targeting now,” so I won’t do that here. If you’ve found success doing it that way and you aren’t getting results by combining those ad sets, do what works for you.

But consider me skeptical.

The idea that this would be more efficient than combining the cold targeting ad sets into one is illogical. It goes against how it works now and opposes Meta’s recommendations.

In the past, it made sense to split out ad sets for different cold targeting segments. Not only were there more interests and behaviors to choose from, but you could have very distinct groups of people. The overlap could have been controlled.

But that’s not the case now. If you’re using Advantage+ Audience (and that’s what Meta recommends), your inputs are only suggestions. If you’re using the original audience options with interests and lookalike audiences, those audiences are expanded.

There may be initial differences in performance between your ad sets in the beginning. Some of it will be based on your inputs and some will be due to randomness. But if they’re all optimized the same way and run the same ads, the differences will eventually be minimal. The algorithm will expand to show to people most likely to convert.

That overlap is not beneficial. You’re undoubtedly getting flooded with recommendations about auction overlap and audience fragmentation with suggestions to combine your ad sets. You’re willfully ignoring those warnings.

In most cases, you should use one ad set per campaign for cold targeting. If you need further evidence that this is where things are headed, look to Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. You can’t even create a second ad set in that case.

And an educated guess would be that the future of campaign creation will look like Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. You can fight it with your multiple ad sets all you want for now, but it very well won’t be possible at some point.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too. Watch it below…

Your Turn

What common targeting mistakes do you see?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 6 Targeting Mistakes Advertisers Make appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I recently discussed the four most important factors that impact Meta advertising results. It’s only natural that we follow that up with the most overrated.

This post is necessary. Far too many advertisers waste their time on these three things when the impact of their efforts is often negligible. You should be focusing on those four primary items instead.

It doesn’t mean that these three areas don’t matter at all. In some cases, there’s a common misunderstanding about how something works. In others, a thing matters far less now than it once did.

And that’s the biggest issue here. Advertisers are slow to adjust to the evolution of Meta advertising.

Stop obsessing over these three things. They just don’t matter that much…

1. Campaign Objective

I truly believe that this is a case of most advertisers misunderstanding the purpose of a campaign objective from the start. When an advertiser tells me that they are running a Sales campaign or Leads campaign, I have to follow up with clarification. More often than not, they are merely referring to the campaign objective.

Your selection of an objective is the first step when creating a campaign…

The choice you make here will impact options that are available to you throughout the process of setting up your ad set and ad. It helps streamline the process to remove irrelevant options. But that’s really about it.

You may think you’re running a Sales campaign because you selected the Sales objective, but that’s unlikely to have any impact on the delivery of your ads. That’s determined by the performance goal.

Here’s an example…

You could select Maximize Number of Impressions as your performance goal using any of the six objectives. You’re unlikely to see any difference in delivery and performance due to the objective that you used. The performance goal determines how your ads are delivered. Meta cares about maximizing impressions only. You won’t naturally get sales because you used the Sales objective.

If there’s any impact on delivery by the objective selection itself — beyond the options that are given to you in the ad set — I haven’t seen that mentioned officially by Meta. But they are very clear about the purpose of the performance goal.

In Meta’s documentation about ad delivery, the campaign objective isn’t mentioned once when it explains the factors that contribute to how your ad is delivered. Yet, “optimization event” (the former name for the performance goal) is mentioned four times.

Your objective selection is not magical. The only motivation for selecting an objective is that it gives you a specific performance goal option that isn’t otherwise available.

2. Targeting

It pains me to list this here, but you had to see it coming. I didn’t list targeting among the most important factors that impact your results in the last post. It’s absolutely overrated now.

Look… My whole thing for a decade was microtargeting. There was a period of time when I would have confidently told you that this is the most important factor in your advertising by far.

That’s just not the case anymore. There are two primary reasons for that.

1. Evolution of broad targeting. “Going broad” would’ve sounded like insanity a few years ago. But, advertisers started removing targeting inputs, and they still saw good results. Then Meta rolled out Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, which virtually eliminate targeting inputs. And then Advantage+ Audience, which sees your inputs as mere “suggestions” before going broad.

2. You’re going broader than you think. It kills me when advertisers say that broad targeting doesn’t work for them. And yet, when they use detailed targeting inputs while optimizing for a conversion, Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically turned on. And when they provide lookalike audiences in these cases, Advantage Lookalike is turned on. They can’t be turned off. Meta is expanding your audience.

These inputs are way fuzzier today than they were a few years ago. The specific interests you provide don’t matter a whole lot. Meta’s going broader anyway. The specific lookalike audiences that you target don’t matter that much either.

There’s way more overlap now. That’s why it’s insane to take the 2018 approach of creating five to 10 ad sets targeting different groups of interests and lookalike audiences. You’re just competing with yourself and confusing the algorithm. You’re driving up your own costs due to Auction Overlap and Audience Fragmentation.

I’m not saying that you should never use detailed targeting, lookalike audiences, or custom audiences. But, results of my tests suggest that targeting inputs and audience suggestions have little, if any, impact on how our ads are delivered.

It doesn’t mean that completely broad targeting works for everyone. I think you should experiment with it, sure. And I do believe that those who resist it aren’t giving it a true chance.

There’s no need for more than two cold audience ad sets in a campaign for the purpose of testing. There just isn’t. Limit your effort because the multiple ad sets you’re creating result in an inefficiency.

I still do some remarketing, though I do it differently than I once did. It’s rare, and it’s typically reserved for micro remarketing, like an abandoned cart scenario.

Feel free to use detailed targeting and lookalike audiences as suggestions with Advantage+ Audience or as initial inputs before expansion with original audiences. Don’t obsess over which ones you’re going to use.

It’s just not that important. The choices you make aren’t that impactful. And the day is likely coming soon when you won’t have a choice about going broad.

3. Placements

There was a time when removing placements made sense. The algorithm wasn’t particularly smart and some placements were a waste of money.

At the same time, I’d say that advertisers overreacted to this as long as a decade ago. I once wrote a blog post (10 years ago!) trying to convince people to stop removing the right hand column placement because the cost per impression was so much lower — which led to efficient results.

Advertisers still do this. In some cases, they only use Facebook and Instagram news feed because “that’s what is most effective.” It’s also what’s most competitive and expensive.

We’re getting very close to the point where we won’t have an option here. Meta pushes Advantage+ Placements hard, to the point of making it difficult to remove placements at all.

There are weaknesses, of course. If you ever optimize for link clicks or landing page views, it’s in your best interests to remove Audience Network. Otherwise, you’re going to get a ton of cheap clicks that result from accidental clicks, bots, and click fraud (before it’s discovered).

But that weakness is no longer an issue if your performance goal is conversions rather than link clicks. The algorithm will adjust with the goal of getting you conversions. If ads shown in Audience Network don’t lead to your performance goal, expect very little money to be spent there. In fact, I rarely see money spent there at all when optimizing for conversions.

There’s no reason to remove placements simply because you believe they are less effective. Allow the algorithm to figure that out. Removing placements when optimizing for conversions only restricts the algorithm, thereby limiting impressions and driving up your costs.

The only reason to remove placements is due to a weakness related to your performance goal. Beyond that, you’re overthinking it.

Your Turn

I’m sure I’ll get some disagreement on some of these. Again, it’s not that these three things mean nothing at all. But advertising has evolved to the point where they mean far less than they once did. Yet, many advertisers obsess over them like they are more important than they are.

Any other overrated factors that you’d add to this list?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 3 Overrated Factors That Impact Meta Ads Performance Less Than We Think appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

In a previous post, I discussed how you should approach Meta ads targeting now. Things have changed quite a bit, and it’s important that you evolve with those changes. But, what does the future of Meta ads targeting look like?

I don’t have a crystal ball. These are all predictions. But, if you’ve been paying attention during the past few years, you’ll likely agree that these predictions are reasonable, if not likely.

Some of you will read this and feel comfortable, knowing that these changes are unlikely to impact you since you’ve adjusted well to the evolution of Meta advertising so far. But I also know that this will make some of you very uncomfortable.

When is the “future,” exactly? I could see some, if not all, of these changes enacted during the coming year. It wouldn’t shock me if some happened suddenly in the very near future.

I have no inside information. It’s always possible I’m wrong. But, here’s what I expect will happen…

Where We’ve Been Heading

We’ve been trending in a natural direction for a few years now…

1. Thousands of interests removed.

2. Tracking challenges related to iOS 14 and privacy changes impact remarketing.

3. Meta begins expanding targeting beyond the audiences we’ve selected — first as an option and then by default (in most cases).

4. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns roll out, which eliminate targeting inputs.

5. Advantage+ Audience targeting rolls out, which allows optional targeting “suggestions.” Otherwise, Meta will find your audience based on pixel activity, conversion history, and prior engagement with your ads.

Maybe you’ve resisted it. But there is a very clear, natural progression happening here.

Advantage Audience Expansion Will Be Eliminated

Once Meta started rolling out Advantage+ Audience, predictable confusion resulted. There are now four different features that sound like nearly the same thing.

1. Advantage Detailed Targeting: If Meta’s systems believe that better performance is available beyond the detailed targeting inputs you’ve provided, your audience can be dynamically expanded.

2. Advantage Lookalike: If Meta’s systems believe that better performance is available beyond the lookalike percentage that you’ve selected, your lookalike audience can be dynamically expanded.

3. Advantage Custom Audience: If Meta’s systems believe that better performance is available beyond the custom audiences you’ve provided, your audience can be dynamically expanded.

4. Advantage+ Audience: Advertisers have the option of providing targeting suggestions using detailed targeting, lookalike audiences, and custom audiences. Meta will prioritize matching those suggestions prior to moving more broadly.

The differences are subtle. In each case, you provide initial targeting inputs (though with Advantage+ Audience, they are merely suggestions). Meta can expand beyond that audience to get you better results — though, Advantage+ Audience seems to suggest that expansion definitely will happen.

Advantage+ Audience also has the potential to go much broader. And if you don’t provide targeting suggestions, Meta will use your past conversions, pixel data, and engagement with prior ads to build and evolve your audience.

The typical advertiser will not understand the subtle differences. They also won’t understand that Meta released Advantage+ Audience as the enhancement that is intended to be more effective than the prior three options.

There truly is no reason for Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage Lookalike, and Advantage Custom Audience to continue to exist. You can accomplish nearly the same goals (with improved results, according to Meta) by simply using detailed targeting, lookalike audiences, or custom audiences as suggestions — if you use anything at all.

Meta should, and likely will, eliminate those three options. It’s the natural progression, and I’d be surprised if they survived much longer.

Advantage+ Audience Will Become Fixed Default

We’ve seen this progression with other Ads Manager features in the past. Meta makes or plans to make a setting a fixed default. There are protests. Sometimes (like with Advantage Campaign Budget), Meta backs off.

We’ve seen this with Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage Lookalike for specific optimizations. You no longer have the option to turn them off.

We’re starting to see signs of this related to Advantage+ Placements. Meta, at the very least, wants to discourage adjusting from the default.

You have limited ability to make any adjustments to Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, including targeting. The entire purpose of Tailored Campaign setup is that it’s streamlined and you can’t edit defaults.

Meta’s process with these decisions is rather straight forward. They analyze results when advertisers use the default and when they make manual adjustments. If results are consistently superior by keeping the default, Meta will either lock it in or make it difficult to change.

At the moment, advertisers have the ability to bypass Advantage+ Audience and use old targeting methods. But it’s not entirely clear and obvious that this is possible. It’s an intentional design decision to discourage these changes.

Meta will surely monitor to compare results when advertisers use Advantage+ Audience vs. the original targeting options. They have some of these results already, which is why we’re seeing the current design.

It’s logical to conclude that, while there may be isolated exceptions based on objective or optimization, the original targeting options will be discontinued. You will still be able to use detailed targeting, lookalike audiences, and custom audiences as targeting inputs during this phase. But they will only be as suggestions.

I can see this happening first with detailed targeting and lookalike audiences. It’s possible that custom audiences without expansion will survive — or at least for now.

Most or All Manual Targeting Inputs Will Be Removed

Why not keep going?

Once again, this isn’t a particularly bold prediction. We’ve seen it already with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. You cannot provide any detailed targeting, lookalike audiences, or custom audiences for targeting — even as suggestions.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, according to reports from Meta, have been more effective than prior Sales campaigns optimizing for purchases. If it can work for Sales, why not for other objectives and optimizations?

There will likely come a time when these targeting inputs won’t be possible for any campaign type. Meta will dynamically determine your targeting based on:

1. The performance goal
2. Past conversions
3. Pixel data
4. Engagement with prior ads
5. Global user engagement data

In a way, detailed targeting will still exist, but only Meta will use it. The data is all there for Meta to find, and your inputs won’t be needed.

I do think this could be problematic given the current Ads Manager structure. Eliminating targeting inputs makes sense for purchases. But Meta may need to provide additional layers of performance goals to provide clarity regarding what you actually want for this to work in other cases.

One could argue that removing targeting inputs could be a smart move for Meta related to privacy and perception, as well. If advertisers are unable to select specific interests and behaviors, the process of delivering ads may seem less “creepy” to non-advertisers.

Maybe Not Now

I can hear the complaints through my computer screen. “This will never work.” There are bound to be reservations about instituting such an approach with Meta’s current advertising feature set. And many of those reservations are valid.

But Meta’s machine learning and AI will only improve. No matter what you think of the effectiveness of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, Advantage+ Audience, or any of the audience expansion tools now, think about a year or two from now.

Think about the advancements we’ve seen in AI just this year. A future without targeting inputs shouldn’t seem far-fetched.

Your Turn

Hey, I could be wrong. But I feel strangely confident about these predictions. They don’t feel particularly bold. It’s the natural progression of where we’ve been and where we appear to be heading.

What do you think of these predictions for the future of Meta ads targeting?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post The Future of Meta Ads Targeting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta advertising is nothing like it once was. The role of the advertiser has changed. New tools and features have emerged. The strategies have evolved. And if you approach targeting now like it’s 2018, you’re going to struggle.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we see. Some advertisers have embraced this brave new world. Others are resistant to it and insist on forcing their old strategies like a square peg in a round hole.

It’s time to wake up. In this post, we’ll evaluate how targeting has changed and how you should approach it now.

Targeting Before

Back in the day, there were three distinct buckets of targeting.

1. Cold Targeting. We loved uncovering the magical combination of interests, behaviors, and lookalike audiences to bring the best results from a cold audience. We experimented with grouping interests in one ad set and lookalikes in another. Or we’d layer interests on top of lookalikes. Should you use a 1% lookalike or 5%? What about 10%? We tested and tested and found the answer.

Even location, age, and gender were important details. A part of the country isn’t leading to conversions? Exclude it. Mainly women between 25 and 34 are buying? We’ll only target them.

2. Warm Targeting. If you wanted to go after a group of people who knew who you were and were likely to convert, there were several places to start. Target your page followers, anyone who engaged with your page or posts, people on your email list, or anyone who visited your website.

This was a go-to targeting strategy.

3. Hot Targeting. These people are hot for a reason. They performed a very specific action. I created a whole strategy around it using Evergreen Campaigns. I’d push people through several stages of a campaign, showing them a different ad every few days. And it worked great!

There was a good reason to use all three approaches. It was generally seen as good practice to have multiple ad sets, if not multiple campaigns, dedicated to each audience segment.

The Evolution of Targeting

There were a couple of turning points. One was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. While it happened in and around 2015, it wasn’t revealed until 2018 and the impact to targeting would come after. One of the main lessons was to prevent bad actors from using sensitive targeting to manipulate elections.

Another turning point was iOS 14 and the movement towards greater online privacy generally. Facebook would face greater scrutiny regarding what was collected, how it was used, and giving users more control.

These combined forces led, directly or indirectly, to the removal of thousands of interests and the inability to target specific groups when a special ad category is involved. Opt-outs also cut into remarketing audiences, making them less complete and less dependable.

In the meantime, Facebook — and eventually Meta — would need to come up with solutions that would overcome these disadvantages. That led to a focus on AI, machine learning, and expanded audiences.

The move towards broad targeting began with Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage Lookalike, and Advantage Custom Audience. You provided targeting, but the algorithm would be able to reach people beyond that group if it would lead to more results.

The next step was Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, which virtually eliminated targeting inputs completely. Beyond having some say over how much you’d reach current customers, the algorithm had entire countries of users to target without restrictions.

Eventually, this same approach would begin rolling out to any campaign objective in the form of Advantage+ Audience. You can provide targeting suggestions, but otherwise the algorithm will use pixel data, conversion history, and ad engagement history to build a starting audience.

How to Approach Cold Targeting

An argument can certainly be made that there’s very little reason for interests and lookalike audiences now. But even if you use them, there’s no reason to use them the way we did before.

You don’t need to obsess over which interest is most effective because, in most cases, Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically on and can expand your audience anyway.

There’s no reason to constantly test different lookalike audiences and percentages because Advantage Lookalike is often on by default, which will expand the percentage if necessary.

The evolution towards broad and expanded audiences changes our approach, whether you like it or not.

There’s simply no reason to spend much time on testing different audiences since the algorithm can go beyond the audience you use anyway. It’s a complete waste of time to have multiple ad sets for different cold targeting approaches when the overlap is likely to be significant and audience fragmentation may result.

What should you do?

Embrace broad targeting for cold audiences. If you’re optimizing for a purchase, test Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.

Otherwise, use Advantage+ Audience. Add some targeting suggestions if you want. But the true power will be how the algorithm learns beyond that initial group.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually see the elimination of Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage Lookalike in favor of Advantage+ Targeting only since the functionality is similar and confusing. But otherwise, you should embrace the expansion of your audiences when given the option.

Bottom line…

1. Create fewer ad sets for the purpose of cold audience segmentation.

2. Embrace expanded audiences when given the option for cold targeting.

3. Embrace machine learning and AI for the broadest of targeting.

Is Remarketing Dead?

This is a common refrain, and it’s at least partially valid.

Generally remarketing is mostly unnecessary. What I mean by that is that it probably isn’t necessary to target the “warm” audiences we defined at the top of this post. These are the types of groups that will be built into the initial focus of broad targeting.

You could make an argument to use some of these remarketing audiences in testing. For example, target all website visitors and turn on Advantage Custom Audience. Or provide a group of custom audiences as your targeting suggestions when using Advantage+ Audience. In both cases, though, it’s a matter of using this group as a starting point with the hope that it helps the algorithm.

We’ll figure out with time whether using custom audiences in these ways was beneficial or if the algorithm would have searched the most valuable people in those groups out anyway. But for now, it doesn’t hurt to experiment with this.

Something I haven’t bought into is abandoning remarketing completely. I still subscribe to abandoned cart remarketing for simple reasons: It works, it’s inexpensive, and it’s very profitable.

If you have a small budget, the broad targeting approach isn’t likely to yield many conversions. But you can spend a very limited amount by retargeting people who abandoned cart and get results.

Maybe I’ll change my stance on this eventually. For now, I still see remarketing to the hottest of audiences makes a ton of sense.

Your Turn

How has your targeting approach evolved?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Approach Meta Ads Targeting Now appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Which group of people should you target with your Meta ads? Targeting could be the difference between your ads succeeding and failing.

Of course, you can overthink this, too. You can spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect audience when, in reality, it may have been best to go as broad as possible.

You have a whole bunch of options available to you. Consider this your home base for all things targeting. Let’s walk through every possible lever you can pull to impact the people you reach with your ads…

Advantage+ Audience

Meta first introduced Advantage+ Audience in late 2023 as an advancement in machine learning and algorithmic targeting. This is default method of targeting for all manual campaigns.

The beauty of Advantage+ Audience is that any targeting inputs are purely optional. If you don’t provide an audience suggestion, Meta will prioritize things like conversion data, pixel history, and prior engagement with your ads.

Otherwise, Meta will prioritize your audience suggestion prior to going much broader.

Audience Controls are the few targeting constraints that you can provide. Meta will not deliver ads to people outside of designated locations, minimum age, excluded custom audiences, or languages determined here.

Otherwise, any other targeting inputs provided — including custom audiences, lookalike audiences, detailed targeting, gender, and age maximum — are considered suggestions.

Original Audiences

If you’d like to go back to the way we did prior to Advantage+ Audience, you can click the link to switch back to original audiences. But you’ll get a warning that doing so is unlikely to lead to better results.

Custom Audiences (General)

This is the first area you can use to refine your targeting. If you have created a custom or lookalike audience, you can enter it here. We’ll discuss in a moment what these are.

You can also choose to exclude a custom or lookalike audience from targeting. This is especially useful if you are promoting a product that cannot be purchased twice.

Custom Audience Types

Custom Audiences are groups of people who are connected to you in some way — they’ve engaged with you, bought from you, are on you email list, or visited something you own.

You can create a custom audience from the Audience section. Here are examples…

1. Website Custom Audience

Website Custom Audiences allow you to segment your website visitors for targeting. You can build these audiences because you utilize the Meta pixel or conversions API on your website. Here are some examples.

All website visitors…

People who visited specific web pages…

Visitors by time spent…

And from your events (like a purchase)…

2. Customer List Audience

You can upload your customer list of names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses and have Meta match up those people with users for targeting.

3. App Activity Audience

Create an audience of people based on their engagement with your app…

4. Catalog Audience

Segment people based on their engagement with your product catalog…

5. Video Engagement Audience

Segment people based on the depth of engagement and specific Facebook video watched…

6. Instagram Account Audience

Isolate those people who have engaged with your Instagram account, assuming it’s been connected to your Business Manager.

7. Lead Form Audience

Isolate those who have opened, opened but didn’t submit, or opened and submitted your lead form.

8. Events Custom Audience

Create an audience of people who engaged with your Facebook event…

9. Instant Experience Audience

Focus on those who opened or clicked on a link within your Instant Experience…

10. Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audience

Isolate those who engaged with your Facebook page in some way…

11. Shopping Custom Audience

Segment those who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram Shop…

12. On-Facebook Listings Custom Audience

Create an audience of people who interacted with the on-Facebook listings from your Marketplace catalog…

13. AR Experience Custom Audience

Create an audience of people who opened your AR experience on Facebook or Instagram…

Lookalike Audiences

When you create a Lookalike Audience, Meta will look for people who are similar to those who are already connected to you in some way.

The source audience will be a custom audience. The Lookalike Audience will be created by country and using anywhere from the top 1 to 10% of those in that country who are similar to this group.

Lookalike Audiences are often used when your custom audience is small and ineffective because there aren’t enough people to target.

Advantage Lookalike

Advantage Lookalike is also one of the Advantage audience expansion products that is only available with original audiences.

When turned on, Meta will expand your audience beyond the selected lookalike percentage if it will lead to better results. In some cases, Advantage Lookalike is on and cannot be turned off.

Location

You can select a location or multiple locations to filter your targeting. Only people living in or recently in that location, while also satisfying the other targeting requirements, will be considered.

You can include locations by country, state/region, city, postal code, address, DMA, or congressional district.

If you browse, you can select countries and regions manually or choose to go worldwide.

You can also exclude locations.

Age

The default, depending on your location, may be people 18 years and older. In some cases, you may be able to target people down to 13 years old. In others, the minimum age may be higher than 18. This will depend upon the laws and restrictions based on location and promotion.

Gender

By default, you will target all genders. You can choose to limit your targeting to men or women only, though that may be restricted if you are promoting a special ad category.

Detailed Targeting

Detailed targeting allows you to reach people by demographics, interests, and behaviors. Most of this information is provided within user profiles or collected based on activities within the Meta family of apps.

Meta has removed many interests and behaviors from targeting during recent years, largely due to privacy laws and restrictions.

You can also exclude people based on this information.

Advantage Detailed Targeting

Advantage Detailed Targeting is another of the Advantage expansion tools that are only available with original audiences.

When turned on, Meta can expand your audience to reach people beyond the detailed targeting that you selected if it will improve ad performance. Your exclusions, locations, age, and gender will continue to be respected.

As is the case with Advantage Lookalike, there are cases when Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically on and cannot be turned off.

Languages

This is set to All Languages by default, but you can specify specific languages if you choose. In most cases, Meta recommends that you keep this blank.

Strategies

As I mentioned at the top, many advertisers have opted to go completely broad recently and forgo all other targeting considerations. You should at least experiment with that.

Others go with a mixture of Lookalike Audiences and Detailed Targeting for their cold targeting. While some swear by it, I’ve mostly abandoned this approach when prospecting.

I haven’t completely eliminated warm targeting from my mix, though. I will still use custom audiences for targeting in specific cases, especially for exclusions. In some cases, I’ll use custom audiences and turn Advantage Custom Audience on to give Meta the ability to go broader if necessary.

But again, not everyone believes in this approach. Some will tell you that remarketing is dead and is completely unnecessary. That if you go broad, the algorithm will naturally start with those who would be in your remarketing audience.

Find what works for you!

Your Turn

How do you approach targeting?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post The Ultimate Guide to Meta Ads Targeting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Relevance is an important factor for the success of your Facebook ads. One way to target a relevant audience is by isolating those who viewed the most pages of your website.

Assuming you have the pixel on every page of your website, you can do this. Let’s talk about it…

How it Works

When you create a website custom audience, click the Events drop-down menu and select PageView under “From Your Events.”

Then click the “Refine by” menu and select “Aggregated Value.”

By default, your refinement will be “Frequency” and utilize the logic of “is greater than or equal to” 2.

In other words, your audience will only include those who fired the PageView event at least two times. You can change the logic if you want…

And you can also change the number. I’ve messed around with this in the past to see how relevant I can get with my audience.

Feel free to experiment!

Audience Size Considerations

Let’s assume that you get 10,000 page views per month. If you apply a refinement to limit your audience to those who viewed at least two pages, that audience is going to shrink. And if you refine to three, four, or more, it’s going to keep on shrinking.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just understand how that works. Your pool is going to shrink as you make the audience more relevant.

One lever you have to counter this is the retention. By default, the audience will be of those who visited your website during the past 30 days.

If you go shorter than 30 days, your audience is going to shrink further. But you could go all the way to 180 days to capture the most visitors who viewed multiple pages of your website during that time.

Optimization Considerations

The starting point for optimization should always be focused on your goal. Don’t overcomplicate things. If you’re trying for conversions, optimize for conversions.

It’s very likely you won’t have the volume to exit the learning phase. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t optimize for that action. Try it out and see if you can get good results.

If the audience is just too small, you can consider using Reach optimization to reach as many people within that small audience as possible.

Lookalike Audiences

When you limit a website custom audience like this, the audience is going to shrink. If you lack volume of traffic, targeting like this might not be viable.

But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t create these audiences. You can also use it as a source audience for Lookalike Audiences so that you can target people similar to those who view multiple pages of your website.

Watch Video

I created a short video about this, too. Watch it below…

Your Turn

Do you create custom audiences like this based on frequency? How do you use them?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Maximize Relevance in Your Facebook Ads: Target Website Visitors Who Viewed Multiple Pages appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

You’ve likely heard the advice, whether from a Facebook ads rep or your regular ads “guru.” Micro-targeting with Facebook ads is no longer viable. You should go broad instead.

As someone who embraced targeting the smallest, most relevant audiences for years, coming around to this approach hasn’t been easy. But it has some merit. It can be the best approach in the right situation. It shouldn’t, however, be used universally in all cases.

Should you go broad with Facebook ads targeting? It depends. Let’s break this down…

What Broad Targeting Looks Like

Let’s be clear, I’m not just talking about targeting a large audience. When I saw “Go Broad,” I’m referring to the practice of using an audience that includes everyone within a given country.

No adjustments made to narrow your audience. No custom audiences, no lookalike audiences, and no interests or behaviors.

If you’ve been advertising for a long time like I have, the thought of this may make you twitch a little. It seems crazy. But, it may just be crazy enough to work.

How Optimization Works

To understand why going broad could work, you must first understand how optimization works.

You choose the optimization event within the ad set.

It could be a conversion, link click, app install, or something else. You provide a target audience. Facebook will then show your ad to people within your audience who are most likely to convert.

The audience is a guardrail. You will never reach everyone in that audience, and you should rarely want that. Facebook’s algorithm is smart and will avoid those least likely to convert while focusing on those with the greatest odds to perform that desired action. The goal is to get you the most optimization events at the lowest cost.

Of course, optimization has some weaknesses. But when it works well, it’s powerful. And it can learn and react much faster — and more intelligently — than we can make changes manually.

How Going Broad Works

The purpose of targeting is to give Facebook the pool of people who are most likely to act on your ad. The algorithm then finds the people within that group to perform that action.

But, when you pick the targeting yourself, the algorithm is limited by your selection. Maybe the people within your selected audience aren’t actually that likely to convert. You are hindering your own success (in theory).

The benefit of going broad is that you are giving Facebook the entire universe of people (not literally, I guess) as an option. The algorithm then goes to work from there.

Machine learning quickly figures out which people are making the action you want and makes real-time adjustments to who sees your ad, in what placement, and (in some cases) in what format.

For this to work, the key is that the algorithm has to learn quickly and effectively in order to find the actions you want. It may start out slowly, but your results should improve with time as the system learns.

This is also reliant on sufficient volume to learn. That may require more budget to get that volume. Ultimately, you will need to get at least 25-50 optimized actions per week per ad set to get optimal results (The Learning Phase).

It’s the Direction Facebook is Heading

If you’ve followed the changes that have rolled out to Ads Manager the past couple of years, you should understand that this is the direction we’re heading — whether we like it or not.

Facebook has rolled out the following “Advantage” features during the past year:

Advantage Detailed Targeting: Allows Facebook to expand your audience beyond the detailed targeting (interests and behaviors) you’ve selected.

Advantage Lookalikes: Allows Facebook to expand your lookalike audience beyond the percentage you used.

Advantage Custom Audiences: Allows Facebook to expand beyond the custom audience you entered for targeting.

In each case, your audience can be expanded beyond what you entered if Facebook believes that more or better results are possible.

In the cases of Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage Lookalikes, you can’t turn this off when running conversions campaigns. Your audience can be expanded and you can’t prevent it.

In other words, Facebook really wants you to go broad(er), and in some cases, we don’t have any choice.

Going Broad and Conversions Campaigns

As it is, we know that if you’re optimizing for a conversion, Facebook will have the ability to go broad with the Advantage audience expansion products. But the question is, should you want to go as broad as you can?

I contend that this specific situation — when you optimize for a conversion (especially a purchase) — is when you try it.

Facebook machine learning is currently best suited for conversions campaigns. The system’s only goal is to get you more conversions. You won’t get “low quallity conversions.” The problem with optimization comes about when you want something other than conversions. In that case, you can end up with low-quality (but cheap) actions.

But if you allow the algorithm to hunt for conversions, it can do amazing things. I encourage you to experiment with this as a user. Click on an ad for something like shoes. I use this example often because I’ve experienced it. I clicked an ad for a casual, nicer shoe. Not a tennis shoe. Not a dress shoe. I then started seeing ad after ad for similar STYLED shoes in my feed. Not from the same advertiser or same brand. The same style.

Super smart.

This is possible because Facebook has a crazy amount of data on their users based on their activity within the app, and even outside of it due to the pixel. Your actions help Facebook understand the things you like and don’t like. You also teach Facebook which placement and formats you prefer to consume content.

It’s this intelligence and set of algorithmic adjustments that make even considering going broad a possibility. You want conversions. Facebook is good at hunting for them. Allow Facebook to hunt.

The Potential Issues

If you’ve read closely, you’ll know where this is heading.

Going broad has merit when optimizing for a conversion because the ad delivery system is good at finding people who convert and there’s no such thing as a low-quality purchase. The problem is with other types of optimization.

I’ve long complained about Facebook’s inability to optimize for quality traffic or engagement. All traffic, for example, is equal to the algorithm — it doesn’t matter whether it’s an accidental click or a 10-minute visit. We know differently, of course.

Because of that, going broad doesn’t feel smart when optimizing for anything other than a conversion. It just makes it more likely that the system will find low-quality actions for you. This is where ad delivery could use a guardrail with targeting (and that itself often isn’t enough).

About Narrow Targeting

So, does this mean that you should no longer use narrow targeting for conversion optimization? Not necessarily.

First, I’m not suggesting that going broad is a must when your optimization event is a conversion. Like everything else with ads, there are very few universal rules. Consider it as an option.

But there are also times when narrow targeting is still important. I still recommend it for powerfully relevant messaging when remarketing. This can’t be replaced.

There may be times when interests are such a strong signal that they’re more effective than going broad. But this will differ from industry to industry and product to product.

Watch Video

I created a quick video on this, too.

Your Turn

Do you go broad with your Facebook ads targeting? What do you think of this approach?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Should You Go Broad with Facebook Ads Targeting? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook is rolling out Advantage Custom Audiences to advertisers, which will potentially expand your targeting when a custom audience is selected.

Wait… This isn’t new, right? Oh, it is?

You’d be forgiven if this sounds like something that’s already been around for a while. A couple of similar audience expansion features have been rolled out to the Advantage product line during the past year. But this, indeed, is new.

Let’s break down what this is, how it’s applied, when you’d use it, and when you absolutely should avoid it.

What Is This?

First, let me be clear that this is a rollout. I don’t have it in most of my accounts.

But, if you enter a custom audience into targeting and you see a checkbox for Advantage Custom Audience like the image below, congrats. You have it.

When Advantage Custom Audience is turned on, your custom audience will be targeted, but targeting can be expanded to people outside of that custom audience if it can improve performance.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s a lot like Advantage Detailed Targeting (formerly Detailed Targeting Expansion)…

and Advantage Lookalikes (formerly Lookalike Expansion).

In both cases, the audience can be expanded beyond what you enter if it can improve performance. But, of course, those features were unique to Detailed Targeting and Lookalike Audiences.

When Is It On?

How and when Advantage Custom Audiences are turned on are a bit different than for Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage Lookalikes. You can turn Advantage Custom Audiences on, no matter the objective. The other two are objective-specific.

Another difference is that even if Advantage Custom Audience is turned on by default (it will be), you can turn it off. Originally, this was the case with Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage Lookalikes. But now, you are unable to turn those two options off (at least in most cases).

Once you enter a custom audience, you can turn this on (assuming you have the feature), regardless of the objective.

When Should You Use It?

Admittedly, I’ve been a bit skeptical of the other two audience expansion products. I’ll get to that more in a moment. But, there is actually a good reason to use Advantage Custom Audiences.

Far too many advertisers struggle with understanding how to set budgets when targeting custom audiences. In almost all cases (unless you’re a big brand), these audiences are going to be small. It doesn’t matter whether it’s website visitors, page engagement, or your email list. We’re usually talking about a few thousand people — or at least under 100,000.

If you treat these audiences the way you do broad targeting and throw a $100 per day budget on it, you’re going to torch that audience pretty quickly. The frequency and CPM will also jump.

Assuming that your messaging isn’t unique to the audience you’re targeting (more on that in a moment), expanding the audience would make a lot of sense.

It’s important to understand how this works. The audience doesn’t immediately jump from 5,000 to 5,000,000 (even if the “potential” audience may look that way). The audience will only expand if it will improve results. The custom audience will still be the core audience used for targeting.

So, expanding your audience could actually improve your average frequency and CPM. Your audience is used in a similar way to how it’s used to generate a lookalike audience. But in this case, that source audience is still used for targeting.

When You Definitely Shouldn’t Use This

When I first heard that this feature was being tested, I was concerned. Audience expansion makes very little sense to much of our remarketing.

Consider the abandoned cart scenario. In that case, you are targeting people who added a specific product to their cart and didn’t purchase. You may create an ad that says something like, “Hey, did you forget something?” and showcase that product. This ad, of course, would only make sense for those in a specific audience.

The same would apply for cross promotions and up-sells. In either case, the ad copy may refer to something specific that a customer did or bought that’s related to another product. This would make no sense to an expanded audience.

In other words, be extra careful with your remarketing. If the ad copy and creative will only make sense to your targeted audience, make sure to turn off Advantage Custom Audience.

Transparency, blah, blah, blah…

If you’ve listened to my podcasts or are in the PHC community, you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about this by now. But I’m not going to stop until this is fixed.

Audience Expansion is a fine little feature if it’s effective. The problem is that we have very little evidence to prove this. It’s not that it’s not working. We just don’t know because it’s all left behind the curtain.

First, we don’t even know if the audience is expanded when this is turned on. Yes, in theory, it can be expanded when any of these features is turned on. We never know when the audience is expanded, how much it’s expanded, or how many of your results came due to expansion.

And that would be helpful, right? Give me a breakdown showing performance of my targeted audience compared to the expanded audience. This could then sell the feature, underscoring the benefit.

This doesn’t exist. You can split test two ad sets when expansion is on and when it’s off. But that’s the closest we get to fully understanding whether this feature is worthwhile. Beyond that, it’s all a guess.

Watch Video

Your Turn

Do you have Advantage Custom Audiences? What do you think, will you use it?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Advantage Custom Audiences: What You Need to Know appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Given how stagnant Facebook ads targeting production has been the past couple of years, it’s nice to have some positive news about something added. Meta announced new B2B targeting options for your Facebook ads.

Let’s discuss what these options are and how you might use them.

The New Options

First, I admit that I had to read the descriptions for these first three options multiple times because they are so similar, and surely have overlap. Here are the definitions from Facebook…

• IT decision-makers: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are IT decision makers based on their job titles.
• Business decision-maker titles and interests: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers based on their job titles and interests.
• Business decision-makers: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers in engineering/IT, operations, HR, strategy or marketing, based on their job titles.

So…

1. “IT decision-makers” is a segment of people in the IT industry based on their job titles.
2. “Business decision-makers titles and interests” is a segment, industry agnostic, of business decision makers based on their job titles.
3. “Business decision-makers” is a segment of business decision-makers in several industries (including engineering and IT) based on their job titles.

Are you able to follow that? These are all decision makers based on their job titles. One is focused on IT, one includes several industries (including IT), and one is broadly “business.” The assumption is that #1 is the most narrow, followed by #3, and then #2. But we’ll get back to that later.

These job titles would all be pulled from a user’s profile. Of course, we don’t know how these job titles are segmented and determined to fall within each group.

Additionally, there are three options for targeting admins of new businesses that were created in the last 6, 12, or 24 months. Presumably, this comes from Facebook activity — the users who set up new business pages.

How to Access Them

You can find these new B2B targeting options when building your ad set within the Detailed Targeting section. First, the three segments based on job titles for decision-makers…

These all fall under Demographics > Work > Industries.

The New Active Business segments are also added within Detailed Targeting.

These all fall under Behaviors > Digital Activities.

Audience Sizes and Overlap

These are worldwide audiences, so keep in mind that they will shrink depending upon the countries that you’re targeting.

The populations for the decision-maker segments are as follows:

• IT decision-makers: 815k – 958k
• Business decision-makers: 1.2M – 1.4M
• Business decision-maker titles and interests: 1.2M – 1.4M

Do you see what I see? The “Business decision-makers” and “Business decision-maker titles and interests” segments appear to be the same size. But do they overlap entirely?

It sure seems that way! The Estimated Audience Size when using these two audiences is 1.1M – 1.3M people.

That’s… weird. It would seem that there’s no reason to have both of these audiences since the Venn diagram is close to a complete circle.

Since the audience increases to a range of 1.8M to 2.1M when including IT business-makers, we can presume that this audience consists primarily of people who aren’t in the other two.

The populations for admins of new businesses are broken down as follows:

• < 6 Months: 9.6M - 11.3M
• < 12 Months: 14.9M - 17.6M
• < 24 Months: 24.8M - 29.2M

These are far larger groups than the segments for decision-makers.

How Might You Use Them?

Great, great. So, now what? Well, I have a few thoughts.

First, it would seem that the segments based on decision-maker groups may be the most useful. Assuming Facebook is using methods to accurately segment these people, you can go after high-level business people who are the ones with the credit card. However, this is also the smallest audience — particularly once you filter by country. That could impact your success.

After that, it’s going to depend upon your product or service. If you have a product that specifically solves problems for people in IT, the IT decision-maker segment is the most specialized of these options.

The business decision-maker segments are a bit broader and don’t seem to be isolated to closely-related industries. So, at that point, your solution needs to help businesses generally, regardless of the industry, to be useful.

Of course, this also depends upon how much you trust Facebook learning and isolating the ideal audience — within the broader audience — for you. In other words, don’t let the broadness of the audience scare you away from experimenting.

It’s unclear exactly how the segments for admins of new businesses is built, and these are obviously much larger audiences. My inclination is that you could focus on those who have recently started a business and the needs that they have.

Will these options work for you? Experiment to find out!

Your Turn

Have you tried out any of these B2B targeting options for your Facebook ads? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post New B2B Targeting Options for Facebook Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

A recent North Carolina State study suggests that Facebook interest targeting is inaccurate or irrelevant 30% of the time. So, how accurate are the interests that Facebook advertisers can use to target you?

This is something that all Facebook users can check. I even wrote about it a few years ago. Of course, it’s changed quite a bit since then and is difficult to find.

But, I’ll help you find it. Let’s go…

Ad Preferences

You can find this within your Ad Preferences. While logged into Facebook from desktop as a user, click the top-right menu. Then, select Settings & Privacy…

Then Settings…

Then Ads…

Then Ad Settings…

Then “Categories used to reach you”…

And then, finally, “Interest Categories”…

That’s six clicks. And if we are to be technical, there’s a seventh. To view all of these interests, click “See All Interests”…

Is it obvious that Facebook doesn’t really want you to find this? If they actually do want you to find it, they could sure make it easier for us.

Manage Your Interests

You will now see a list of hundreds, if not thousands, of interests that Facebook has inferred based on your activities. These are the interests that advertisers can use to target you.

So… are they accurate? If they aren’t, set aside a few hours to go through it. Cleaning this up is not easy.

You’ll need to go interest by interest and click “Remove” individually on those that you don’t find relevant.

There is no easy way to do this. No checkboxes. No filters. Just scroll, scroll, scroll, and scroll some more.

You will either need to be ultra-determined or a glutton for punishment to clean up the entire list.

My Interests

Admittedly, some of the interests advertisers can use to target me are pretty darn accurate.

Some examples:

• Social Media Examiner
• Parenting
• Small Business
• Entrepreneurship
• Beer
• Family
• Running
• Digital Marketing
• MLB Network
• Green Bay Packers
• Social Media Marketing
• Online Advertising
• Coffee
• Jon Loomer Digital
• Baseball
• Coaching
• The Godfather
• Philosophy

That’s some good work right there. But, it’s not all good.

Some interests were either things I don’t know anything about or don’t have an interest in.

Some examples:

• An Extremely Goofy Movie
• ICC Test Championship
• Classical Antiquity
• Turkish Football Federation
• UGC
• Ancient Greece
• Broadcast Engineering
• Bogota
• Cricket Clothing and Equipment
• Papyrus

Some are so general I’d have to imagine they’d apply to most people.

Examples:

• Document
• Earth
• Email
• Traffic Sign
• Lodging
• Operating System
• Pleasure
• Wage
• Social network (not the movie)
• Dish (food)
• Paper
• Fire
• Mail
• Machine

Some others may have been accurate at one time, but those days are long gone. I have interests related to diapers, preschool, and babies. My sons are all 14 and older.

And that, to me, is a question I have. Does recency of activity matter? Because it should. If I showed interest in something 10 years ago, it doesn’t mean that I still have interest in it now.

What Do We Make of This?

While some of these interests are funny, it’s also a big concern — partly for users, but mainly for advertisers. Someone is paying money to target me because they think I have an interest in Classical Antiquity. I don’t even know what that means (I’m not cultured enough). They are wasting their money.

And that’s the problem. What’s crazy is that I’ve actually cleaned up my interests multiple times before. I’m sure I’m one of the very few who even know that this exists. So imagine how messed up most people’s interests are.

Facebook has had so many years to get this right. We always hear about how much data Facebook has and how they can be so precise with targeting. That may be true sometimes, but they also do a really terrible job at other times.

And since this is the type of targeting that may continue to survive many of the privacy changes (at least anything similar to iOS 14+), advertisers should be concerned. If Facebook can be this bad at inferred interests — and I’m sure that it’s more complicated than it seems, but come on — how can we trust they’ll be successful at more complex optimizations?

Your Turn

Have you checked the interests used to target you? How accurate are they?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post The Interests That Facebook Advertisers Can Use to Target You appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

According to a recent North Carolina State University study, Facebook doesn’t account for context when assigning a user an interest that is used for ad targeting.

The study (“Analyzing the Impact and Accuracy of Facebook Activity on Facebook’s Ad-Interest Inference Process”), suggests that Facebook doesn’t consider positive, negative, or neutral reactions to a topic. They used green cheese as an example.

Let’s assume you shared a post about how you dislike green cheese. The Facebook algorithm, based on the mention, would infer an interest in green cheese. The algorithm would completely ignore that you dislike it. You could then see ads promoting green cheese.

While the example may seem silly, it makes an important point. Replace “green cheese” with the interest you are targeting. In most cases, you assume that the users you target have a positive interest in that topic. You may be wasting your money if you pay to reach those who actually dislike it.

The researchers conducted a couple of studies to come to the conclusion that this was happening.

Study #1

In the first study, the researchers created 14 new Facebook user accounts. Researchers controlled the demographics and behavior of each account. They then tracked the interests that Facebook generated.

The researchers could see these interests within each account’s Ad Preferences. You can, too. Read this post about your Facebook Ad Preferences.

Researchers found that actions as simple as scrolling through a page led to Facebook inferring an interest. According to the study, 33% of the inferred interests were inaccurate or irrelevant.

Of course, determining whether something is “inexact” or “irrelevant” is a sliding scale. At what point is an inferred interest accurate and at what point is it inexact? When is it relevant and when does it become irrelevant?

Regardless, we may be splitting hairs when one of three inferred interests is problematic. That’s a lot!

Study #2

The researchers performed another study. This time, they recruited 146 people from different parts of the world. Each participant downloaded a browser extension that allowed researchers to collect data from Facebook about their interests.

The participants were then asked questions about the accuracy of the interests Facebook had inferred. In this case, researchers found that 29% of the interests Facebook listed were not actually of interest to these people.

In other words, these results were consistent with the findings of the first study.

Check Your Ad Preferences

If you’re skeptical, you can check the ways that advertisers can target you based on interests, too. It’s actually really hard to find now, and I’ll dig deeper in a separate post. But, from the desktop app, go to…

Settings & Privacy > Settings > Ads > Ad Settings > Categories used to reach you > Interest categories.

Like I said, it’s buried! That’s six clicks just to get there.

I’ve found that some of the interests that can be used to target me are creepily accurate. Some, though, are the complete opposite. I have no idea why they’d be associated with me.

Some examples:

• RVs
• CamperVan
• Motorhome
• Golf Stroke Mechanics
• Workers’ Compensation
• Canvas Print
• Baking
• Diaper
• Preschool

I have no idea why I’d have inferred interests related to RVs and camping. We almost never go camping, and we’ve never used an RV, campervan, or motorhome.

I don’t golf. Not one bit.

I’m self-employed and workers’ compensation is not something I’m concerned about.

I don’t bake.

I have kids, but they’re all 14 and older. Diapers and preschool haven’t been in my world in a long, long time. Maybe interests aren’t updated and they can be outdated? That’s not good either.

There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of these, so I stopped looking! And what’s crazy is that I actually cleaned my interests up years ago, so mine are likely more accurate and updated than most people’s may be.

My Experiences

These results could explain some of what I’ve seen with targeting interests.

For example, I recently promoted a highly technical blog post related to Facebook advertising. I targeted interests that included some of the following:

• Advertising agency
• Advertising campaign
• Digital marketing
• Online advertising
• Social media marketing
• Social media strategist

The vast majority of the comments I received on that ad were from people who were quite obviously not advertisers. Instead, they wanted to voice their distaste for ads and how they wished they didn’t exist.

So, how is it that I may have reached these people?

If this study is accurate, we can guess that some of these interests may have been inferred for these people if they previously commented on posts or ads about how they dislike Facebook ads.

This is obviously a guess and a small sample example, but I’d be curious if you’ve had similar experiences that could be explained by this study’s results.

It Matters

Now, we don’t know how many of these interests are actually used for targeting. And, of course, targeting interests were cleaned up after these studies were conducted.

But, this certainly raises questions about how these interest lists are generated. Poor targeting impacts the user experience and it certainly impacts the advertiser’s results.

You can make an argument that in some cases, the context doesn’t matter about a person’s relationship with an interest. But, I’d suggest that advertisers would hope that, in most cases, the interest is actually due to a positive relationship.

Your Turn

What do you think? Is this an indictment on interest targeting?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Study Suggests 30-Percent of Facebook Interests Are Inaccurate or Irrelevant appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

While cold, broad targeting is popular, I still find warm targeting extremely valuable. I believe this is especially the case for content creators like me. Website custom audiences can be a great tool, and you can use them in many different ways.

I attract you to my website with free content, driven here by email, organic search, social media posts, and ads. It’s then important that I can isolate those who were most engaged to move them to the next step.

Because of the importance of warm audiences for me, I have a rather sophisticated approach to website remarketing. It’s more than just targeting all of my visitors or retargeting an abandoned cart.

While I use many of the “base” audiences that anyone can create, I also create audiences based on standard and custom events that help me isolate those who show they really dug into my content.

Let’s walk through the ways that I’m using website custom audiences right now…

Group 1: Base

First, let’s go through the easy audiences, the ones I call the “Base” audiences. These can be created by anyone and only require that you have the Meta pixel on your website.

1. All website visitors.

This is the broadest audience you can create of your website visitors. If you lack traffic, this is where you’ll start.

Visiting your website should be a good signal. It suggests at least the smallest amount of interest in your business or content. Of course, such an audience includes everyone: Those who spend three minutes and those who spend hours; those who view one page and those who view 100; those who buy from you and those who never would.

While you can use this for multiple purposes (driving traffic back to your website, building your email list, or selling a product), the variation of engagement may make it the best fit for driving traffic or free opt-ins.

2. People who visit specific web pages.

I use these for several very different situations.

First, like in the image above, I’ll use it to isolate traffic to a specific section of my website. Not everyone listens to podcasts, so I can promote podcast episodes to people who have visited “Pubcast” pages of my website.

When I use an ad set to promote a single blog post, I’ll also make sure to exclude those who already read the blog post. I do that by creating an audience of people who visited that URL and exclude it in my ad set.

Another way I use these audiences for exclusion purposes is by excluding those who already bought a product or opted-in to a free thing. Instead of using the website custom audience for standard events (we’ll get to those), I choose to instead create audiences of those who visited the thank-you page for the product I’m promoting and exclude the people who have been there.

Finally, I run remarketing campaigns to people who visited a product landing page but didn’t convert. I do this by targeting the people who visited the landing page and then excluding those who visited the thank-you page. While you could do this in a single audience, I choose to create two (target one, exclude the other).

3. Visitors by time spent.

This audience has been around for years, but I still find it very valuable for isolating my most engaged audience. In this case, it truly can be used for promoting just about anything (on my website, at least), whether it be content, an opt-in, or a product.

The key to remember is that it will, obviously, shrink your overall audience quite a bit. If you target your top 5%, that will be extremely relevant, but it is also going to be a fraction of the total website visitors. Size can lead to deliverability issues.

Group 2: Standard Events

One of the many reasons that you should create web events is that you can target people who perform them. I use these at a very basic level. For example, I will target all people who have purchased a product from me during the past 180 days.

I do the same for CompleteRegistration and Search. I target each group as engaged users likely to want to read a blog post or buy a product from me. While I could refine by parameters to isolate those who bought a particular product or spend the most money, I don’t tend to do that.

Keep in mind that I’ll create audiences by URL (using the confirmation page) to target or exclude those who have bought or registered for something.

One event that I will utilize parameters for, though, is PageView. I’ve used this during a recent experiment to find my most engaged website visitors by the number of pages viewed.

Group 3: Custom Events

I’ve written before about how I use Custom Events to isolate quality engagement on my website that I can’t get from Standard Events alone. While one valuable use of these events is for adding more context to reporting, I also use it to target these actions.

I created these events in the first place because they represent important engagement on my website. So, it would only be logical to target the people who perform these important events.

Once you create these custom events, you can create the audiences based on the events. Here are examples of what I do…

1. User Views 2+ Pages in a Session

2. User Scrolls at Least 70% on a Page

Note that I don’t technically refine by scroll depth here because the event only fires once you’ve scrolled 70%. I used it as an example here so that you can see how you might choose the scroll depth for this audience. (Read more about this event here.)

3. User Spends at Least 2 Minutes on a Page

I’ve set up the event itself in different ways. It originally fired in 30-second intervals. Then I set it up to only fire at 1 minute. Now I have two separate events, one at 1 minute and one at 2 minutes. As a result, I don’t need to refine further to create this audience.

4. User Performs “Quality Visitor” Event (2+ Minutes AND 70% Scroll)

Just for fun, I’m showing how to create an audience of people who perform this event at least three times.

5. Embedded YouTube Video Watched

I typically use these to include all YouTube video views on my website, but here’s an example of how I could include only views of a particular video and for a certain amount of view time.

6. Audio Player Started on My Website

Your Turn

Are there any other audiences you use that I haven’t mentioned here?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 10 Facebook Website Custom Audience Strategies appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Back in November, Meta announced that they would be removing detailed Facebook ads targeting options. I covered it on a Pubcast Shot as well. Except, the changes that would be made were far more significant than anyone had expected.

Thousands of detailed targeting options were removed on January 19. Let me tell you: Meta wasn’t messing around!

Of course, this may negatively impact your advertising if you rely on targeting options that are no longer available. In this post, let’s cover the following:

• The targeting that we expected to be removed
• The surprise removals
• How removals impact current ad sets
• What you should do

Let’s go…

The Original Announcement

When Meta first discussed removing detailed targeting options, the focus was on targeting related to sensitive topics, “such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation.”

We would see detailed targeting removed related to health causes (“Lung cancer awareness”), sexual orientation (“LGBT culture”), religious practices and groups (“Catholic church”), political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures.

My biggest concern at the time was for non-profits that would want to target people who showed interest in their cause. While I understood these updates, I worried most about that specific scenario when targeting would be used for good.

Of course, that was only the beginning.

The Surprise Removals

Once the changes actually went into effect, Meta made another announcement about what it was doing, and the removals would be far more drastic.

The first paragraph (emphasis mine):

Starting Jan 19, 2022, we’re removing some Detailed Targeting options because they are either not widely used, they may be redundant with others or too granular, or because they relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as targeting options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation.

I admit that at first, I thought I simply missed this in the original announcement. But that original announcement made no mention of removing options that aren’t widely used, may be redundant or are too granular.

Based on reports we’ve been seeing in my communities, there are a ton of detailed targeting options that were caught up in this. And many have nothing to do with sensitive topics, but instead fall into the other groups.

How Removals Impact Current Ad Sets

If you created ad sets prior to January 19 that use any of the impacted targeting options, they should continue to run until March 17. At that point, expect the ad set to stop running. You’ll see a warning on any impacted targeting options you’ve used.

So, if the ad set is still working well using those targeting options, great. But, you should start planning for an immediate future without those targeting options.

What You Should Do

The easiest solution is to find other interests or use Lookalike Audiences. That’s easier said than done, of course, if you’ve been using tried and true detailed targeting options that have worked great.

You can, of course, use broad targeting (gender, age, and location), custom audiences, or turn on Targeting Expansion or Lookalike Expansion. But, I doubt those options will seem all that appealing to those who have found great success with detailed targeting that has been removed.

Here’s what I recommend you do to find other relevant detailed targeting options…

Within the detailed targeting text box of your ad set, type in a core audience that fits your needs.

Then click the “Suggestions” link.

Facebook tends to do a pretty good job of providing related suggestions that you may not have considered. Here are some that are recommended for the “Jon Loomer Digital” interest (luckily, it hasn’t been removed!):

• Social Media Examiner
• Digital Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Online Advertising
• Business Page Admins
• Podcast
• Digital Strategy
• Digital Marketing Strategist

Go ahead and add another to see how it impacts the suggestions. Theoretically, giving Facebook more info will help refine the targeting suggestions.

Try it!

Your Turn

Did you have any significant targeting options removed on January 19? What did you do about it?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Removed Thousands of Detailed Targeting Options appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of the biggest negative results related to iOS 14+ and browser restrictions that have gone into place during the past year is a drop in targeting effectiveness.

The Facebook pixel has become less dependable. We should expect it to get less effective as more and more browsers and devices move towards less tracking. These restrictions negatively impact reporting, but also the ability to target people based on their website actions.

That doesn’t mean you should abandon the pixel or targeting built off of pixel events. But, you should consider building and targeting the audiences that aren’t impacted by these restrictions.

In this post, we’ll provide a list of options that you still have available to you that haven’t been impacted.

A Clarification

The important thing to remember here is that impact is isolated to activity across websites and apps. However, Facebook is still able to update audiences based on activity within the Facebook and Instagram apps themselves.

1. Lead Form Custom Audiences

USE IN ADDITION TO: Link ads for website leads

Facebook lead ads leverage forms that are easy to complete. They can pre-fill contact info like name and email address from a user’s profile. They are super fast and, most importantly, they keep people on Facebook. As a result, these audiences will remain complete.

Lead Form Custom Audiences allow you to create audiences of people who:

• Opened your form
• Opened and submitted your form
• Opened your form but didn’t submit

Audiences include people for up to 90 days at a time.

Beyond having the advantage over the pixel, the “opened and submitted” audience will also be more complete and accurate than a customer file custom audience, which relies on the email address matching up to a user’s Facebook profile.

2. Video View Custom Audiences

USE IN ADDITION TO: Custom audiences based on embedded YouTube video views

Facebook videos (videos that you upload to Facebook) have many benefits. First, they are engaging for the user since they auto-play and can be watched directly from the news feed. Second, engagement with these videos gives advertisers retargeting capabilities.

You can create a video view custom audience of people who viewed one or multiple videos for as little as three seconds or for up to 95% of the video.

The greater engagement rates can give advertisers targeting capabilities to reach people who provided clear buying signals based on watching a product video, for example.

One of the nice things about these and Engagement Custom Audiences (next on this list) is that people can remain in the audience for up to 365 days.

3. Facebook Engagement Custom Audiences

Facebook Engagement Custom Audiences give advertisers the ability to target Facebook users for many types of interaction:

• People who currently like or follow your page
• Everyone who engaged with your page
• Anyone who visited your page
• People who engaged with any post or ad
• People who clicked any call-to-action button
• People who sent a message to your page
• People who saved any post

The “People who currently like or follow your page” audience replaces the prior method of targeting your followers using Connections.

Targeting “everyone who engaged with your page” gives you the largest possible audience of people who engaged with you. Many of the other audiences are likely to be small, depending on your audience size and level of activity.

While these are all solid audiences to use, Facebook has an opportunity to provide more granularity here. I’ve previously written about how Facebook could very easily allow advertisers the ability to target people based on more granular interactions with Facebook content.

4. Instagram Account Custom Audiences

Instagram Account Custom Audiences work much in the same way as Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audiences, but with your Instagram business account (it needs to be connected to your Business Manager).

You can create audiences of people based on the following levels of engagement with your Instagram business account:

• Everyone who engaged with your account
• Anyone who visited your profile
• People who engaged with any post or ad
• People who sent a message to your account
• People who saved any post or ad

If you have an active Instagram account, you should take advantage of these options.

5. Instant Experience Custom Audiences

USE IN ADDITION TO: Website custom audiences based on traffic sent to a landing page

Instant Experiences are like custom landing pages created within Facebook. Combine text, videos, photos, buttons, and other components to build an immersive experience.

In the news feed, an ad that links to an Instant Experience may look mostly like a typical link ad. When it’s clicked, the Instant Experience appears.

Of course, advertisers can create audiences based on engagement with Instant Experiences, including:

• People who opened the Instant Experience
• People who opened and clicked any link within the Instant Experience

One reason to use Instant Experiences could be to replace the targeting lost due to iOS 14+ opt-outs. Let’s assume someone opted out of tracking. If they click on your ad, you will not be able to create an audience of that user’s activity on your website. You won’t be able to retarget or exclude them based on clicking the ad.

If you create an Instant Experience to showcase your product, you could still have a link that goes out to purchase the product on your website. But, you could first create an audience of the person for opening the Instant Experience in the first place. And then you could create an audience for clicking the link within that Instant Experience that goes out to your website — even though they won’t be included in the website custom audience!

6. Facebook Event Custom Audiences

USE IN ADDITION TO: Website custom audiences for events sold on your website

Facebook has enhanced the Events product during the past few years, now integrating Facebook payments. That provides more targeting opportunities when creating Facebook Event Custom Audiences.

You can now create audiences based on the following engagement types with your events:

• People who responded Going or Interested
• People who have responded Going
• People who have responded Interested
• People who have visited the event page
• People who have engaged
• People who entered the ticket purchase flow
• People who have purchased tickets
• People who abandoned the ticket purchase flow

Many of these audiences would be the equivalent of targeting and remarketing that could be done with website custom audiences related to the purchase funnel.

7. Shopping and On-Facebook Listing Custom Audiences

If you sell products on Facebook or Instagram using a Shop or Facebook Commerce Catalog, you can create audiences of people based on their engagement with those products.

First, there are several targeting options based on engagement with your Facebook Shop:

• People who viewed products
• People who viewed products and navigated to website
• People who saved products
• People who viewed Shops page
• People who viewed Shops collection
• People who added any products to their cart
• People who intiated checkout for any products
• People who purchased any products

These audiences can be based on engagement with either your Facebook or Instagram Shop.

If you sell products within Marketplace using a Marketplace Catalog, you can also create audiences of engagement with your products there.

On-Facebook Listing Custom Audiences you can create include:

• People who viewed products in my catalog
• People who messaged about products in my catalog

The one problem with all of these is that there isn’t granularity based on the specific product viewed or purchased.

8. Interests, Demographics, and Behaviors

All of the first seven audiences are “warm” based on engagement with you on Facebook or Instagram. Of course, most cold audiences won’t be impacted by iOS or browser restrictions.

Age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, and language are mostly or completely unaffected by these changes.

9. Lookalike Audiences

Finally, advertisers can find users who are similar to those who have engaged with them before by creating Lookalike Audiences.

The only potential negative impact to Lookalike Audiences is because your source audience may be based on a website custom audience that is incomplete. The quality of the Lookalike Audience depends upon the quality of the source audience.

Your Turn

These are all targeting options that you should consider adding to your advertising mix if you haven’t already. It doesn’t mean that you should replace website custom audiences or app engagement custom audiences entirely — that’s crazy! But using these more could give you more complete targeting overall.

Have you started using these audiences? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Ads Audiences That Aren’t Impacted by iOS and Browser Restrictions appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Lookalike Audiences are one of the oldest shortcuts for isolating a broad audience for targeting. Advertisers can also experiment with Facebook Lookalike Expansion to yield optimal results that scale.

Of course, this is not to be confused with Targeting Expansion, which I wrote about recently. They are similar… but different.

Let’s talk about what Lookalike Expansion is, why you might use it, and how it differs from Targeting Expansion.

What is Lookalike Expansion?

Lookalike Audiences allow you to create bigger audiences of people similar to those who are already connected to you (email list, website visitors, page engagement, and more). You can have Facebook find the people who are in anywhere from the top 1% to 10% within a country or region who are most similar to your source audience.

A question I often get is related to what percentage you should use for your Lookalike Audience. I typically tell advertisers to test and experiment. But it would seem, if it works as it should, that Lookalike Expansion will help simplify this process.

Lookalike Expansion allows Facebook to dynamically expand your audience if their system finds better performance opportunities beyond the percentage you selected.

From Facebook:

Our ad delivery system uses the Custom Audience that you based your lookalike audience on as a guide for ad delivery, while also dynamically assessing performance. If our system finds better performance opportunities beyond the percentage you selected for your lookalike audience, lookalike expansion allows us to dynamically make updates that reflect where we’re seeing better performance and we may expand your audience further to include similar opportunities.

Lookalike Expansion is automatically enabled for new, duplicated, and draft campaigns and ad sets optimizing for conversion, value, or app events using Engagement, Leads, App Promotion or Sales objectives while using conversion, value, or app event optimization. You’ll notice a checkbox after selecting a Lookalike Audience when creating such a campaign.

Note that Lookalike Expansion will not expand beyond the ages, genders, locations, or exclusions that you indicate in your targeting. Lookalike Expansion cannot be used with other objectives or with Special Ad Categories.

Compared to Targeting Expansion

Much of this may sound very similar to our discussions about Targeting Expansion. When turned on in that case, Facebook will test and monitor to determine if more or cheaper conversions can be found outside of your designated audience. If so, Facebook will dynamically expand to reach these other people. Facebook uses the targeting you select as a guide.

One way Targeting Expansion is different is that, unlike Lookalike Expansion, it is used when targeting demographics, interests, and behaviors. Facebook doesn’t come out and say this in their documentation, but this is also assumed to include custom audiences (we’ve tested to confirm).

The checkbox to turn this on is found below Detailed Targeting within the ad set.

Targeting Expansion is now on by default (and can’t be turned off) when used with certain objectives. It is off by default (but can be turned on) in other situations (other than Reach and Awareness, which are not eligible).

How to Use Lookalike Expansion

I alluded to it earlier, but there is one very clear value to this. There are limitless ways to create Lookalike Audiences. What will be the source? For which countries? What percentages will you use? It’s a lot to consider and test.

I’ve consistently used 1%, since this should be the most relevant group that is most likely to be effective. But that’s not always the case, of course. A bigger or different audience may result in lower competition and CPMs, leading to lower costs. You just never know without testing, testing, and testing some more.

If Lookalike Expansion works the way it should, I see no reason to turn it off if given the option. Start with a smaller, highly relevant Lookalike Audience. This will usually be 1%, but it could be the top 3% or 5% in smaller countries. Use that as the starting point. Then, turn on Lookalike Expansion so that Facebook can expand the audience if necessary.

The “if necessary” is the key. Assuming it works as designed, Facebook won’t necessarily expand if the audience is working as well as it can. But if Facebook’s ad delivery systems see that you can get more and cheaper conversions by expanding to a larger percentage, it will.

This would also seem to be a good way to scale an ad set — or at least maintain solid performance for a longer period of time. If frequency is increasing or you’re beginning to exhaust the highest performers within your designated Lookalike Audience, the assumption is that Facebook could expand beyond that group to maintain or improve performance.

But Does it Work?

I discussed this while talking about Targeting Expansion as well. One very big problem is that Facebook provides nothing within reporting to help you understand how well Lookalike Expansion is performing — or how much it is being applied.

For example, let’s assume you are targeting a Lookalike Audience (top 1%) and have Lookalike Expansion turned on. You’re getting great results. But was Lookalike Expansion applied? How far beyond that top 1% did Facebook go? What percentage of your results were from the originally targeted audience?

This is my big issue with both expansion products. How they work, how much they work, and how well they work are all hidden behind the Facebook Black Box. If our ad set is effective and expansion was turned on, we have no idea if it was effective BECAUSE it was turned on. And that’s not helpful for advertisers looking to get consistent results.

Is This Necessary?

I’m not suggesting that a dynamic Expansion is unnecessary. I just wonder if having both Lookalike Expansion and Targeting Expansion creates too much confusion. Why not just have Targeting Expansion? It can still function in the same ways when using Lookalike Audiences, but you won’t have a whole new box and term to confuse people.

Of course, there are some differences in how the two expansions are applied related to defaults and objectives that would need to be made uniform, but it would seem to be a good simplification for Facebook. I’m sure I’m not the only one who took some time to understand the difference between the two.

Your Turn

Have you experimented with Lookalike Expansion? What kind of results have you seen?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Use Facebook Lookalike Expansion appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook is making a change to force advertisers to potentially target more broadly using Targeting Expansion for some situations. It’s a big change that could lead to more results (if it works the way it’s designed), but it may also upset advertisers wanting to limit targeting to a smaller group.

Note that this change is still rolling out (I don’t have it yet, but we’ve confirmed it happening for some).

Let’s dig in to explain what Targeting Expansion is and how this will impact your advertising.

What is Targeting Expansion?

After entering your target audience in an ad set, you may have seen a check a box to turn on Targeting Expansion.

When turned on, Facebook will test and monitor to determine if more or cheaper conversions can be found outside of your designated audience. If so, Facebook will dynamically expand to reach these other people. Facebook uses the demographics, interests, and behaviors you select as a guide.

Note that age, gender, location, and language settings you make will continue to apply. Additionally, Facebook will respect any exclusions you added to your targeting when expanding your audience.

Targeting Expansion is available for all objectives, other than Reach and Brand Awareness. It also cannot be used when promoting a Special Ad Category.

The Change

Okay, now let’s get to the big change.

Announced in Marketing API v12.0, Targeting Expansion will be turned on automatically when optimizing for conversions, value, or app events while using the Conversions objective.

When Targeting Expansion is turned on automatically in these cases, advertisers will not be able to turn it off. It will look like this (thanks to Luke Elliott for the image)…

Note that when optimizing for actions other than conversions, value, or app events, targeting expansion will be turned off by default — but can be turned on (other than the situations described earlier).

The Problem with Targeting Expansion

I’ll admit that I really wasn’t happy when this was first announced. I enjoy targeting a small, warm audience when trying to get conversions. It’s part of my process. But, this update has forced me to take a closer look at how Targeting Expansion works and whether it may work for me.

One of the surface-level problems with Targeting Expansion is that when you turn it on, the “Potential Audience” immediately balloons to the size it would be if you removed all targeting restrictions within a location.

Truthfully, this is what upset me. It may have been my own basic misunderstanding of how this works — or is supposed to work.

If Targeting Expansion works as it should, it isn’t always applied. It may be rarely or never applied. It’s just that Facebook COULD expand your audience as much as the delivery system wants (within constraints mentioned earlier) if it may lead to more conversions.

This, of course, is where it gets dicey. There’s a lot of “in theory” that does some heavy lifting when talking about Targeting Expansion. “In theory,” you could end up with more conversions if Facebook expands your audience. But, there’s a whole lot of “we don’t really know what happened” going on as well.

What I mean is that there is no easy way to get reporting from Facebook on if or how much Facebook applied Targeting Expansion when it’s turned on. There’s no column that shows you generated “X” additional conversions because you reached people outside of your initial target audience.

And that’s where everything falls into a black box, and we just have to trust that it’s working as it should.

Does it Work?

Historically, I haven’t had great success with Targeting Expansion. But I was inspired to try it again this week, and I am seeing better results than expected for a Lead Generation campaign (this wouldn’t be impacted by the changes to Conversions campaigns, of course).

Part of me doesn’t like being forced to turn this setting on. If I wanted to target this smaller audience, I should be allowed to!

But at the same time, “in theory,” Targeting Expansion may not even be applied. If the audience you are targeting is so great, Facebook may not need to ever apply Targeting Expansion. Or it may only use it a little. And it SHOULD lead to better results.

“In theory,” of course. And we’ll never know whether it was applied or not.

The post Facebook Targeting Expansion Becomes Default appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

We’re entering a time when tracking users from app to app and website to website is becoming increasingly difficult. Browser settings and Apple’s iOS 14.5 update are making the Facebook pixel less dependable for the purposes of tracking conversions and creating audiences for ad targeting.

That’s rough for advertisers. It creates a need for more granular targeting that isn’t impacted by these privacy developments. Activity that occurs entirely within the Facebook app, for example, can still be tracked and turned into audiences used for targeting.

Facebook offers some options. They just aren’t as robust as they could or should be. I’ve long wondered why many of the requests I make in this post aren’t already available. Until now, it was more of a luxury need. Now, though, they’re the type of options advertisers will need to replace or supplement some of their favorite options that are becoming less useful.

Facebook, if you’re reading this, it’s long past the time to offer these options for advertisers. You have the ability. Doing so will provide a little bit of sunshine during an otherwise tumultuous period.

Let’s go…

Clarification: What Is and Is Not Impacted

These additional audience targeting options are necessary because iOS 14 and other tracking restrictions are impacting the ability to target people based on their activity. Understand that iOS 14, specifically, applies to tracking across apps and websites.

This applies to the creation of website custom audiences and app activity custom audiences. If someone opts out of tracking, they will be removed from these audiences related to their activity while using an iOS device.

That said, this does not impact tracking that Facebook does and can do within their own app. As a result, this does not impact the following audience types:

• Video
• Lead Form
• Instant Experience
• Shopping
• Instagram Account
• Page Events
• Facebook Page
• On-Facebook Listings

It also doesn’t impact things like customer list audiences, interests, or lookalike audiences (though the source audiences may be impacted).

In this post, we’ll explore ways that Facebook can expand on those audiences that aren’t impacted.

Expansion of Engagement Types

The Facebook Page Engagement audience allows for several ways to target an audience that engages with your page…

Advertisers also have a similar method for building audiences of people who have engaged with their Instagram business account.

This is great and all, but the types of engagement are extremely general. The nice thing about website custom audiences is that I can isolate very specific types of events for targeting. That granularity does not exist here.

Here are a few engagement types that Facebook could turn into targeting audiences…

1. Post Shares
2. Post Comments
3. Post Reactions (or segmented by specific reaction type)
4. Image Click

You probably don’t realize this, but most of these actions (except for image click) were previously possible. Creation wasn’t part of Facebook’s main audience interface, though. It was done within Facebook Analytics.

In the example above, you’d first create a filter, save it, and then create a custom audience from it. Perfect, right? The problem is, of course, that Facebook Analytics went away on June 30, 2021.

We know that Facebook has the information to create these audiences. We could create them before. Facebook needs to make this part of the main audience interface.

Engagement on Specific Posts

Maybe you want to reach those who shared or commented but limit retargeting to that activity related to a specific post. In the example above, creating audiences for all comments, shares, or reactions would be good for building general targeting audiences. But there’s often a more specific need.

If you liked, shared, or commented on a specific post, I could then show you an ad related to that topic. Relevance, as always, is key.

Look, I understand that Facebook’s argument may be that this type of granularity wouldn’t be useful for those with small budgets or low levels of activity on their posts. The audience sizes will be small.

Fine. But it could be enormously valuable for those with higher budgets and those with more activity. Just make it available and let us sort out whether we have the volume to make it useful.

More Granular Instant Experience Actions

The Instant Experience ad format is likely to become more popular among Facebook advertisers since it doesn’t rely on the uncertainty of the pixel for audience creation. It keeps users entirely inside an “instant” experience that can consist of various “components,” or blocks of text, images, videos, products, or more.

You can create audiences of people who engage with these experiences. Audience creation options include anyone who opened the Instant Experience or anyone who opened and then clicked a link within it.

That’s a pretty soft offering of options. In addition to adding the components that were engaged with, what about adding specificity to the link clicked within the Instant Experience? You could include multiple links and buttons within the experience. Why not allow the ability to create an audience based on which one was clicked?

Impressions Shown

You may have been shown an ad or post, but you didn’t necessarily click on it. In fact, the odds are better that you didn’t. What if I could target or exclude people who were already shown a post or ad?

For example…

1. Show to followers who haven’t seen it.

Let’s say you published something organically to your followers. As we know, a small percentage of those followers will likely see it. What if we could create an ad that reaches only those who weren’t shown it so far? We could do that, but only if we could create an audience of those who were shown an impression and exclude that group.

2. Control frequency.

One of the biggest complaints among advertisers is that Facebook doesn’t give us enough ways to control frequency. We waste money showing ads to people who see them over and over again.

Currently, the best way to do that would be to use Frequency Capping when optimizing for Reach or using Reach and Frequency buying.

But, how would you control reach when simply optimizing for Conversions or something else with a modest budget? We could do that by creating an audience of people who already saw our post or ad during a set window of time (let’s say 14 days) and exclude that group.

3. Show a variety of content.

Or maybe we want to reach people who saw a post or ad (but didn’t necessarily engage with it) and show them something else. We could do that if we could target those who were shown that post or ad.

Frequency of Engagement or Impressions

One of the really cool and underutilized features related to website custom audiences is buried within pixel event audiences. You can create audiences based on parameters, values, and frequency of actions.

This is great! But we’ve already discussed how the pixel is becoming less dependable in the age of iOS 14 and less tracking. Anyone who opts out of tracking will be removed from these types of audiences.

What if we could apply this type of granularity to engagement with other types of Facebook content?

1. Frequency of engagement.

We mentioned creating an audience of people who engaged with a specific post or ad. But what about people who have engaged multiple times across your content? People who routinely like or love your posts, for example, may be valuable. Or people who message frequently, click links, comment, or provide numerous other types of engagement. It would be great to be able to isolate these people!

You can currently create an audience of people who engaged with any post or ad, but there’s no frequency element. That would decrease the audience size but increase the relevance.

2. Frequency of impressions.

Once again, a way to control frequency. Previously, we discussed creating an audience of people who were shown a specific post or ad during a specified window of time so that we could exclude them. Instead, what if we could exclude only those who saw that post or ad three times during the past seven days?

Watch Video

Your Turn

Facebook has the ability to provide these targeting options to advertisers. It would only enhance the performance of ads and the creativity of advertisers. Why not provide them?

Any other targeting options you want to see? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Audience Targeting Options Facebook Needs in the Age of Less Tracking appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook advertisers are scrambling as a result of Apple’s iOS 14 update. This will impact virtually every aspect of our advertising, in some ways that aren’t yet clear. But one of the most important: Negatively impacting Facebook advertising audiences.

Let’s take a closer look at how and why iOS 14 will impact the composition and sizes of your targeting audiences.

If you want to learn more about this topic, I will go into significant additional detail in my new training, Facebook Ads and iOS 14. This will be my biggest and most important training yet (and I’ve done a lot of training!).

The Vague and Not Fully Explained

As I type this, we know that the iOS 14 update will have a negative impact on your remarketing audiences. From Facebook:

As more people opt out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, the size of your app connections, app activity Custom Audiences, and website Custom Audiences may decrease.

Details are limited. My belief is that Facebook isn’t fully clear yet what the full impact will be. There are a couple of things that should contribute to smaller and incomplete remarketing audiences…

Delayed Reporting

We’ve been accustomed to real-time reporting. When a conversion happens, it appears in Ads Manager rather quickly. This will not be the case for many iOS 14 users.

If you are running ads promoting your iOS app, it will rely on the SkAdNetwork. It may take Apple up to three days to send that data.

If a user opts not to share their data when they open the Facebook family of apps, conversion data from mobile web will also be delayed up to three days (and potentially unavailable for targeting audiences — more on that in a second).

When it comes to advertising, this means that remarketing audiences are not fully updated in real-time.

Limited Reporting: Aggregated Event Measurement

When a user opts to not share their data with the Facebook family of apps, this also impacts the volume of reporting. For this segment of users, Aggregated Event Measurement comes into play, resulting in partial event reporting.

Due to Aggregated Event Measurement, only the highest priority event will be reported for a single visit. For example, consider the following website visit:

• Visited a product page (ContentView pixel event)
• Added a product to a customer shopping cart (AddToCart pixel event)
• Completed a purchase (Purchase pixel event)

Normally, this behavior would result in at least three pixel events (even four, if you include the standard PageView event). But, for this segment of users, only the highest priority event will be reported: The Purchase.

The result is fewer events reported. But, it’s possible that this data will only be used for reporting — not for targeting audiences. For now, Facebook isn’t clear.

Other Potential Limitations Inferred

Let’s go back to that original Facebook quote and break it into chunks.

As more people opt out of tracking on iOS 14 devices

This suggests that once someone opts out, they may be excluded from your remarketing audience, even if their activity continues to be reported in some way.

the size of your app connections, app activity Custom Audiences

Again, this is related to when someone opts out. The SkAdNetwork will result in data that is aggregated, restricted, and delayed — and that will impact all users, whether they opt out or not. But while aggregated data may help fill in the gap for reporting, it certainly feels like these people won’t be available for app activity Custom Audiences.

and website Custom Audiences may decrease

Above, I referred to how Facebook will report fewer mobile web conversion events and they will be delayed due to Aggregated Event Measurement. Does this suggest, too, that a user who opts out will not be used in a website custom audience? The “may” qualifier makes it unclear.

Bottom Line: Be Prepared

Facebook tells us that our app activity and website custom audiences should decrease as a result of iOS 14. How much? If any user who opts out is omitted from audiences, that could be a lot — at least if you have a heavy iOS audience.

Why is a delayed, incomplete, and smaller remarketing audience a problem? First, the obvious point that you want to reach everyone who should qualify in an audience. Smaller highly relevant audiences will mean less effective advertising when reaching your most relevant group of people.

But it’s also an exclusion issue. When promoting a product, you’ll want to exclude those who already purchased it. If that data is delayed, you’ll continue targeting a customer for up to three days after purchasing. If they opt out, you may not be able to exclude them at all — at least from website and app activity custom audiences.

The result is waste. Waste is an advertiser’s biggest enemy. No one wants to throw away money. We try to keep our targeting and exclusions tight to avoid it.

If your audience is mainly Android, I project the impact of changes will be focused on attribution, reporting, and optimization. It would seem that audiences would continue to build as normal for non-iOS users.

What to Do?

This is something we are all going to feel out as we go. How much will your audiences decrease? How much of a problem will it create?

Personally, I will continue to use these website custom audiences for targeting and exclusions. However, I will also stick with my long-term strategy of using every possible method at my disposal.

For example, when excluding someone who registered for something, I will exclude them in three ways:

• Facebook Lead Form Custom Audience (if lead ads used)
• Website Custom Audience of thank-you page or event
• Email/Data File Custom Audience

If it makes some of my most heavily used remarketing audiences too small to target, I may need to consider making them slightly broader.

Your Turn

How are you planning for smaller remarketing audiences as a result of iOS 14?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Advertising Audiences and iOS 14 appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Video is big on Facebook. Not only is video popular and engaging, but Facebook prioritizes it in news feeds. If you’re utilizing videos, you need to create Facebook video engagement custom audiences.

Understand that this isn’t just about video ads. You can create organic videos or use video in ads, it doesn’t matter. But you need to take advantage of the ability to target and exclude the people who watch your videos.

Let’s discuss…

How Video Engagement Custom Audiences Work

The concept is simple: Add users to an audience based on their engagement level with one or multiple Facebook videos that you published. Then target or exclude those who engaged with those videos.

Of course, this only involves Facebook or Instagram videos (not YouTube, Vimeo, or any other platform).

You can add people to a video engagement custom audience based on the following levels of engagement:

• 3 seconds or more
• 10 seconds or more
• 15 seconds-plus or completed the video (ThruPlay)
• 25% or more
• 50% or more
• 75% or more
• 95% or more

Note that it doesn’t matter whether someone watches these videos with or without sound. And it doesn’t matter whether they saw it within the news feed or clicked to get a closer look.

You can create an audience of people who performed these actions at any time during the past 1 to 365 days. These audiences are updated dynamically.

How to Create Video Engagement Custom Audiences

Go to facebook.com/ads/manager/audiences or select Audiences within your Business Manager.

Click “Create Audience” and select “Custom Audience.”

Now, select “Video.”

You’ll get a screen that looks like this…

First, select the level of engagement that is required to be added to this audience (discussed earlier).

Next, click “Choose Videos”…

At the top, note that you can select videos by campaign, Facebook page, Instagram business profile, or video ID. It defaults to Facebook page.

These are videos that appeared on your Facebook page or Instagram business profile. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it was an Instagram video, for example. A Facebook video can appear on Instagram (usually as an ad).

These are merely ways to filter all of your videos to make them easier to find. For example, if you select Campaign, it will only display the videos appearing within a campaign. And you can select the specific campaign that the video is in.

Select one or multiple videos to be included in this audience. When you’re done, click “Confirm.”

Note that you could add another engagement rule if you want. I wouldn’t recommend this as it simply makes this audience more complicated and less flexible. I’d instead create two separate audiences that could be used either together or apart.

Set a duration of 1 to 365 days, name your audience, add an optional description, and click to Create Audience.

That’s it!

Targeting and Excluding People Who Watched Your Videos

Once you create these audiences, you can target and exclude them within the ad set as you normally would with custom audiences.

Things to Consider

First, let’s talk about levels of engagement and volume. Know that if you select the 3 seconds view, that’s going to capture a very high number of people who were served the video. It includes auto-play of videos that were passed over in the feed. You may want this, but keep it in mind.

Otherwise, consider the length of the video and potential volume before selecting an engagement level. If the video is 30 minutes long and was viewed by 1,000 people, don’t expect an audience of people who watched 95% to be very big. I’m sure you’re engaging, but no one’s that engaging.

The quality of these people may not be as high as you think unless you focus on the higher ends of engagement. That said, volume for shorter videos should be relatively easy to get.

Strategies

Let’s talk through a few ways that you can use Facebook video engagement custom audiences in your own advertising strategies.

1. Related sales.

Know that Facebook Live videos are included in the inventory that can source these audiences. Host a Facebook Live webinar or tutorial on a certain topic, mentioning your product. Then remarket to those who watched the video to promote the product related to your video.

2. Video series.

Show a series of five video tutorials or promos.

1. Target a broad group to promote Video #1; exclude those who watched Video #1
2. Target those who watched Video #1 to promote Video #2; exclude those who watched Video #2
3. Target those who watched Video #2 to promote Video #3; exclude those who watched Video #3
4. Target those who watched Video #3 to promote Video #4; exclude those who watched Video #4
5. Target those who watched Video #4 to promote Video #5; exclude those who watched Video #5

You could also use short durations, like somewhere between 3 and 7 days.

3. Higher volume exclusions.

I’m often asked how you can exclude people who already saw your ad. Technically, you can’t do this. And simply excluding people who clicked your link will only cut into a small percentage of the total people who saw it.

With video, you can leverage auto-play. Not everyone has auto-play, but a majority do. Use a video ad and exclude those who already watched 3 seconds of it.

4. Higher volume targeting.

On the flip side, maybe you want to target a large group of people who engaged with your content. Once again, volume is more difficult when it comes to clicks and pixel events. But, you could create an audience of 3 or 10-second video views to reach a larger group of people exposed to your content.

Your Turn

How are you using Facebook video engagement custom audiences?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Create Facebook Video Engagement Custom Audiences appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

When running Facebook ads, advertisers have multiple steps of the funnel to attack. One key step of that funnel is the existing customer base. There are multiple ways to reach these people, but one way is by creating a custom audience based on your customer list.

This is one of the oldest methods of remarketing to a brand’s existing audience, but that doesn’t mean that you should neglect it. Facebook custom audiences based on a customer list remain a staple for successful advertising strategies.

Let’s walk through the following:

• What these audiences are
• How to prepare your list for a custom audience
• How to create your custom audience
• Targeting and excluding
• Custom Audience Terms
• How to update custom audiences
• What I do

Facebook Ads and Your Customer List

You have been building an email list away from Facebook. While Facebook advertising is a key part of my marketing, email marketing may be the most effective revenue driver. You should build this list, market to it, and leverage it with ads.

You can export your customer list and send it to Facebook. This data is hashed and then matched up with people on Facebook based on names, email addresses, physical addresses, and more found in profiles. You can then target or exclude these people within your advertising.

Generally, you can expect anywhere from 30-70% of the people on your list to match up with users on Facebook for targeting. In other words, an email list of 10,000 people doesn’t mean you can reach those 10,000 people with ads; you can expect somewhere closer to 3,000 – 7,000. It depends on the quality, accuracy, recency, and thoroughness of your list.

Prepare Your Customer List

Go to facebook.com/ads/manager/audiences or select Audiences within your Business Manager.

Click “Create Audience” and select “Custom Audience.”

Select “Customer List.”

You’ll get a screen that looks like this…

The file should be a CSV or TXT format and include at least one identifier.

This means that each column of your file represents a different customer identifier. This includes email address, phone number, first name, last name, and others. The more identifiers (columns of data) you include, the more likely Facebook can match a customer with a Facebook user. For example, your customer’s email address may not match up with a Facebook user, but the combination of their first name, last name, and phone number might.

If you hover over an identifier, Facebook will give you an example of the format that this data needs to be in.

See this resource for formatting guidelines. Facebook also provides a list template to help you understand what your file should look like.

You can also include a column for Customer Value so that you can later create value-based lookalike audiences. We won’t cover that here, but feel free to read more about them.

How to Create a Custom Audience Based on Customer List

First, indicate whether your file includes a column for customer value. Again, you only need this if you later expect to create a value-based lookalike audience.

You can either upload a CSV or TXT file or do a simple copy and paste. Assuming your list is more than a few dozen and includes multiple columns, I’d go with a CSV file.

Name your audience and click “Next.”

Assuming the names of your columns are different than what Facebook expects, you’ll need to map each column to its related identifier.

There may be columns that don’t match up to an identifier. In that case, just select “Do Not Upload” for that item.

When you’re done, click “Upload and Create” and you’re done!

MailChimp Integration

If you use MailChimp, Facebook makes the creation of these custom audiences easy. There’s a link at the bottom of the initial screen for creating your custom audience to “Import From MailChimp.” Click that.

First, log in to MailChimp.

Then select one or multiple lists to convert to a custom audience.

We’ll talk more about list syncing later, but know that this integration does not mean that your custom audience will be regularly updated based on changes to your customer list. It only allows you to easily create that custom audience for the first time. If you want to keep it updated, you’ll need to consider a third-party tool.

Targeting and Excluding

Once created, you can target or exclude this audience. Go to your ad set and select the audience that you want to target or exclude.

In the example above, I am targeting my customer list while excluding a list of people who registered for my Quiz Library. Both are data file custom audiences, but they don’t need to be. You can combine multiple custom audience types (website custom audiences, Facebook page engagement custom audiences, lead form custom audiences, etc.) within the same targeting.

Custom Audience Terms

There are some important rules that you need to understand when it comes to usage of data for Facebook custom audiences. While I won’t go through the entire Custom Audience Terms, here are a few highlights:

1. You must have rights to the data.

These are your customers, or they are the customers of your client whom you are advertising for. You’re not scraping data or compiling a list of people who have no connection to your business.

2. You can only use a customer’s data for a custom audience until they opt-out.

These are people who have opted into receiving messages from you. Once they opt out, they need to be removed from your targeting.

3. You won’t grant access to these audiences to parties who have no rights to them.

If you have multiple clients in the same industry, you can’t share or use this data across accounts unless you have the rights to this data for that particular business (see #1 and #2).

Granted, this document is in legal language. It’s not always clear how to interpret these rules. But this is how I interpret them.

Updating Custom Audiences

The thing about Facebook custom audiences based on a customer file is that it’s static. You upload a file, and that’s it. If you never touch it again, it won’t change.

This, of course, is a problem related to #2 in the Custom Audience Terms above. But, you should also want to keep it updated as much as possible so that your targeting is relevant.

There are two ways to keep your custom audience updated…

1. Update Manually.

To update manually, select it from your Audiences list and click the “Edit” button.

From there, you’ll need to upload a file of people you either want to add or remove from your audience. Unfortunately, you can’t simply upload a fresh list.

2. Use a Third-Party Tool.

This is the easiest, though it means an investment. You’ll typically need to pay a monthly fee to maintain regular updating of your audience. Cost is usually a sliding scale depending on the number of records that need to be updated.

There are many tools available that can do this. I already use Zapier for many types of automation like this. I’ve also used DriftRock. LeadsBridge has a good reputation, though I’ve never used it.

None of those are affiliate links. If you’re in need of a solution, hopefully this gets you started!

What I Do

While my customer list custom audiences aren’t a top priority in my targeting, they are certainly in the mix. Some examples…

1. Exclusions

Whenever I promote a product or opt-in, a high priority is excluding those who already signed up. As a result, I exclude every possible audience I can that represents those current customers.

Lead form custom audiences only last up to 90 days. Website custom audiences last 180 days. Even if both covered everyone within those time periods (they won’t), they create holes after that window expires.

While a custom audience based on your customer list may not have a 100% match rate, the nice thing is that there is no expiration date on the audience. Someone who signed up two years ago could still be on the list.

2. Up-Sell

Similar to #1, but for the purpose of targeting. Maybe I want to target everyone who signed up for Facebook Pixel Basics to promote the Facebook Pixel Masterclass. I could do this by targeting the website custom audience and customer file custom audience of those who signed up for the free series.

Of course, I’d also exclude those who signed up for the paid training (like I did in #1).

3. Full List

Sometimes, I’ll promote blog posts or free opt-ins to those who have engaged with me in some way. I won’t focus on the most engaged so as to have some volume.

Here’s an example…

I’m targeting people in a LOT of ways here in an effort to reach all of my most engaged readers. I included website custom audiences, lead form custom audiences, and customer file custom audiences in an attempt to generate the most volume of potential quality visitors.

Your Turn

How are you using Facebook custom audiences based on your customer list?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Create a Facebook Custom Audience Based on Your Customer List appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook has a variety of targeting options. Knowing which to choose for specific scenarios can be confusing.

In advertising, a specific product or service may only be relevant to owners of certain devices. For instance, a Facebook ad for an iPad case might not be useful if shown to a target customer who doesn’t own that device (unless of course they are looking for a gift for an iPad-owning friend.) In such cases, an advertiser may want to control whether the ad is only seen by those who use that specific device.

In this article, we’ll cover some tactics for utilizing Facebook’s targeting options to ensure that this happens.

Tactic 1: Targeting Device Usage via Placements

The most explicit option for targeting specific devices is available at the ad set level within Ads Manager, via ad Placements.

Once you have created your campaign and accessed the ad set section, you can select to Edit Placements:

If you scroll down beyond the many options for platform placement (such as Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network), you should see an item called “Show More Options”:

From here, if you hover over the section called “Specific Mobile Devices & Operating Systems,” you should have an option to edit:

A drop-down selector will appear, where you can select certain device groups (such as “Android Devices Only”):

If you select one of these items, an area will appear that allows you to enter specific devices. In the example below, I’ve started typing “Samsung Galaxy s10,” and options populate that can be selected:

You can select multiple options in this list of devices where you would like to have Facebook place the ad:

Of course, some specific devices may not be available in this list.

Excluding Devices

Just as we can target devices, we can also exclude specific devices. Immediately below the option to include devices, there is an area where you can choose specific devices to exclude.

In this example, I’ve let Facebook know that I need the ad to appear for all Android Smartphones and Tablets, except for these specific devices:

Other Device Options

If you select for an ad to appear on a specific device category (such as Android devices), you also have the option to define the range of operating systems used for the devices. This may be appropriate, for example, if you are advertising a certain type of software only compatible for users with a certain operating system version on their device:

Note that you can also choose to only have the ad appear when a user is connected to Wi-Fi. This could be appropriate if you are linking to a website requiring a faster loading speed for an optimal experience.

General Device Placement Considerations

Two things to note on using these device placement options:

1) You can still adjust your platform placements. This means that you can select to only have the ad appear on Facebook News Feed for a specific device, or only on Instagram Stories for a specific device, etc.

2) As far as I’m aware, you cannot target specific Android Devices along with specific iOS devices in the same ad set. To do this, you would need to generate separate ad sets, each with their own devices selected.

Option 2: Targeting General Device Owners via Behavior Targeting

There may be a scenario where you want to target people who at least own a specific device, regardless of whether they are using the specific device in the moment they are seeing the ad.

Facebook has a targeting category available that can be used in this way for some device owners. This option is available under the “Detailed Targeting” section within the ad set options.

For example, if we begin typing “Samsung” into this area, we can see some options for “Owns” appear:

Note here that the option for S10 that we utilized for specific placement in an earlier example is not explicitly available from the “Owns” options. Instead, we simply have “Owns: Galaxy S9+.” However, Facebook does make occasional updates to the available targeting options. It’s worthwhile to regularly verify current options, if this is a feature you commonly use.

You can also access these targeting groups via the “Browse” option, in addition to typing the keywords into the text field:

Option 3: Targeting by Device Interest

If you scroll down the list of options that populate when you enter a keyword, you may notice some other options that appear, which are not related to device ownership:

Notice how Facebook refers to this as an “Interest,” not as a “Behavior.” We can see from the description that this is not necessarily someone who owns a Samsung Galaxy device. Instead, they’ve simply liked pages or interacted with content related to the topic.

Comparing Interests with Ownership Behavior

It can be important to differentiate between audiences who are considered “Interested” in a device from those who supposedly “Own” the device.

To test this, you can create audiences that reflect ownership and audiences that reflect interest. Then, you can compare the two using the Audience Overlap feature.

To do this, we’ll first access the Audiences section of Ads Manager, available from the drop-down menu at the top left of Business Manager or the main Ads Manager interface:

From here, you can create saved audiences, and compare their overlap. For this test, I’ll create an audience of people who own the Samsung Galaxy S6. I’ll also create an audience of people who are considered interested in the Samsung Galaxy S6:

Audience 1: Galaxy S6 Ownership

Audience 2: Galaxy S6 Interest:

Now that we have created both audiences, we can select both, and choose to Show Audience Overlap:

The overlap, which is our comparison metric for these two audiences, will then appear:

This example shows that many more people are classified as owners of Galaxy S6 devices than those who have expressed interest (or liked pages) related to the S6. Very few of the owners are considered interested in the device. This is perhaps not surprising because they already have the device, but it’s great to know that we can analyze interest audiences in this way directly with these data.

Device Targeting Recap

Here’s what we covered:

1) In many cases, we can tell Facebook the specific devices (or device categories) where we want to show our ads. We can also tell Facebook where we would like to not show our ads. This is the most direct option for controlling placement for those people who are actively using a specific device in the moment that they are shown an ad.

2) We can also target device owners. This allows us to potentially reach someone who owns a specific device, even though they may be seeing our ad while using a different device (such as on a workplace desktop computer).

3) Facebook also provides the option to target people who are interested in specific devices, regardless of the device they may or may not already own or use. In many cases, interest audiences may be quite different from ownership audiences. Luckily, Facebook has tools available via Audience Overlap that allow us to compare specific device ownership vs. interest.

Comparing and overlapping audiences is one of my favorite topics of Facebook advertising. To dig deeper, check out this article about comparing Facebook and Instagram audience sizes.

Your Turn

For what sort of campaigns might you utilize device targeting? Do you simply ignore device targeting, and let Facebook run your ads across all potential devices?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post How to Target Specific Mobile Devices on Facebook and Instagram appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Last Thursday, I spoke at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego for the sixth straight year. While it’s a big event, there are 10 competing sessions happening at any given time. To help drive people to my session, I ran Facebook ads.

In this post, I’ll outline:

1. What I Did
2. How I Did It
3. The Results I Saw

Let’s dive in!

My Ad

I created a campaign that began the Monday prior to my session, giving me a little more than three days of promotion (I spoke on Thursday morning). I focused my targeting on people in the area (more on that in a minute), and since the event didn’t technically start until Wednesday, I couldn’t really start the campaign any sooner.

Here’s the ad that I created (go ahead and click it to play)…

If you’re familiar with my advertising, this is rather standard for me. Not that I’ve created ads that look just like this, but it’s very simple and doesn’t require a design team. I like to be able to act on inspiration and immediately hit publish.

The goal here was to…

1. Get the attention of those attending SMMW
2. Create some mystery around my presentation
3. Show the value they can expect to get

How I Did It: Objective and Optimization

My goal was to reach the most people attending Social Media Marketing World as possible. To do this, I would want to combine geotargeting (inclusion and exclusion) and interests to focus as much on my potential audience as possible.

Since the audience would be small, I didn’t want Facebook to optimize for an action. As a result, I used the Reach objective…

…and I optimized for Reach. This means that Facebook will show my ad to as many people within the targeted audience (more on that in a second) as possible.

Since Reach optimization also includes a handy Frequency Capping feature, I capped frequency at three times per day.

Note that I would consider this to be a pretty high frequency normally. But in this case, I’m reaching people for a very limited amount of time and making sure that I get their attention.

I also chose to set a manual bid cap of $200 per 1,000 impressions.

Once again, this is not normal, and I would not recommend this under normal conditions. However, I’m willing, in this case, to spend more to make sure I reach my audience.

How I Did It: Targeting

My goal was to reach as many people at the conference, located at the San Diego Convention Center, as possible. Inspired by a blog post written by Trey Edwards, I chose a geographic microtargeting approach.

This involved the following:

1. 1 mile radius around the primary location
2. Multiple 1 mile radii exclusion zones

It looks like this…

It may look a bit messy, but the goal was to reach only those in the San Diego Convention Center. By excluding the fringes of the circle, I was able to do that.

I found that the audience was still larger than I wanted. In response, I layered on the Social Media Examiner interest.

This brought me down to a potential audience size of 6,500 people.

How I Did It: Creative and Placements

I had a bit of a dilemma when it came to placements. Typically, you have to be very careful about the placements you use when utilizing frequency capping. You don’t want to waste your one impression per day (if that’s where you cap) on an ineffective placement.

But here, I was using a very aggressive frequency capping number of three times per day. I also wanted to be sure to reach people where they were. So, while I did remove some placements (Marketplace, Audience Network, Messenger Inbox), I kept the rest.

Since the video I created wasn’t ideal for all placements, I made use of Facebook’s Custom Creative feature and customized the video by placement.

I would create four versions of the video to fit recommendations for each of the placements.

The Results

We can throw the results into a couple of buckets:

1. Facebook Metrics
2. Real World: Did it move people to attend?

I spent $111.76 to show the ad to 2,559 people a total of 3,821 times (frequency of 1.49) during a short, three-day window.

Impressions broke down by day like this:

• Monday: 722 (18.9%)
• Tuesday: 1,151 (30.1%)
• Wednesday: 1,421 (37.2%)
• Thursday: 527 (13.8%)

My session was at 10:30am on Thursday.

There were 3,172 video plays, 226 which were at 100%. The ad also received…

1. Comments from 13 unique people
2. 66 post reactions
3. 926 post engagements

At the start of my session, I asked the crowd if they saw my ad. Of the 600 or so in the room, a good number (10-20%?) indicated that they did. That’s not scientific, of course, especially since not everyone will respond.

Overall, I’d consider it a success. For a spend of about $100, I’m confident that this ad helped me accomplish my goal of driving more people to my speaking session.

Your Turn

What do you think about this approach? What have you done in similar situations to promote attendance to an event?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How I Promoted My SMMW Speaking Session appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook advertisers have a deep toolbox available to help reach their ideal audience. One underutilized and underappreciated group they can target is their referral traffic.

How much of your traffic comes from Google? From Instagram? From somewhere else? Are the behaviors, needs, and expectations of these people different from your typical visitor?

Knowing the referral source could allow you to create advertising that caters specifically to their needs.

I have admittedly long taken for granted that not everyone has the ability to create referral Custom Audiences. I’ve been able to do this for years. It’s not because I have access to any Facebook features that others do not. It’s simply due to how my pixel is set up.

My pixel collects parameters along with the standard PageView event. These parameters allow Facebook to collect things like referrer, language, post category, post tags, and more related to the visit.

I have a third party tool that does this for me. While I’ll provide details on that, you don’t necessarily need to use a third party tool to accomplish this. I’ll also provide the manual solution for everyone else to create the custom parameters that will help you generate referral Custom Audiences.

Custom Parameters: Test

You may already be adding parameters to your pixel for certain events, like purchases. In that case, you may include details like product ID and price. But we can do the same for the base PageView event.

In order to create Custom Audiences based on referral source (and other information mentioned above), we need to collect parameters for all visits with our pixel. In a moment, I’ll get to how you set this up. But first, let’s test to see if you have this set up already.

If you use a plugin that injects your pixel code, you may have a setting like I do to control whether your visits as an administrator get tracked.

For this test, you may either want to turn this off or simply log out first. Then, do the following…

1. Install the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome plugin (it’s free).

2. Go to Google.

3. Type in a search that would bring up results to a blog post or page on your website. Be as specific as possible to make sure you get the results you want.

4. Click the link in the Google Search results that redirect you to that page on your website. You will now be referral traffic from Google.

5. While on that page of your website, click the Pixel Helper icon.

Here’s what my results look like:

I have a section for AdvancedEvents. That’s where my parameter info is. I click to expand and the following details are revealed…

As you can see, the following parameters were collected:

1. Login Status
2. Post Tag
3. Post Category
4. Language
5. Post Type
6. Object Type
7. User Agent
8. Object ID
9. Referrer

Note that there may be others that my pixel collects, but these are the items that were relevant in this case. If I went directly to my home page without a referral from Google (or somewhere else), I wouldn’t see parameters for Post Tag, Post Category, or Referral.

Keep in mind that you may still have Custom Parameters, but organized differently. My plugin organizes them under AdvancedEvents, but it may appear differently for you.

Add Custom Parameters: Pixel Caffeine

The reason I’ve long added these parameters is that I use the free Pixel Caffeine WordPress plugin (not an affiliate link).

[SIDE NOTE: I don’t use affiliate links. I get nothing from Pixel Caffeine for referring them.]

Within my Pixel Caffeine general settings, I have all of the Advanced Tracking checked…

Add Parameters to PageView Event: Manually

Of course, I realize not everyone uses Pixel Caffeine. In fact, it occurred to me during research for this post that most websites don’t collect parameters on every page view. As a test, I went to several websites (including as a Google referral), and I couldn’t find a single one that tracked this information.

I reached out to an engineer at Pixel Caffeine to find out how someone would do this manually. They were very kind to provide the info.

When you go through the manual pixel setup process, Facebook provides the base pixel code that you need to paste before the closing HEAD tag in the template of your website.

If you paste this base pixel code manually into your template or into either a plugin or Google Tag Manager, you should be able to do this.

We need to inject some additional code after ‘PageView’ and before the closing SCRIPT.

As a result, Facebook should then track the referrer for every page view of your website.

Note that I haven’t tested this myself, but I’ve been assured it will work. Please report back.

Create Website Custom Audience

Once you start collecting this information, you should be able to create Website Custom Audiences for these relevant groups. Note that it may take a day or two to show up.

When creating a Website Custom Audience, you should see an option for “From Your Events.” Under it, select the “PageView” event.

Next, click “Refine by” and then “URL/Parameter.”

Click the drop-down where “URL” appears. You will now see relevant parameter options that you are tracking. Select “referrer.”

If you want to create an audience of all referral traffic from Google, I’d select “Contains” and enter in “google.com” below it.

I’d avoid containing traffic that only includes “google” as it’s possible that this will pull in traffic that includes Google in a URL or UTM parameter. In those cases, it’s not guaranteed to always be referral traffic from Google.

After doing this, of course, it occurred to me that the domain is different depending on the country. You may also want to include other variations of the Google domain, like google.co.uk. Or, include far more variations at once by using google.co.

You may not want to create Custom Audiences of referral traffic from Google. Maybe it’s from Pinterest. It’s the same process. Simply create your audience based on the Pinterest domain instead.

The duration you use for this Website Custom Audience is up to you. Keep in mind the volume of referral traffic that you get when setting this.

Alternate Method: Facebook Analytics

Thanks to Yan Yanko for alerting me of an alternative. If you are using Facebook Analytics, you can also create a filter for referral traffic. In fact, you should be able to create a filter for many of the things that would otherwise be covered with parameters. You could then create a Custom Audience from that.

At the top of Facebook Analytics, click the “Add Filter” button…

Then click “Create new filter” > “had matching web parameters” > “Referral Domain” > “contains” > “google.”

Then, at the top right click the “…” and select “Save Filter.”

After saving the filter, go back to the same menu at the top right and select “Create Custom Audience.”

I assumed that this would only work if you had the necessary parameters set up with your pixel, but Yan assures me it’s a workaround that works.

Other web parameters I see when creating filters in Facebook Analytics:

• Current Domain
• Current URL
• Referral Domain
• Referral URL
• Session Exit URL
• Session Landing URL
• Session Referrer Domain
• Session Referrer URL
• Session Traffic Source
• Session Traffic Source by Search Engine
• Session Traffic Source by Social Network

There are also several UTM-related filters. I had assumed these would only appear and work if you were using these parameters. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

Try it and report back!

Target Referral Traffic

Now that you’ve created the Website Custom Audience of referral traffic, you can target these people!

Within the ad set, enter the name of the audience you just created…

You may want to use the Worldwide region, but it’s up to you at this point. Only you know what kind of volume you get from these referrals.

Is there something specific that people search for when they come to your website as a result of a referral? If so, can you then serve them an ad related to this need?

Your Turn

I hope this guide helps you set up the ability to target referral traffic with Facebook ads. Have you done this before? What results do you see?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Target Referral Traffic with Facebook Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Advertisers are split into three primary camps when it comes to geo-targeting and Facebook ad spend by country:

1. Worldwide: Just target everyone on the planet in the same ad set
2. Country Clustering: Throw your primary countries that work best into the same ad set
3. Segmentation: Create a separate ad set for each country or similar groups of countries

There are additional variations and areas of gray, but these are the primary approaches.

Let me first say that there is a time and place for each of these things. For example, I will use Worldwide targeting on occasion — but I do so selectively. I’ll use it when reaching a very warm (and small) group of highly engaged people.

But there are many times when you should strongly consider approaches 2 and 3. However, you can’t simply guess which countries to use. It needs to be intelligently based on your customer data.

Let’s take a quick step back and then plow through…

Why Separate Ad Spend by Country?

So, why should we consider separating ad spend by country in the first place? There are three primary reasons…

1. Similar audience optimization. Facebook’s optimization is quirky. It’s complicated and mysterious. But what Facebook does, essentially, is reach people most likely to perform your desired action within the audience you’re targeting.

How they do that is where the mysterious part comes. But the thought is that it helps to group audiences of similar people to assist Facebook’s optimization. This isn’t something I buy into strongly, but it is one of the strategic lines of thought.

To that point, it would help to have people grouped by location. Not only might these people be more similar due to geography, but Facebook’s optimization and delivery can remain more consistent in terms of timing due to time zones.

Another, less obvious “similar” grouping is CPM. If we have countries with drastically different CPMs in the same ad set, Facebook is bound to focus primarily on the low CPM countries. We’ll talk about how I handle that specific problem near the end of this post.

2. Reach those likely to buy. If you’re a local business and you can’t service those outside of your area or country, there’s no reason to target globally. But even if you can have customers anywhere, there’s reason to limit the countries you reach.

I’ve personally seen that I may get a high level of engagement in certain countries, but that I NEVER get a paying customer from those locations. Or the ratio is so small that it’s not worth spending on people there.

As a result, I’ll often run either one ad set with all of my “primary” customer countries in it or create separate ad sets for each country.

3. Distribution control. My paying customers dating back to the beginning of 2017 are from 90 different countries. It’s pretty crazy! However, the percentage of customers from each country is a good starting point for determining how much I should spend on that group.

For example: Customers from the United States make up 52% of my revenue dating back to the beginning of 2017. The other countries represented most are the United Kingdom (8%), Australia (8%), and Canada (5%). Every other country represents fewer than 2% of my revenue.

If I were to group my top four countries in the same ad set, how will Facebook distribute my budget? For reasons I am about to discuss below, it’s quite likely that users within the United States will not account for half of my budget.

So, let’s say that I want to spend $100 per day targeting only these four countries. I’d then create a separate ad set for each country with the following budgets:

• United States: $71
• United Kingdom: $11
• Australia: $11
• Canada: $7

(NOTE: I’m not using $52 for the United States because it actually makes up 71% of my “primary country” revenue).

Let’s talk further about why optimization forces us to do this…

How Optimization Creates a Problem

Facebook’s primary goal, by default, is to get me the most actions (conversions, clicks, etc.) for the lowest price. If I am driving traffic to a blog post or building my email list with a lead magnet, this definition creates a problem.

You see, clicking a link or providing an email address aren’t revenue. I know, they can lead to revenue, but by themselves, they are not revenue equivalent. Proof of that can be found when targeting worldwide.

Some countries are MUCH cheaper to reach than others. The most expensive, of course, tend to be my primary countries. The main reason for this is the competition within those countries.

While I may not get revenue from certain countries, I may get clicks, engagement, and even registrations. In fact, I may get far more clicks, engagement, and registrations from third world countries. This is due first because of the low cost to reach these people. It can also be attributed to bots and low-quality engagement.

The problem is that if you optimize for clicks, traffic, or leads, Facebook doesn’t care whether or not these people lead to revenue. They are cheap to reach. They will give you a ton of “results.” Those results just aren’t likely to lead to much.

But Which Countries?

This is the difficult part. Most advertisers are quick to list the same four countries (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada) as being “high quality” for business. But they aren’t the only countries that can lead to revenue.

As I mentioned earlier, I have a list of 90 countries that have led to revenue in less than two years! Of course, most of these 90 represent a very small piece of the total pie. But should they be ignored?

First, be careful about assumptions. India gets a reputation for low-quality traffic. That said, I have 64 paying customers since the start of 2017 from India. That’s not nothing (double negatives are fun!).

Still, India is a country to be careful about because it is so cheap to reach users there. So you shouldn’t, for example, have an ad set that includes the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and India — at least, for the purpose of leads or traffic. If you do, Facebook will send the bulk of your impressions to India (at least, in theory).

I’ll talk more about how exactly I handle this in a minute…

Considerations Based on Audience Size and Budget

This is all great, but let’s not get crazy. If you have a $5 per day budget, there’s very little reason to micromanage this. And in all likelihood, you won’t need a separate ad set for a single, small country.

For example, I have 18 paying customers out of Norway, making up .5% of my revenue. While there are 3.6 Million Facebook users in Norway, only a small percentage of them would care about my products. According to Google Analytics, only about 5,000 Norwegians have visited my site since the start of 2017.

I’m not going to spend .5% of my budget for a campaign to create a single ad set for Norway. Instead, I’ll add similar (at least in impact) countries to create an audience large enough to spend more.

Once again, we’ll look at how I handle this in a moment…

Find Customers and Revenue by Country

Okay, so the first thing you need to do is find out how many paying customers you have from each country. I use Infusionsoft, and I’m able to create a report of my customers, including a column for country and revenue.

Here’s how the top 24 break out in terms of total customers and percentage of total revenue:

1. United States – 2,185 (51.6%)
2. United Kingdom – 396 (8.3%)
3. Australia – 357 (8.0%)
4. Canada – 255 (5.0%)
5. Netherlands – 65 (1.9%)
6. Germany – 73 (1.4%)
7. Denmark – 64 (1.3%)
8. New Zealand – 56 (1.3%)
9. Belgium – 49 (1.1%)
10. Singapore – 52 (1.1%)
11. Italy – 54 (1.0%)
12. Israel – 42 (1.0%)
13. India – 64 (0.9%)
14. Thailand – 40 (0.9%)
15. Malaysia – 33 (0.8%)
16. Spain – 36 (0.8%)
17. Mexico – 25 (0.7%)
18. Ireland – 42 (0.7%)
19. France – 31 (0.6%)
20. Brazil – 31 (0.6%)
21. Sweden – 24 (0.6%)
22. Norway – 18 (0.5%)
23. South Africa – 26 (0.5%)
24. Greece – 25 (0.5%)

I cut this off at 24 only because every other country accounted for less than .5% of my revenue. It’s an arbitrary cutoff, but you have to start somewhere.

Apply What You Learned by Ad Set

I’ll use a campaign for my free webinar as an example of how I’m splitting up my budget by campaign.

I’m spending $53 per day (random, I know) on this particular campaign. First, I created a separate ad set for each of my “tier 1” countries:

• United States: $30
• United Kingdom: $5
• Australia: $5
• Canada: $3

Then, I created an ad set for my next five “tier 2” countries and assigned a daily budget of $4 (applying the ratio of revenue for those countries).

Finally, I included all of the remaining 15 “tier 3” countries and assigned a daily budget of $6.

PROBLEM ALERT! Those final 15 countries in “tier 3” will not distribute evenly. Why? Some (India and Malaysia, for example) will have a much lower CPM than a handful of others (notably: Singapore, France, Sweden, and Norway). The lower CPM means the cost per conversion will likely be drastically different between these countries. As a result, Facebook is unlikely to show ads to the high CPM countries since you’ll get far more results from the others.

What do we do? I split tier 3 into two groups: High CPM and Low CPM and split the budget evenly.

Note, we could have done some things differently if I wanted to micromanage or spend more money. With a higher budget, I could have looked to create individual ad sets by country for my top 24 countries. I may have even gone beyond the top 24.

But I like to stay sane and limit micromanagement when possible. There are times when I may only target my top four countries. In this case, I’ve expanded my spending, but I’ve made sure that I’m spending an amount that is in line with the likelihood for return revenue.

Your Turn

How do you go about handling this? Do you create separate ad sets for each country? Do you group countries together in the same ad set? And how do you determine your budgets?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Determine Facebook Ad Spend by Country appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook’s removal of Partner Category targeting options has been a topic for some months now. However, Facebook recently sent out an email to advertisers, warning them that they may have campaigns using these now-defunct targeting options. Here’s the email:

If you’re left wondering what to do with these changes, read on.

What is Partner Category Targeting?

Partner Categories are simply targeting groups that Facebook had previously made available based on partnerships with third-party data providers. This type of data sharing is common practice in digital advertising realms, but following various challenges (i.e. Cambridge Analytica news stories), Facebook has removed these targeting options.

After a somewhat murky period following the brief Facebook announcement that Partner Categories were being removed, Facebook updated their Partner Category help article with a phased schedule for the changes:

As noted in Facebook’s recent email to advertisers, after October 1st these campaigns may be “paused or modified.” The “paused” component of this language is what could cause some advertisers to experience a mild panic.

Which leads us to….

Confusion About Facebook’s Warning Email to Advertisers

There are a number of factors contributing to advertiser confusion.

• Facebook’s email does not make clear whether campaigns with partner category targeting will simply be paused, or if targeting changes will be made automatically.
• It appears the link in Facebook’s warning email does not lead advertisers directly to their campaigns which may be an issue.
  • Instead, this link simply opens Ads Manager, which leaves some doubt about what to do next.
• It also seems that advertisers may have received the email even in cases where they have an unused, paused ad set.
  • This often happens with ad sets created with a daily budget, which advertisers may have paused long in the past and never used again.
• To add to the challenge, it seems there are no warning or error messages that are appearing in the Ads Manager overview.

However, there are actions you can take to make sure your affected campaigns are clear of issues. Read on…

How to Address Ad Set Targeting Issues

To make your ad review easier, I suggest you only look at Active, Scheduled, and In Review ad sets. Previously completed or unused ad sets should not have any issue, unless you plan to activate them again in the future (in which case, you should review those setups as well!).

You can apply a filter in Ads Manager to view the ad sets that meet these conditions. Click the Filter button, then Ad Set Delivery, then select Active, Scheduled, and In Review:

Now you’ve used a filter to populate only the campaigns, ad sets, and ads that meet the applied conditions.

You can review your ad sets and individually inspect the targeting set up for each of these.

To do this, follow these steps:

1) Select the ad set tab. I also suggest making sure you have the Lifetime date range selected, as viewing an overly specific range of time can inadvertently miss relevant, active campaign data:

*The Lifetime date range will reflect the dates in your ad account’s lifetime range, so it will appear different than in my example.

2) Select the ad set you want to review by checking the box to the left of your ad set name.

3) Select the Edit button, which looks like a pencil, to the far right of the screen:

Once you select Edit, you can scroll down to the Detailed Targeting section to review the targeting in place.

We have found that ad sets with partner categories included display a warning message, such as this example:

You can remove problematic targets individually, or simply click the removal button in the warning message to make changes automatically.

Once you have changed the target options, you can click to Review and Publish changes from the main Ads Manager screen.

What Happens Now to Partner Category Targeting?

Partner category targeting as an “easy-add” option is no longer available.

However, some advertisers have reported to have negotiated agreements directly with some of these same data providers. It seems that there may be potential options to establish independently with providers (such as Axciom). That said, we’ve heard from some members of our Power Hitters Club that this process can be somewhat slow.

Your Turn

How are you responding in the wake of the removal of Partner Category targeting? How might these changes affect your strategies?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Partner Categories Removed: What Now? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Location Targeting options can provide powerful methods to reach specific users in certain areas. However, as Facebook has created additional options, advertisers may be confused about how to take complete advantage of these features. Some also may not fully understand how Facebook determines target audience locations.

Note that this post is focused primarily on paid targeting. I’ve also written about restricting your audience using location targeting at the page or post level.

This post dives into what Facebook Location Targeting is and how location is determined. We’ll also cover scenarios when you might want to use the different capabilities offered. Along the way, we’ll take a nerdy detour into segmented audience analysis.

Let’s get to it…

What Is Facebook Location Targeting?

Location Targeting on Facebook simply allows us to tell Facebook the relevant geographic locations where we would like to show our ads.

At the time of this writing, Facebook allows you to target by Country, State (or region, depending on the country), City, Zip/Postal Code, and Business Address. In the United States, you can also target by DMA, which is a media market as defined by Nielsen.

You can also target multiple locations within a single targeting group, though there are limits to how many specific targeting parameters you can build. For example, you can include up to 25 individual countries, or up to 250 individual cities, in a single group.

Facebook also offers very broad targeting capabilities, including the “Worldwide” targeting option. You can also target by broad region, such as Asia, and by Free Trade Area. A list of options is available here. If you are using broader target groups, there are limitations to what Facebook will include. We’ll cover these in more detail later in this article.

How to Use Facebook Location Targeting

There are three phases when you can define locations to target: during the campaign creation process, when creating a saved audience, or when using Audience Insights.

Within each of these phases, there are three primary methods for selecting a location:

1) Type the location:

In this example, as we type “California” the various options populate. Be sure to select the correct geolocation!

2) Perform a “Drop Pin” on a map.

Navigate on the map using the +/- options, and also by dragging the map, to where you’d like to drop a location pin. Once you’ve found your location, click the “Drop Pin” button:

Your mouse pointer will now be highlighted with a “check” mark, which you can drop wherever you’d like on the map:

Once you click to drop the pin, the map will populate with the GPS coordinates for the location you’ve chosen:

You can now click the mileage/kilometer radius to adjust as needed. You can type in the new radius, or slide the bar to the desired location:

3) Bulk Upload Locations

This less common method is useful if you need to target many locations, and you don’t want to have to manually select them. Facebook covers this method here.

How to Exclude Locations

Instead of targeting a location, you can also change the selector to the left of the location name to exclude specific locations from your target:

As an example, you could target people in a State, but exclude a specific city (or cities). Here’s an example targeting people in California, while excluding San Diego:

*Excluding locations has some special considerations, which are covered later in this article.

What Types of Locations are Eligible for Targeting?

Facebook has four options for location targeting:

• Everyone in a location
• People who live in this location
• Recently in this location
• People traveling in this location

Strangely, Facebook’s help articles indicate that Everyone in a location is the default option, though in my own experience I have seen the People who live in this location seems to be the default selection when creating a new audience.

You might wonder how Facebook determines whether a user lives in a location, or is just passing through. Glad you asked!

How Facebook Determines Location of a User

Facebook uses multiple signals to determine (or more realistically, to estimate) a user’s location. The platform may use IP address, mobile device info, a user’s profile data (i.e. city listed in their profile), and sometimes a combination. They can also use info from the locations of the Facebook user’s friends.

Thankfully, Facebook does shed some light on this. The data source they use depends on the location segment (i.e. Traveling In, People who Live In, etc). Location data sources are defined by Facebook as follows:

• Everyone in this location: People whose current city on their Facebook profile is that location, as well as anyone determined to be in that location via mobile device.
• People who live in this location: People whose current city from their Facebook profile is within that location. This is also validated by IP address and their Facebook friends’ stated locations.
• Recently in this location. People whose most recent location is the selected area, as determined only via mobile device. This includes people who live there or who may be traveling there.
• People traveling in this location. People whose most recent location is the selected area, as determined via mobile device, and are greater than 100 miles from their stated home location from their Facebook profiles.

It’s important to remember that Facebook uses multiple signals to determine a user’s location (with the exception of the Recently in this location target, which is based solely on mobile device signals).

You may be surprised to see that the Recently in this location group can include people who live in the location as well as those traveling, based on Facebook’s definition. Some may assume that Recently in this location would exclude People who live in this location, but that’s not the case…

Nerd Break Warning: Audience Location Overlap

If you are interested in slicing, dicing, and diving deep into comparing the different Location segmentation audiences, this section is for you. Feel free to skip ahead to the section “Quirks/Limitations to Consider with Location Targeting” if this is a bit too much detail.

Thinking back to how Facebook defined the data source for the Recently in this location audience, we might assume that this audience would automatically include everyone who is in the People who live in this location audience, at the very least.

Let’s do a quick experiment using the Audience Overlap tool within Facebook’s Ad tools to see if that holds up. We can use it here to better understand Facebook’s definition of the various Location audiences, and how they interact with one another. Sidenote: If you want to dive even deeper into this tool specifically, Jon wrote about it here.

Audience Segmentation Analysis

Access the Audiences tool within Ads Manager:

Choose the option to Create Audience, and select Saved Audience:

Enter the name of your audience. In this example below, I’ve used the very basic “People Who Live in California.”

Change the Location selection from the drop-down menu to choose “People who live in this location,” and type California into the location list:

Click the “Create Audience” button on the bottom right to save this audience.

Now that we have our People who live in this location audience set for California, let’s now set up a Recently in this location audience for California.

Similar to above, we’ll select Create Audience again, and then choose Saved Audience:

As before, we’ll enter the name of our audience. This one I’ve named “People Recently in California.”

We’ll change Location selection drop down to choose “People recently in this location,” and type California into the location list:

Here’s where the fun begins. Click to Create Audience at the bottom right of the audience creation screen.

From our main Audiences screen, we should now see both audiences listed:

The first thing to notice in our example is that the “People Who Live In” audience is larger than the “People Recently In” audience. Based on the way Facebook defines each of these audiences, this result doesn’t seem possible. Let’s investigate further by comparing the Audience Overlap.

Select both audiences by checking the box to their left, then from the Actions drop-down menu choose the Show Audience Overlap:

Here’s what we find:

Here’s how we read this chart: The top shows the base audience. The bottom chart is the Comparison Audiences section, which reports the comparative audience against the base audience. In our example, 9,396,000 of the total people in the “People Recently In California” audience are also in the “People Who Live In California” Audience.

Interpreting Our Audience Overlap Findings

This comparison exercise suggests that a literal interpretation of Facebook’s definition of People Recently In would be incorrect. We should not assume that People Recently In includes all of People Who Live In AND People Traveling In.

When we review the data sources and definitions of the different targeting options (as outlined earlier in this article), this makes sense for several reasons. First, the target for People Recently In is determined using only mobile device info as the signal, whereas the other targeting options use additional signals.

Just as we can create audience groups and compare them in Audience Insights, we can also compare People Recently In with People Traveling In to test our assumption that a literal interpretation of Facebook’s audience definitions would be incorrect:

Here we find that the People Traveling In audience includes people who are not also within the People Recently In audience, confirming our assumption that the Recently In audience does not fully encapsulate the entire audience of Traveling In. I’m not certain whether this is because the two are based on different data sources, or if Facebook is categorizing users as Recently In if they normally live in that location but are currently elsewhere.

It’s helpful to be able to compare different audience segments and their overlap patterns. If you like this sort of thing, check out this write-up from Jon specifically on the use of the Audience Overlap capability.

Quirks/Limitations to Consider with Location Targeting

1) Excluded Cities When Using Broad Targeting

When you target broad locations, such as Country (or Worldwide), certain cities are sometimes not included. Most of the locations subject to this limitation are islands, or in locations where Facebook usage is limited or restricted, such as China.

For a complete list of locations that exclude cities when using broader targeting, check out this Facebook help resource page. The list is located near the bottom of the article.

2) Excluding Locations

If you exclude certain locations from your advertising audience, keep in mind that this only guides Facebook to not run an advertisement in this location. It does not prevent people in those locations from seeing the ad.

We can illustrate with an example: Let’s say we tell Facebook to target people in California, but exclude people in San Diego. Facebook will not show our post as an advertisement (i.e. sponsored post) to people in San Diego. However, there might be someone who lives in Los Angeles, who shares our post. That person in Los Angeles could have a Facebook friend in San Diego. The friend in San Diego may see our post as an organic placement because their friend in Los Angeles shared the post.

If you need to completely restrict people in a location from seeing the post, you have some options. I covered those options here in a more detailed article regarding Restricted Audiences on Facebook.

3) Drop-Pin Radius Limitation

If you elect to use the “drop pin” method, and the radius of the circle crosses into another country, that country is not included in your target audience. Facebook covers other reminders about radius targeting here, near the bottom of the page.

Scenarios When You Might Use Different Location Targeting Options

1) Everyone in this location:

You could use this if you don’t mind whether the people in your target live in the area or are just traveling through. Coffee shops, restaurants, online sales, etc.

2) People who live in a location:

This targeting segment is for something more relevant for people who live their daily lives in an area and may use services or products on a regular basis. Think gym memberships, community centers, etc. It could also be useful for services related to property, such as home repair, plumbing, electrical HVAC, security services, etc.

3) Recently in this location:

I’ll be honest – I have trouble thinking of times when this is more useful vs. the other targeting options. Facebook’s help article suggests this segment for time-sensitive sales. An example might be inviting people back to a location – local visitor bureau ads, perhaps? If you have an idea for a great use of reaching people recently in a location, tell me in the comments!

4) People traveling in a location:

This is naturally suited to tourism offerings. If you have a tourist attraction, event tickets, hotel, rental car company, or any other service of use to a traveler – go for this.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Location targeting was one of the first “fancy” targeting options to become available on Facebook. The potential from this is often overlooked, likely because of newer targeting options based on travel behavior. From our dive into Facebook location targeting, here’s what we covered:

• You can target very broad (as broad as the entire globe) or very specific (down to a one-mile radius of a pin drop) locations.
  • Broad targeting does not always include all cities in a location. There are exceptions.

• You can exclude specific locations from targeting… but this doesn’t mean the users from excluded locations will definitely not see an ad.

• Facebook uses different data sources to determine estimates for the various location segments. These segments are: Everyone, People Who Live in, Recently In, and People Traveling in.
  • The definitions of these estimates are not aligned exactly with the realities of each segment.

• Different situations call for different targeting options.
  • You might have a business justification for wanting to target only users who live in a location, and other times people traveling in a location. Facebook offers options for these.

Your Turn

Do you use different Facebook Location Targeting options? Is there a way you use it that I’ve missed?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Location Targeting: A Detailed Guide appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There is a need to sometimes limit the audience of people who see your Facebook posts (or page!). While it’s counter to the standard “more reach, please” attitude of most Facebook marketers, occasionally there are circumstances that require you to restrict your Facebook audience.

Let’s review three ways to apply audience restrictions on Facebook. We’ll look at an example of Page-Level Restrictions, Post-Level Restrictions, and a special case involving Lead Forms.

Restrict Your Facebook Audience at the Page-Level

To limit the visibility of your entire Facebook page to certain audience groups, you can adjust the page settings by following these steps:

First, access the admin panel for your Facebook page. If you use Business Manager, you may need to log in to your Business Manager account.

Click Settings on the top right of the panel:

Make sure you are on the General tab:

At the Page Level, you have two restriction options. You can limit the audience to specific countries as well as set minimum age restrictions.

For Country Restrictions, you can choose to either set specific countries where the page will be visible or choose regions where you want to hide the page:

For Age Restrictions, you can select a minimum age for users to see the page:

If there is not already a minimum age selected and you select one of the options to set a minimum age, you may see a warning message from Facebook. This warning reminds you that fans who have already liked your page from outside your minimum age will automatically unlike the page, so be careful with this. There is also a message indicating that age-restricted pages cannot be linked to groups:

As the warning message indicates, people outside the specified aged group will not be able to see your page. They’ll simply see a content unavailable notification, like this:

Restrict Your Facebook Audience at the Post-Level

You can limit the audience of specific posts on your page.

Similar to how we approached this with Page-Level targeting above, begin with the General tab of your page’s Settings section.

Beside the option “Audience Optimization for Posts”, click Edit. From here, select to enable the “Audience Optimization for Posts”, if the box is not already checked:

By updating this setting, you will now have an option to add audience restrictions when you create a post.

With this setting enabled, you have two options to add restrictions to a post.

To add restrictions to a post created directly on the page, select the targeting drop down:

*Facebook recently changed the way this looks, so it’s possible your targeting selector may appear different from this screenshot.

Select the option for Restricted Audience:

You can specify your audience restrictions here, and then save the changes:

You may have noticed that alongside the Restricted Audience option, there is an option for News Feed Targeting. If you’re interested in this functionality, check out this write-up from Jon on Facebook Audience Optimization.

To apply post-level audience restrictions for a post created via the Publishing Tools interface, click on the globe icon at the bottom of the post:

Select the option to Limit Audience By Demographics:

From here, you can specify the demographic parameters you’d like to use as limitations for your audience:

Location targeting at the Post-Level offers a few more options than location targeting at the Page-Level. In particular, at the Post-Level, you can target specific countries, states/regions, cities, or postal codes — even congressional districts. But at the Page-Level, you can only restrict the audience by country.

Lead Forms Audience Restrictions

Facebook Lead Forms have their own special options for audience restrictions. These are set during the form creation process. This feature is easy to miss, and you may even find that your Lead Forms already defaulted to a restricted audience in the past.

To set restrictions on Lead Forms, click on the Settings tab during the form creation process:

If you want to change the audience to Open, simply select that option.

As defined by Facebook (when you hover over the small ‘i’ beside the “Sharing” indicator):

By default, only people who are delivered your ad directly will be able to see and submit this form. Select “Open” to let people share this form with friends and allow submissions from people tagged in the comments.

Note that the restriction applies to the Lead Form itself, not to the associated post. This means users outside the specified audience could see the copy and creative of the post, but if they click to open the form, the Lead Form would not appear.

Generally speaking, I recommend changing Lead Forms to Open. Why? You may have users who want to share the form with their friends. If those friends are not in the audience you are using for the Lead Ad associated with the form, they will not be able to see the form even though they can view the post. This can be frustrating to your audience, and damage their perception of your brand or business.

That said, there may be certain scenarios where you only want people in the ad audience to be able to enter the form. Having this option available may be helpful to you.

The Restricted Facebook Audience Roll-Up

• You can restrict the audience on Facebook at the Page Level and at the Post Level.
• Page-Level restrictions apply to all posts that come from the page.
• Post-Level restrictions apply only to individual posts.
• Post-Level restrictions have some added location targeting functionality that Page-Level lack.
• Lead Ads/Lead Forms have their own restricted audience capabilities. They may have defaulted to restricted audiences without your realizing it!

Your Turn

Do you have a need for restricting your audience on Facebook?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Three Ways to Restrict Your Facebook Audience appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Many recent announcements from Facebook concerning targeting are seemingly about the removal of features. Thankfully, this post is not about that! Facebook quietly mentioned some new (and some reinstated/returning) professional targeting options on the Facebook Developers blog.

Facebook’s Developers blog is normally a space for more technical announcements, so the updates mentioned here are sometimes easily missed by advertisers.

On August 9th,  the announcement was made that Facebook has new interest segments to reach professional audiences. It also let us know that some previously removed targeting features will be coming back, although the update implies that rollout will be gradual.

According to the update, we can find the new and reinstated professional targeting options pertaining to the following interest segments:

• Page Admins: Behaviors targeting > Digital activities > Facebook page admins
• Employer Targeting: Demographics > Work > Employers
• Job Title Targeting: Demographics > Work > Job Titles
• School Targeting: Demographics > Education > Schools
• Field of Study Targeting: Demographics > Education > Field of Study

These classifications provide the navigation flow to find the updated targeting segments. To review any of these, you simply set up an audience, choose the Browse option under Detailed Targeting, and follow the outline provided.

The areas of Employer and Job title, in particular, seem to have had various targeting options removed in the past. I imagine that advertisers will be excited to see some of these options returning.

Let’s do a quick review of a few of these…

Page Admins

Within Behaviors -> Digital Activities -> Facebook page admins, we can now see a number of Page Admin targeting segments available.

Though Page Admin targeting was previously available, I do not recall seeing some of these options. If anyone out there in the interwebspace knows otherwise, please let me know in the comments below!

As of today, here are the options that populate:

The option Facebook Page Admins appears to encompass all the other segments.

This general target is very large! Over 350 million people.

To dive deeper into how Facebook might be classifying admin segments, I created an audience made up of all the individual page admin segments.

120 million people is far fewer than the 350 million number we saw for Facebook Page Admins in general. We can compare Audience Overlap between these two audiences to verify that the broader group of “Facebook Page Admins” does in fact encompass the specific segments:

This tells us that over 230 million page admins are not contained within one of the specific segments. I imagine Facebook might start adding more categories in the future.

Other Targeting Segments: Employer, Job Title, School, Field of Study

As far as I’m aware, all of these options were already available. I did a quick spot check of Field of Study below, using “Bio” as the input, to see if these options had become more robust:

The results seem quite limited for now. Similar to the Page Admins segments, I imagine Facebook may start adding more fields in the future.

Your Turn

What new targeting options are you seeing within these segments? Have any new doorways opened for you with this update?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post New and Reinstated Professional Targeting Options on Facebook appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The first shoe drops. In a very brief statement, Facebook announced that they will be shutting down Partner Categories (a way for advertisers to target users based on information provided by third parties) during the next six months.

Let’s take a closer look at what Partner Categories are/were, what this means for advertisers, and why this is happening now…

What Are/Were Partner Categories?

I first wrote about Partner Categories in 2013, so this form of targeting has been around for more than five years now.

The easy explanation for Partner Categories is targeting that Facebook can’t surface itself without the help of data mining companies. These partners have information on people based on their activities away from Facebook that can be used (anonymously, of course) in ad targeting.

An example: A car dealership wants to reach people in the market for a car. Partner Categories can help an advertiser reach those who are not only in the market for a car, but those who currently own a particular model.

Facebook integrates Partner Categories into “Detailed Targeting” within an ad set. Facebook calls out these options when highlighting the source.

Here’s an example…

There are hundreds of these Partner Categories, but only within seven countries.

• Australia: Acxiom, Experian, Greater Data, and Quantium
• Brazil: Experian
• France: Acxiom
• Germany: Acxiom
• Japan: Acxiom and CCC
• United Kingdom: Acxiom, Experian, and Oracle Data Cloud (formerly DLX)
• United States: Acxiom, Epsilon, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud (formerly DLX), TransUnion, and WPP

Examples of Partner Categories targeting include the following:

• Automotive shoppers
• Company size
• Charitable donations
• Credit union member
• Corporate executives
• Retail purchase behavior
• Likely to move
• Business travelers

Here’s how it works…

You perform a certain action away from Facebook. These data mining companies collect this information. They then pass it on to Facebook. Facebook matches it up to your profile. Advertisers can then target you based on that activity.

Why are Partner Categories Being Removed?

It should be easy to read between the lines here. This announcement comes on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook took several actions in response, including shutting down app approval and improving access to privacy controls.

Partner Categories hadn’t become a focus of scrutiny… yet. But it’s a targeting capability that is difficult to describe to non-advertisers. It’s easy to see this stuff as being a little creepy — if not an invasion of privacy.

See this as Facebook getting ahead of a potential problem.

Remember, though, that Partner Categories are not new. The reality is that they’re rather archaic in marketing age. And if you ask 10 advertisers what kind of success they’ve seen with them, I’d bet most will give you less-than-glowing reports.

It’s a targeting option that always sounded potentially amazing. But the results rarely matched up.

While Facebook doesn’t say it, it’s a good assumption that these are being removed due to the creep factor and the expectation that, while it’s not unique to Facebook advertising, this would likely come under scrutiny soon given the current environment.

Combined with the fact that Partner Categories aren’t particularly innovative, new, or effective, it’s probably an easy decision for Facebook to remove these now before they become a new PR problem.

Now What?

First, this primarily impacts targeting in the United States, though some Partner Categories exist in six other countries as well.

Second, you can continue to use this targeting for now. It will be phased out during the next six months.

Note that this not only impacts advertisers accessing this targeting directly through Ads Manager, but also those advertisers who work directly with ad reps to get special Partner Categories access.

Most advertisers didn’t rely heavily on Partner Categories. But there are exceptions. Check for interests and other Facebook categories that are similar or related to the Partner Categories that you were using.

Worst case, this creates a challenge for advertisers to experiment more. Rely less on what you’ve always done and try something different.

Your Turn

Do you use Partner Categories for your Facebook ad targeting? What are your thoughts on this update?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Responds: No More Partner Categories Targeting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

It never seems to stop. Facebook provides a constant stream of updates for advertisers looking to target their ideal customer. The latest addition to the tool box: Facebook Event Custom Audiences.

Facebook Events have been around for years. You’ve been able to create an Event from the Facebook publisher since 2009.

Facebook Events allow marketers to generate buzz and commitment around a virtual or in-person event. Up until now, Facebook ad targeting of those who engage with Events has been limited to targeting or excluding those who responded (in any way) to a specific Event.

The latest changes give advertisers much more power to target and exclude those who engage with their Events.

About Facebook Event Custom Audiences

Facebook Event Custom Audiences are a subset of Engagement Custom Audiences. Engagement Custom Audiences give advertisers multiple ways to target those who engage with their videos, lead forms, pages, canvas, Instagram business profiles, and now Events.

Advertisers can now create simple or complicated audiences of people who have engaged in multiple ways with one event, multiple events, or all events connected to a specific Facebook page.

Create Facebook Event Custom Audiences

Let’s create one of these now…

When creating a Custom Audience, select “Engagement.” When you first get this, you may notice an alert about the new feature.

Now you’ll see an option for “Event.” We’ll want to click on that.

The process to create a Facebook Event Custom Audience will look like this…

After selecting the page you want to be associated with your Events, the default audience will include all users who responded “Going” or “Interested” to any of your Events during the past 180 days.

However, you do have options to further refine this audience…

You could limit your audience only to those who responded “Going” to an Event or “Interested” in an Event as well.

Obviously, the largest audience will be of all who responded “Going” or “Interested.” As soon as you limit to one or the other, the number of people you’ll reach will drop.

Instead of creating an audience of all who responded to any Event, you could isolate those who responded to one or multiple specific Events.

You can also use “include” or “exclude” logic to further isolate those who responded to other Events — whether associated with the current page or another page you control.

Finally, these audiences allow advertisers to isolate those who engaged with their Events during a specific time period — from between the past 1 and 180 days.

As you undoubtedly know by now, this is dynamic. The shorter the time period, the more relevant your advertising may be to the targeted audience. The longer the time period, the larger the audience.

How to Use Facebook Event Custom Audiences

There are several use cases for Facebook Event Custom Audiences…

1. Remind those attending an upcoming Event.

2. Convince those interested in an upcoming Event to commit.

3. Promote a new Event to those who committed to previous Events.

4. Promote products or content related to a particular Event.

This is just scratching the surface, of course. These audiences could be incredibly valuable for any brand that actively utilizes Facebook Events.

Your Turn

Facebook says that this feature is in the process of being rolled out. If you don’t have it yet, you should soon!

Do you have this feature yet? What are ways that you might use it?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Event Custom Audiences: More Targeting Power appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

In the video above, I cover how to sell on Facebook using a simple four step sales funnel:

• Attract A Relevant Audience (Organically and with Ads)
• Earn Trust by Sharing Useful Information
• Collect Email Addresses
• Sell

[Tweet “Attract. Share. Collect. Sell. Profit! Sell on Facebook with this simple sales funnel…”]

The Important Links

In the video above, I address several features and topics that could use a bit more explanation. Relevant links are below!

• 4 Steps to an Effective Facebook Sales Funnel
• How to Sell on Facebook: A Detailed, 9-Step Guide
• How to Build a Facebook Audience From Scratch
• WCA Lookalike: Target Facebook Users Similar to Website Visitors
• The Death of Facebook Interest Targeting: Shifting Budget Priorities
• Website Custom Audiences: Target Visitors with Facebook Ads (Not FBX!)
• How to Use Facebook to Increase Website Traffic
• This is Why You Shouldn’t Build a Business Entirely Within Facebook
• Facebook Website Custom Audiences: Increase Fans, Traffic and Sales
• Facebook Custom Audiences: Target Facebook Ads by Email List
• 14 Facebook Marketing Goals for 2014

Subscribe to My YouTube Channel!

Thank you for watching! If you haven’t already, subscribe to my YouTube channel to stay ahead on all things related to advanced Facebook marketing. I’m publishing a different video every week!

Be sure to watch to the end for the bloopers! Enjoy!

The post How to Sell on Facebook [Video] appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.