We should always test our assumptions. We may think that something works, or maybe it worked at one time, but it’s important to verify that it remains the path forward.

Testing our targeting strategies was the focus of a recent blog post, and I ran a test of my own as an example. This post will highlight the setup and results of the test.

I tested using the following three targeting strategies:

1. Advantage+ Audience without suggestions
2. Detailed Targeting with Advantage Detailed Targeting
3. Lookalike Audiences with Advantage Lookalike

It’s important to understand that the results of this test are not universal. I will address some of the potential contributing factors at the end of this post.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Campaign Basics
• Targeting
• A/B Test Setup
• Surface Level Data
• Conversion Results
• Quality
• Remarketing and Prospecting Distribution
• Potential Contributing Factors
• What it Means

My goal isn’t to convince you that your approach is right or wrong. My hope is that my test inspires you to run a similar one of your own so that you can validate or invalidate your assumptions.

Let’s begin…

Campaign Basics

I created a campaign using the Sales objective.

Within that campaign, I created three ad sets. Each used the following settings…

1. Performance Goal: Maximize conversions with Complete Registration conversion event.

My goal is to get registrations on a lead magnet. The reason I’m using the Sales objective is to get access to Audience Segments data (I’ll address that later).

2. Attribution Setting: 1-day click.

I recommend using a 1-day click attribution setting for most non-purchase events.

3. Budget: $25/day per ad set ($750 per ad set overall)

The total spent on the test was about $2,250.

4. Locations: United States, Canada, and Australia.

I would normally include the United Kingdom, but it is no longer allowed for split testing.

5. Placements: Advantage+ Placements.

6. Ads: 1 static and one using Flexible Ad Format. The Flexible version utilized four different images.

Each ad sent people to a different landing page with a unique form. All three landing pages and forms appear identical to the user. This was done so that I could confirm results in my CRM — not just the number of registrations using each form, but what these people did once they subscribed.

Targeting

Each ad set utilized a different targeting approach.

1. Advantage+ Audience without suggestions.

There isn’t much to show here. This allows the algorithm to do whatever it wants.

2. Detailed Targeting with Advantage Detailed Targeting.

I used Original Audiences and selected the following detailed targeting options:

• Digital Marketing Strategist
• Advertising agency (marketing)
• Jon Loomer Digital (website)
• Digital marketing (marketing)
• Online advertising (marketing)
• Social media marketing (marketing)

Because I’m optimizing for conversions, Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically turned on. I cannot prevent the audience from expanding.

3. Lookalike Audiences with Advantage Lookalike.

I selected lookalike audiences based on the following sources:

• Customer List
• Power Hitters Club – Elite (Active Member)
• All Purchases – JonLoomer.com – 180 Days

Because I’m optimizing for conversions, Advantage Lookalike is automatically turned on and can’t be turned off.

A/B Test Setup

I ran an A/B test of these three ad sets in Experiments. The key metric for finding a winner was Cost Per Result. That “result” was a registration.

I ran the test for 30 days and chose not to have it end early if Meta found a winner.

I’m glad I did it this way because Meta’s confidence in the winner wasn’t particularly high and it changed the projected winner a couple of times. This allowed the test to play out until the end.

Surface Level Data

Before we get to the results, I found this interesting. Beyond testing how these three would perform, I was curious if the cost for delivery would be much different. This, of course, could have an impact on overall performance.

The difference in CPM is minor, but it could be impactful. It was $.68 cheaper to deliver ads using Advantage+ Audience than Lookalikes. The difference in CPM between Advantage+ Audience and Detailed Targeting was $.89.

While this may not seem like much (it’s not), that resulted in the delivery of between 1,500 and 2,000 more impressions when using Advantage+ Audience. It doesn’t mean that a lower CPM will lead to more results, but we should bookmark this metric for later.

Conversion Results

According to Ads Manager, Advantage+ Audience led to 9 more registrations than Detailed Targeting and 36 more than Lookalikes.

The overall costs for these results weren’t great, but that’s also consistent with what I’ve seen when running split tests. Because these tests prevent overlap, delivery will be less efficient. Of course, “good results” weren’t the goal here.

The difference between Advantage+ Audience and Detailed Targeting may not be statistically significant, but the difference between the two and Lookalikes certainly was. The A/B test results support this assumption.

It’s possible that if the test were run again, Detailed Targeting would come out ahead (Meta estimates a 36% chance of that happening). But, it’s very unlikely (under 5%) that Lookalikes would come out on top.

Recall that each ad sent people to a different landing page that utilized a different form. This way, registrants were given a unique tag so that I knew which audience they were in. These landing pages and forms were only used for the test.

Keep in mind that the results in Ads Manager reflect all registrations, and this can include registrations for other lead magnets. This could happen if someone who subscribes to the lead magnet I’m promoting then subscribes to another (I email about other lead magnets in my nurture sequence).

The numbers from my CRM aren’t much different, but they are different.

The disparity is greater when looking at the “true” results. Advantage+ Audience led to 14 more registrations than Detailed Targeting and 43 more than Lookalikes.

At least some of this difference might be related to the slight difference in CPMs. But, keep in mind that Lookalikes had the second lowest CPM of the three targeting strategies, but it performed the worst.

Quality

One of the first arguments I hear from advertisers when it comes to leveraging Advantage+ Audience over old school targeting approaches is that it’s more likely to lead to low-quality results. Was that the case here?

I was prepared to measure this. It’s one of the reasons that I used unique forms for each ad set. It allowed me to get a deeper understanding of whether these registrants did anything else.

I’d consider my funnel atypical when it comes to most businesses who collect registrations. I don’t have an expectation that many of them will buy from me within 30 days. I look at it as more of a long-tail impact, and many of the people who buy from me do so years later.

Because of that, we can’t make any reasonable assessment of registration quality based on sales at this stage. While two purchases came in via Advantage+ Audience and two from Detailed Targeting so far, these are hardly statistically significant. And it could change dramatically in a matter of months or years (and I don’t want to wait until then to publish this post).

But, there is another way to assess quality, and I first applied this when comparing lead quality from instant forms vs. website forms. Have these registrants performed a funnel event by clicking specific links in my emails?

Once again, the count of “quality clicks” is incomplete, but we can make some initial evaluations. Here’s where we stand at this moment…

While Advantage+ Audience led to a higher volume of registrations, it was not at the expense of quality. It generated 17% more quality registrants than Detailed Targeting and 54% more than Lookalikes.

These numbers are imperfect and incomplete since, like I said, a true evaluation of whether or not the registrations were “quality” can’t be made for quite some time. But, it at least shows the difference in engagement. If someone hasn’t engaged with my emails, they are less likely to be an eventual customer.

Remarketing and Prospecting Distribution

I promised I’d get back to this when I explained using the Sales objective at the top. I could have used the Leads objective (or even Engagement), but I chose Sales for one reason: Access to data using Audience Segments.

When running a Sales campaign (Advantage+ Shopping or manual), some advertisers have access to Audience Segments for reporting.

Once you define your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers, you can use breakdowns to see how your budget and results are distributed between remarketing (Engaged Audience and Existing Customers) and prospecting (New Audience).

This is something that isn’t necessarily incredibly meaningful, but I find it interesting. It gives us an idea of how Meta finds the people who are likely to perform our goal event. I used this as the primary way to compare distribution using four different targeting approaches in another test.

Within that test, I saw remarketing take up 25 to 35% of my budget, regardless of the targeting approach. In that case, I ran each ad set concurrently and didn’t run an A/B test. This test could be different since it’s a true A/B test.

Here are the breakdowns…

It’s a lot of numbers, but the distribution between remarketing and prospecting is very similar in all three cases.

• Advantage+ Audience: 9.2% remarketing, 90.8% prospecting
• Detailed Targeting: 10.1% remarketing, 89.9% prospecting
• Lookalikes: 8.7% remarketing, 91.3% prospecting

More remarketing happened with Detailed Targeting, though I wouldn’t consider that statistically significant. The type of remarketing was a bit more significant, however. Advantage+ Audience spent $10 on existing customers, whereas the other two approaches spent around $5 or under. Not a lot, obviously.

Maybe somewhat surprising is that more remarketing registrations came from using Detailed Targeting (25 vs. 16 for Lookalikes and 14 for Advantage+ Audience). While that creates a seemingly significant percentage difference, we’re also dealing with very small sample sizes now that may be impacted by randomness.

My primary takeaway is that distribution to remarketing and prospecting is about the same for all three approaches. My theory regarding why it’s so much less than when I ran my other three tests is that an A/B test splits a finite (and comparatively smaller) remarketing audience into three. There isn’t as much remarketing to go around.

Potential Contributing Factors

It’s important to understand that my results are unique. They are impacted by factors that are unique to my situation and you may see different results.

1. The Detailed Targeting selected.

Some advertisers swear by detailed targeting. Maybe they have certain options that are much more precise and make using them an advantage. Maybe I would have seen different results had I used a different selection of interests and behaviors.

These things are all true. But, you should also remember that no matter what our selections, the audience is expanded when optimizing for conversions. This is why I have my doubts regarding the impact of using specific detailed targeting options.

2. The Lookalike Audiences selected.

The lookalike audiences that I selected are based on sources that are important to my business. They include both prior registrants and paying customers. But, this was also my worst performing ad set. Maybe different lookalike audiences would have changed things.

Once again, I’m not wholly convinced of this because of the fact that lookalike audiences are expanded when optimizing for conversions. I have doubts regarding whether any of my lookalike audiences are that different that the algorithm wouldn’t eventually find itself showing my ads to the same people once expanded.

But, I can’t ignore the possibility. I was surprised that lookalikes performed so much worse than the other two, and the ones I selected could have contributed to those results.

3. Activity and history on my account.

This one is based primarily on theory because Meta isn’t particularly clear about it. We know that if audience suggestions aren’t provided when using Advantage+ Audience, Meta will prioritize conversion history, pixel data, and prior engagement with your ads.

It’s possible that I’m at an advantage because I have extensive history on my account. My website drives more than 100,000 visitors per month. There is a history of about a decade of pixel data.

Yes, this is possible. We just don’t know that for sure. Many advertisers jump into a new account and automatically assume that Advantage+ Audience won’t be effective without that history. Test it before making that assumption.

4. Industry.

It’s entirely possible that how each of these three approaches performs will differ based on the industry. Maybe some industries have detailed targeting that clearly makes a difference. That doesn’t seem to be the case for me, even though there are detailed targeting options that clearly fit my potential customer.

And… once again, we can’t ignore that your detailed targeting inputs will be expanded when optimizing for conversions.

5. Location.

Some of the responses I’ve received from advertisers regarding the viability of Advantage+ Audience refer specifically to their location. They say that Advantage+ Audience does not work where they are. Maybe that’s the case. I can’t say for sure.

6. Randomness.

One of the biggest mistakes that advertisers make is that they fail to account for randomness. Especially when results are close, do not ignore the potential impact of random distribution. The more data we have, the less it becomes a factor.

One of the tests on my list is to compare the results of three ad sets with identical targeting. What will happen? I’m not sure. But, a piece of me is hoping for chaos.

What it Means

As I said at the top, my goal with this test wasn’t to prove anything universally. My primary goal was to validate or invalidate my assumptions. I’ve been using Advantage+ Audience for a while now. I haven’t used detailed targeting or lookalikes for quite some time. But, these results validate that my approach is working for me.

Another goal for publishing these results is to inspire advertisers to create similar tests. Whether you use Advantage+ Audience, detailed targeting, lookalike audiences, or something else, validate or invalidate your assumptions.

A far too common response that I get from advertisers about why they don’t use Advantage+ Audience is something along the lines of, “This will never work for me because…” It’s based on an assumption.

That assumption could be because of an inability to restrict gender and age with Advantage+ Audience. But, as I’ve discussed, you should test that assumption as well — especially when optimizing for purchases.

Bottom line: These results mean that Advantage+ Audience without suggestions can be just as effective as, if not more effective than, detailed targeting and lookalikes. If that’s the case, you can save a lot of time and energy worrying about your targeting.

Test this yourself and report back.

Your Turn

Have you run a similar A/B test of targeting strategies? What did you learn?

Let me know in the comments below!

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

If you’re looking to reach a cold audience of people who are likely to act on your Meta ads, a good place to start is with a lookalike audience.

Sure, you could experiment with interests and behaviors, but that’s always a bit of a guess. The nice thing about lookalike audiences is that they are modeled after people who may be your current customers.

Let’s walk through it…

What Are Lookalike Audiences?

Lookalike audiences first rolled out in 2013 (when this post was originally published). They allow you to reach people who are similar to your existing customers or others who are closely connected to you.

Lookalike audiences are based on a source audience that you’ve already created. Meta’s system builds it using information such as demographics, interests, and behaviors from your source audience to find other people who are most similar to them.

You can control the size and similarity of your lookalike audience by setting a percentage from 1 to 10 to focus or broaden your audience based on the country or region these people are pulled from.

Source Audiences

Meta recommends the source audience have between 1,000 and 5,000 people, though the quality of that audience also matters. The more closely aligned the source audience is to your goals, the more likely the lookalike audience will be valuable.

For example, if you used a very broad and large source audience, there may be very few tight similarities between those people. Meta may struggle to put together a lookalike audience that will be effective for you.

Your source audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country in order to create a lookalike audience off of it in that country.

How to Create Lookalike Audiences

Go to the Audience Manager section of your Business Tools to create a lookalike audience.

At the top left, click the blue “Create Audience” button and select “Lookalike Audience.”

It will look like this…

The first thing you will need to do is select a source. Meta prefers you select a value-based source, but it doesn’t need to be. Examples of value-based sources would be (assuming you pass value with purchase events)…

• Meta pixel
• App
• Product catalog
• Offline events

After selecting the lookalike source, you’ll need to select an event source (either Website or Store).

Then select which event with value you want to select. By default, Purchase is selected (and recommended). But you can select another.

Meta will tell you the highest and lowest values passed as well as the number of unique customers and events during the past 60 days.

Of course, you aren’t required to select an event with value. When selecting your lookalike source, there’s a tab for “Other Sources.”

Unlike the Value-Based lookalike source where you could simply select your pixel and an event, you won’t have that option here. You’ll see a list of custom audiences and page names. You can type the name of an audience into the search bar to find it.

After entering your lookalike source, select your audience location by entering at least one region or country.

Next, you’ll need to select the number of lookalike audiences that you want to create. We’re only going to create one, but you could create up to six at once if you wanted.

Next, you’ll need to select the percentage you want to use. The size of a 1% audience in the United States will always be the top 1% of all Meta app users in the United States who are most similar to your source audience. The size of your source audience won’t impact the size of the lookalike audience.

I’m going to use 1% since this is most relevant and still equals 2.8 Million people in the United States. But if you use smaller countries, you may want to increase this percentage.

The final product looks like this…

Create from Ads Manager

Another (and possibly easier) way to create a lookalike audience is directly from the ad set in Ads Manager.

After selecting a custom audience in the Audiences section, click the little arrow to the right and select “Create Lookalike Audience.”

That custom audience will be automatically selected as your source audience.

Populating and Updating

Meta says it should take between six and 24 hours for your lookalike audience to populate. However, you can still use it for targeting while you wait.

This audience will continue to update every three to seven days, as long as you’re actively targeting it in an ad set. It will stop updating otherwise, though updating will restart as soon as you begin using it again.

Within Audience Manager, there are columns to see when the audience was created and last edited.

Targeting

To target a lookalike audience, enter the name and select it from the Custom Audiences field within the Audience section of your ad set.

Note that your targeting will automatically exclude people in the source audience that your lookalike audience is based on.

You could also choose to exclude a lookalike audience.

Advantage Lookalike

One reason to go with a 1% lookalike audience, regardless of the size, is that you can turn on Advantage Lookalike. This is one of the Advantage Audience Expansion products.

When Advantage Lookalike is turned on, Meta can expand the percentage if it will lead to better results. There are times, based on objective, when you won’t have the option of turning this off.

Should You Target Lookalike Audiences?

Back when lookalike audiences were first launched, they represented a huge advancement in cold targeting. Lookalike audiences simplified the process of finding the ideal group of people to target when prospecting.

Lookalike audiences likely represent a better option than interests and behaviors these days as more interests are removed on a regular basis. But you should still test it.

Of course, completely broad targeting has emerged, as well. Is there an advantage to using lookalike audiences (with or without Advantage Lookalike turned on) instead of removing all targeting filters?

That’s for you to figure out. Like everything, there is no universal rule. Always experiment and find what works for you.

Your Turn

Do you use lookalike audiences? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Meta Ads Lookalike Audiences: A Complete Guide 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.

Meta consolidated all of its automation products under the “Meta Advantage” suite.

So, what does this mean? What’s the difference between Advantage and Advantage+? Should you care?

Let’s discuss…

The Meta Advantage Suite

The Meta Advantage suite is split into two different product lines: Advantage features and Advantage+ products.

Advantage features are focused primarily around targeting and optimization automation. Advantage+ products prioritize automating campaign creation and creative.

The benefits of Meta Advantage (according to Meta):

1. Optimization
2. Personalization
3. Efficiency

Following are the Advantage features:

• Advantage Detailed Targeting
• Advantage Lookalike
• Advantage Custom Audience
• Advantage Campaign Budget

And here is a running list of the Advantage+ products:

• Advantage+ Shopping Campaign
• Advantage+ App Campaign
• Advantage+ Placements
• Advantage+ Creative
• Advantage+ Creative for Catalog
• Advantage+ Catalog Ads
• Advantage+ International Catalog Ads

Let’s take a trip through the Advantage features and Advantage+ products.

Advantage Detailed Targeting

Advertisers can provide detailed targeting based on interests and behaviors to isolate their target audience. This is one of the oldest forms of Meta ads targeting.

Advantage Detailed Targeting gives Meta the ability to expand your Detailed Targeting inputs and reach people beyond that group if it will lead to more or better results.

In the screenshot above, an objective was used that gives advertisers the ability to turn this on and off. But in some cases, Advantage Detailed Targeting is always on and can’t be turned off.

This expansion of your audience will continue to respect location, gender, and age filters as well as exclusions.

While Meta can automatically expand your audience, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your audience will be expanded — or will be significantly. The key here is that it should only be used for your benefit.

Unfortunately, there’s currently no easy way to isolate how often your audience is expanded or how effective it is, beyond creating a split test to compare results when it is on and off.

For more information on Advantage audience expansion products, read this blog post.

Advantage Lookalike

Advantage Lookalike is an audience expansion product that works similarly to Advantage Detailed Targeting, but with a minor difference.

Many advertisers provide Lookalike Audiences for targeting to reach people who are similar to customers and those who engage with their brand. Advantage Lookalike will allow Meta to reach people beyond that group if it will lead to more and better results.

The difference here is that your audience can be expanded by reaching people within a broader lookalike percentage. You may target people who are in the top 1% of those who are similar to your customers, and Meta can expand to reach people in the top 10%.

As is the case with Advantage Detailed Targeting, Meta will continue to respect your location, age, gender, and exclusion settings. And once again, there are times based on optimization when you cannot turn this off.

As is the case with all audience expansion products, it will only be used to your benefit. But unfortunately, there’s no easy way to see how it impacted your results.

Advantage Custom Audience

Advantage Custom Audience works like Advantage Detailed Targeting, but the expansion of your audience only applies to your custom audience.

As is the case with all audience expansion tools, expansion will respect your location, gender, age, and exclusion settings and will only be used to your benefit.

One difference here is that Advantage Custom Audience is always an option. There’s not currently an objective or optimization that requires you to turn it on. This is probably a good thing as there may be examples when your messaging only applies to those in a very specific group.

Advantage Campaign Budget

When you create a new campaign, one of your options is Advantage Campaign Budget.

Here’s how it works…

This applies in cases where you have multiple ad sets. Instead of setting separate budgets for each ad set, you will set an overall budget for the campaign.

Meta will then distribute your campaign budget optimally across ad sets to get you the best results. In other words, more of your budget may be spent on a high-performing ad set and less of your budget may be spent on one that isn’t leading to conversions.

While you can establish ad set spend maximums and minimums, it’s recommended that you don’t.

Each ad set will need to utilize the same optimization and bid strategy. It’s recommended that you use ad sets with similar audience sizes or you may see that most of your budget is spent on the ad set with the larger audience.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

And now the Advantage+ products…

Possibly the most popular among e-commerce advertisers is Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.

This approach offers a streamlined way of creating a Sales campaign that leverages machine learning to get the best results.

Presets are locked in and can’t be changed.

Targeting is broad, based only on location, allowing the algorithm to find your customers.

The advertiser provides custom audiences at the account level that define current customers…

…and can then determine a budget cap for how much of the budget is spent on current customers.

You can also set Audience Controls for Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns to prevent your ads from being shown to certain ages and in restricted locations.

Advantage+ App Campaigns

Advantage+ App Campaigns automate and streamline app install campaigns while using machine learning to deliver the best results.

As is the case with Advantage+ Shopping, the advertiser will have fewer steps and customization options, putting more faith in the algorithm. Meta suggests use this when scaling your app installs is a primary objective.

Advantage+ Placements

Advantage+ Placements was formerly known as Automatic Placements.

When you utilize Advantage+ Placements, Meta will automatically optimize what placements are used and when to get you the most results for your budget.

While advertisers have a long history of manually selecting the placements that they believe are most effective, it is often best practice to turn on Advantage+ Placements. The manual selection of placements may restrict the algorithm and force your ads to be shown in the most competitive placements, driving up your costs.

There are exceptions of course (particularly when optimizing for clicks or ThruPlay), but it usually makes sense to use Advantage+ Placements when optimizing for any type of conversion. The algorithm will optimize in real time based on the performance of each placement to get you the best results.

Advantage+ Creative

Advantage+ Creative allows Meta to automatically adjust your ad creative to get the best results.

Examples of adjustments include:

• Standard Enhancements
• Music
• 3D Animation

Standard Enhancements allow Meta to automatically make the following adjustments to your media:

• Adjusting the image brightness or contrast
• Applying artistic filters
• Varying aspect ratio
• Adding templates to a feed image

And examples of ad-level compositional changes include:

• Adding labels from your Facebook page (likes or ratings)
• Displaying relevant comments below your ad
• Swapping text combinations

When turned on, Advantage+ Creative will automatically create multiple variations of your ad, showing versions that people are most likely to respond to.

There are several possible enhancements that may be made, both to media and ad-level compositional changes. You can get a preview of what these enhancements will look like when creating your ad.

Some advertisers have complained about how some of these enhancements don’t look good or may not be consistent with branding. Make sure you take a look at how these adjustments can be applied before turning them on.

Advantage+ Catalog Ads

Advantage+ Catalog Ads have been around for a long time, but they were previously known as Dynamic Ads.

By providing a catalog of your products that includes details like product name, price, description, and image, Meta can dynamically show the right ad to the right person at the right time.

This is far more efficient for e-commerce brands with hundreds or thousands of products, rather than creating individual ads for each product.

Advantage+ Creative for Catalog

Advantage+ Creative for Catalog applies the similar adjustments to your creative that’s found in the base Advantage+ Creative product.

When turned on, Meta can dynamically make adjustments to the following:

• Format: Either the carousel or collection format will be shown.
• Description variations for carousel ads: If you add catalog details to your description (like price or shipping), Meta will show the version that is most likely to lead to results for each person.
• Media and creative options for collection ads: Meta can create auto-generated videos with products from your catalog.
• Product tags: Meta may automatically add product tags to ads that appear in Instagram Feed and Explore.

Advantage+ International Catalog Ads

Advantage+ International Catalog Ads are a variation of Advantage+ Catalog Ads for cases in which you’ve uploaded country and language feeds to your catalog.

Meta will automatically show people relevant items from your catalog with the correct information for their country or language.

Should You Trust It?

Meta Advantage and Advantage+ are mostly about automation and optimization. You can do things manually or you can put your trust in Meta’s machine learning and automated adjustments.

At the very least, you should experiment with all of these features and products, where relevant. You may have reservations, but you may be surprised by the results.

Meta Advantage has challenged many of our advertising assumptions. There was a time when it was generally considered best practice to manually select your target audience or turn certain placements off, for example. But as Meta improves its systems, we need to adjust.

There are certainly exceptions and times when it may not be best to use these options. But you should still make that determination for yourself on a case-by-case basis.

Your Turn

What do you think about Meta Advantage? Is it a good thing?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post What is Meta Advantage? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I have long warned Facebook advertisers about the potential pitfalls related to types of optimization and broad audience targeting — particularly when used together. So, what I’m about to describe isn’t necessarily a bombshell revelation. But, it’s a situation advertisers will often find themselves in, and the discovery of misleading results can be alarming.

I’d take that a step further. I have serious concerns about how Facebook builds cold targeting audiences and optimizes for top-of-the-funnel events. If you’re not careful, you will embrace the results and keep on spending.

That, to me, is the problem here. An advertiser who doesn’t know better will see the surface-level results and keep writing checks (or charging their card). And Facebook will happily take that money.

In this post, I’m going to explain what I did. Not only the multiple efforts I made to create cold audiences that would work, but how I adjusted optimization to help eliminate misleading, fluff traffic results. Nothing worked.

But, I’ll also share what’s most important: How I was able to detect that these results weren’t nearly as good as what Facebook was reporting. And how you can follow a similar approach.

Let’s go…

My Goal: Drive Website Traffic to My Blog

My website is a very important piece of my marketing puzzle. I rely on a basic funnel, rather than focusing on converting cold traffic directly to a sale. Free blog content answers questions and verifies expertise, leading to registration for some free thing, leading to one of a number of ways a person might buy from me.

My focus is on lifetime value, not immediate value. You may not buy today. You may not buy a year from now. You may not buy ever. But, I hope to gain your trust so that you’ll eventually be a loyal, paying customer — or recommend me to someone who will be.

While the vast majority of my blog traffic is organic (Google and email newsletter, especially), I want to drive more traffic, if I can. I do drive traffic by targeting warm audiences, but I recently decided to put more budget behind sending cold — but relevant — traffic to my blog.

More traffic leads to more registrations for some free thing which leads to more sales.

My Campaigns

During a period of about two weeks, I would spend close to $1,500 to drive traffic to various blog posts on my website by targeting cold audiences. I used five different approaches, running at separate times.

1. Traffic objective optimizing for Landing Page Views, targeting Lookalike Audiences, experimenting with various Cost Caps.

2. Engagement objective with Website conversion location optimizing for 70% scroll (no Cost Cap) while targeting Lookalike Audiences.

3. Engagement objective with Website conversion location optimizing for 70% scroll (no Cost Cap) while targeting Lookalike Audiences layered with interests.

4. Engagement objective with Website conversion location optimizing for 70% scroll (no Cost Cap) while targeting interests only.

5. Engagement objective with Website conversion location optimizing for 2 page views per session while targeting interests only.

I’ve written before about how I use custom events to optimize for conversions while focusing on quality traffic. That’s what I was doing from campaigns two through five.

The Surface Level Results

Overall, Facebook was reporting some results that could have been acceptable — even good — depending on your perspective.

The CTR for all five campaigns combined was about 3%. The Cost Per Click was $.34. The Cost Per Landing Page View was $.36. It even generated 60-second view events at under $1 each.

Overall, these campaigns drove 3,745 Landing Page Views. According to Google Analytics (using URL parameters), these ads sent about 4,200 people. My goal was to send cold traffic to my blog posts, and Facebook surely did that.

Let’s keep those 3,745 LPV and 4,200 users numbers handy.

Establishing a Baseline for Expectations

Before we dig deeper into the results of these campaigns, it’s important to establish some reasonable expectations. We can’t just blindly determine results are good or bad without some research. We can do that based on some of the other data that I have.

First, I run a Reach campaign targeting warm audiences to promote blog posts — just like the blog posts promoted to cold audiences in the campaigns above. When I add columns for Complete Registrations, Purchases, and Searches, I see that this campaign generated the following actions during January:

• Landing Page Views: 318
• Complete Registrations: 75
• Purchases: 1
• Searches: 61

So, the ratio of conversions (137) to Landing Page View (318) is an admittedly high 43-percent. Keep in mind that Ads Manager will report on view-through conversions and conversions that happened as many as seven days later, and this likely contributed to these results from such a warm audience.

I did use URL parameters for this Reach campaign targeting a warm audience, and those results were a bit more tempered. While I don’t include Searches within my Google Analytics Goals (which will certainly bring this number down), the conversion rate (purchases and registrations) in that case was 2.78%.

The conversion rate for that campaign isn’t far off from the overall conversion rate for all traffic to my website. Google Analytics reports a total conversion rate for all traffic of 3.28% during the month of January.

But, let’s also segment that traffic to set expectations. Google Analytics breaks out New Visitors (most likely to be similar to the traffic from my cold audience campaigns) from Returning Visitors.

• New Traffic Conversion Rate: 2.60%
• Returning Traffic Conversion Rate: 5.24%

Now, what the person clicked on to get to the website matters, too. Any conversion that occurs when someone enters the website to view a blog post is incidental. These numbers also include people who went directly to landing pages.

Let’s recap:

1. Warm Audience Reach Campaign Promoting Blog Posts Conversion Rate of 43-percent. This was really high, and it’s likely impacted by how Facebook reports conversions. That benefit will be far greater for warm audiences that may return to my website during a 7-day period.

2. Google Analytics Conversion Rate of 2.78% for Reach Campaign Promoting Blog Posts to Warm Audience. This feels more in line with what we should expect, though a cold audience will obviously be less effective.

3. Overall Website Conversion Rate of 3.28%. Since some traffic goes directly to a landing page, I’d expect conversion rates from blog posts to be lower. These conversions would be incidental.

4. New Traffic Conversion Rate of 2.60%. Once again, we should expect something lower since that rate includes traffic to landing pages.

So, lower than 2.78% and 2.60%. A reasonable expectation would be something between 1.0% and 2.0%.

Remember the earlier number of Landing Page Views (3,745) reported by Facebook and users (4,200) by Google Analytics? Now, let’s do some math to set a baseline.

• 2.0% Conversion Rate: 75 – 84 Conversions
• 1.5% Conversion Rate: 56 – 63 Conversions
• 1.0% Conversion Rate: 37 – 42 Conversions

Even if we drop all the way down to 0.5%, we can expect 19 – 21 conversions. So, on the lowest end, I’m expecting something around 20 conversions. We’re going to set expectations low so that we can be pleasantly surprised if it’s more.

Conversions Reported in Ads Manager

Earlier, I showed you how Ads Manager reported a pretty insane 43% conversion rate for my Reach Campaign targeting a warm audience. For obvious reasons, I should not have expected numbers this high for a cold audience.

Still, I expected somewhere between .5% (worst case scenario) to 2% conversion rate. I’m hoping for at least 20 conversions.

Instead, this…

Of the 3,745 Landing Page Views, not a single visit resulted in a free registration or purchase. All I have to show for it is THREE searches (and they all popped into the same campaign at the same time, meaning it was likely a single user).

Well, this is not 20. But, it’s possible that Facebook is unable to report some of the conversions, for a number of reasons.

Conversions Reported in Google Analytics

Luckily, I also used URL parameters so that I can check results in Google Analytics for all of these campaigns.

You’ll recall that the campaign promoting blog posts to my warm audience resulted in a 2.79% conversion rate according to Google Analytics. Also considering the 2.60% New Traffic conversion rate, we were reasonably expecting something between a 0.5% (on the very low end) and 2.0% conversion rate with these cold traffic campaigns.

According to Google Analytics, these campaigns resulted in nearly 4,200 users (4,188 to be exact), a bounce rate of 98.21%, and… not a single conversion of any kind.

Not a 2.0% conversion rate. Not 1.5%. Not 1.0%. Not 0.5%. Not even 0.1%. No conversions at all.

What is the Problem Here?

The source audiences for my Lookalikes were registrations and purchases. Those source audiences SHOULD be good. Is it how Facebook constructed those audiences? Is it because Facebook now uses Lookalike Expansion?

The interests should also be solid. I made sure to isolate advertisers and digital marketing strategists. Even the Jon Loomer Digital interest. But, could Facebook’s default use of Targeting Expansion be a reason for the conversion campaigns?

Could it be that there were high-quality people in the Lookalikes and interests, but Facebook prefers the low-quality ones? And why would that be? Is it due to the cost to reach those high-quality users just to send traffic?

Could it be the nature of the optimization I used? Even when I optimized for 70% scroll, Facebook found users who would perform the actions I wanted. It’s just that, strangely, none of these people would take an additional step.

It feels so statistically improbable that Facebook could send nearly 4,200 people to my website and not a single one would end up converting. While that may not have been Facebook’s goal (obviously), how is it that Facebook didn’t even luck into sending one of 4,200 people who would decide to convert while they were on my website?.

Is there a reasonable explanation?

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I tend to favor the most obvious and simplest explanation. But I have a hard time explaining this.

Now What?

Consider this a cautionary tale.

I used every guardrail possible. I created Lookalikes based on very high-quality sources. I did things most advertisers wouldn’t, including optimizing for and tracking high-quality traffic custom events. The typical advertiser may not even spot these issues. They’d just keep spending their money.

It makes it seem virtually impossible to send quality traffic that actually has the potential to convert when optimizing for Landing Page Views or a traffic conversion while targeting a cold, broad audience. This, though, is a problem for a couple of reasons.

First, Facebook often recommends optimizing for Link Clicks and Landing Page Views if you can’t get the necessary volume to exit the learning phase when you want conversions. It would seem that this would not be a productive approach.

This is also counterproductive related to building your website custom audiences. By sending these 4,200 people to my website, I am watering down the quality of what is otherwise a very effective group of people to target.

This doesn’t mean that optimizing for Landing Page Views and custom events for traffic as I have will never work. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever target broad audiences.

But, you should be careful. You should be aware of how misleading results can be. Look beyond the Landing Page Views, CTR, CPC, and more.

This is a big reason why I continue having a hard time abandoning my warm audiences, despite Facebook’s insistence that its optimization is amazing and you should go broad. That may work for purchases, but you should be ultra vigilant when it comes to traffic or engagement.

Your Turn

What has been your experience with driving traffic to your website while targeting cold audiences?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Of 4,200 Visitors Driven by a Facebook Ad, How Many Should Convert? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The most important characteristic of a successful Facebook advertiser is the willingness to experiment. It is your experimentation with Facebook ads that will lead to knowledge, solutions, and success.

Instead of asking, “Should I…” related to a basic Facebook ads strategy, know that there is very little black and white (outside of the rules themselves). What works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. If you want to know if something will work, try it!

It’s really easy to get stuck in your ways, too. As someone who has been running my own business with Facebook ads for a decade now, I fully appreciate how quickly you can rely solely on tried and true methods. It’s so easy to end up with a templated approach.

The problem, of course, is that while your approach remains unchanged, the advertising environment is evolving quickly. It’s all so much different today than it even was a year ago. Fail to evolve your strategies, and you can expect to get buried in frustration.

You should experiment often. It’s what keeps me sharp and helps me uncover things that I’d never know without trying something new. I’m working on an experiment right now that I’ll explain in more detail at the bottom of this post.

For now, let’s cover the primary buckets of experimentation opportunities you should be taking with your Facebook advertising…

1. A/B Testing

If you’re trying to figure out whether one thing works better than another, Facebook’s built-in A/B testing tool is the only way to get a true, scientific test without overlap. This is the best way to determine the best strategies based on things like image, video, text, targeting, and more.

A/B testing isn’t something you should be doing for the long term. It’s a short-term test (1-30 days) to help you understand what works best going forward.

You don’t need to use A/B testing in all scenarios. Maybe you’re fine without a true, scientific test and just want to run separate ad sets to different audiences or separate ads with different creative options. All of that is fine. Facebook’s optimization will also help focus on what is working best in those cases.

Here is some additional documentation on A/B testing:

• A/B Tests Types Available on Facebook
• Best Practices for A/B Testing

2. Campaign Budget Optimization

Should you create multiple ad sets with their own, separate budgets, or should you utilize Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)?

If you turn on CBO, Facebook will distribute your budget “optimally” between ad sets to get the most results. So, you could set a $50 daily budget with CBO using two ad sets, and Facebook will move budget between those ad sets based on the results each one generates.

If you don’t use CBO, you would set individual budgets at the ad set level. Here, of course, you are given more control. Maybe you are okay spending more per action for a particular audience. Maybe you don’t trust Facebook’s optimization.

I prefer the control, but I will occasionally experiment with CBO, particularly if the audiences are similar in size.

3. Budgeting

I understand that this is a tough one to test. Either you have the budget available or you don’t.

But keep in mind that volume drives Facebook ad optimization. If you struggle to generate enough volume at $10 per day to exit the learning phase, Facebook may struggle to get you the results that you want. Maybe spending $50 or $100 per day will get that volume, and everything will change.

Or maybe it won’t? Bottom line is that it’s nice to be able to try it and find out.

4. Daily vs. Lifetime

This is one that I can confidently say I am stuck in my ways. I have always used Daily budgeting.

It’s not because I get better results with Daily budgets. It’s just that I feel like I have a far better understanding of what is happening and can easily adjust. Getting great results? Maybe I spend a little more per day. Results are dropping? Maybe I slow it down.

I’ve always felt that Lifetime budget is best in cases where you (or a client) have a rigid budget to work with. You know that you want to spend $500 during the month, and that’s it.

The rumor is that Facebook ad reps recommend Lifetime budgeting. Does it actually work better? If you care, test it out!

5. Dayparting

If you aren’t familiar with Dayparting, it is only available when using Lifetime budgets. It allows you to schedule your ads so that they only run during certain times or on certain days of the week.

A few years back, I was determined to make dayparting work. I researched which specific times of day gave me the best results for a certain objective over a six-month period. Then, I focused only on those times.

The result? Costs actually went up.

Maybe you can get dayparting to work for you. I’ve never heard of anyone who has seen better results by using it. Maybe you want to use it because you need to have staff on hand during certain times. That may be the best argument for it.

6. Small Audiences vs. Large Audiences

If you ever ask Facebook advertisers whether it’s better to use small audiences or large audiences, you’re going to get a very wide range of answers. The best answer: It depends.

Facebook says you should use large audiences (in the millions) to create a large pool for optimization. Some advertisers absolutely swear by using the largest audiences possible. They even say removing any filtering at all and going with an entire region works best.

But, context likely matters. How large is the country? Is the brand well-known? How large is the brand’s built-in audience? Are there repeat customers? How are you optimizing?

I’ve found that optimization with large audiences for top-of-the-funnel actions produces garbage results. Actually, those results are good in the eyes of Facebook, but they aren’t quality results that lead to purchases (read this post about the problems with optimization).

I love micro-targeting my audience for those who have performed a specific action. Remarketing to tiny audiences of people who abandoned cart, too, often works well.

There is a place for large and small audiences. Feel free to experiment with both!

7. Lookalike Audiences vs. Interests and Behaviors

What’s more effective, targeting people based on interests or using Lookalike Audiences? And if you use Lookalike Audiences, what should be the source? And should you use 1% or 10%? Or something else? Should you layer interests on top of Lookalike Audiences and combine them?

So many questions, right? The problem is that there isn’t a universal answer. “It depends” is doing overtime here.

The performance of your interest targeting depends upon the quality of the interests you use. The quality of interests you have available to you often depends upon the industry you’re in.

Lookalike Audiences, too, will vary greatly in performance depending upon the quality of the source audience and how Facebook assembled it. Whether you use 1% or 10% is also greatly impacted by the countries used (and you may not need to debate this one anymore due to Lookalike Expansion).

There is no universal answer here because the factors involved will drastically impact the answer. My primary suggestion is that you explore both interests and Lookalike Audience targeting for top-of-the-funnel, knowing that this is their first exposure to your brand. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

But which interests and Lookalike Audiences should you use? Test, test, and test some more. This is where using the A/B Test option may prove valuable.

8. Country Targeting

If you’re a local brick-and-mortar business, this is easy. You probably only want to reach people within driving distance of your building.

But, if you create virtual products or ship globally, everything changes. Then the question becomes, “Which countries should you target?”

This gets really complicated. The CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) costs vary widely depending on the country. But that’s also at least partially related to the quality and competition within those countries.

Some countries are much more prone to spam, bots, and people who can’t afford your products. Does that mean you shouldn’t target them? Maybe. Maybe not.

If you’ve been in business for a while, I encourage you to research where your paying customers come from. That should at least be a starting point.

Be careful, though. Let’s say that you have paying customers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and India. If you include all five countries in the same ad set, Facebook may dedicate more of your budget to India (particularly if you aren’t selling a product). The reason is that the CPMs are much lower there than in the other four countries.

You may want some control over that. This is where creating multiple ad sets for similarly priced countries may be a good idea.

Have proper perspective here. Targeting globally all of the time using all objectives is probably a bad idea. Refusing to target certain countries may also limit your opportunities. Know the risks and know how to mitigate those risks.

9. All Placements vs. Select Placements

Look, I have a very strong opinion about one Facebook placement in particular. I have seen really bad stuff from Audience Network. It’s where the most click fraud and accidental clicks happen. The Audience Network is often the source of “too-good-to-be-true” results (because they are).

At least in the case of traffic and engagement campaigns. Leave that placement on and be prepared to throw some money away. And hope you catch it before it’s too late.

But, is that a hard-and-fast rule for everyone? Of course not. If you get sales from Audience Network, use it. There are a lot of placements these days. Find what works for you and what doesn’t.

Facebook recommends using “All Placements.” I can see that being fine when optimizing for a purchase. Otherwise, scrutinize your results, do a lot of testing, and figure out what works best for you.

10. Optimization Options

This is one of those areas that provides a wide variety of possibilities.

Should you optimize for conversions? Maybe. If you can get results. You may not have the budget to generate enough results to properly optimize. In that case, you may need to optimize for something else.

Does that mean optimizing for link clicks or Landing Page Views? Or Engagement? Maybe. But be wary of the results you get there (as discussed before).

When I micro-target, I don’t want Facebook to optimize for an event. I want to reach everyone within that tiny audience. In that case, I’ll optimize for Reach (or you could even use Daily Unique Reach).

You have a ton of options. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. The main thing is to understand how optimization works and what Facebook needs to properly optimize. Make sure it fits your goals. Know the potential weaknesses of optimizing for a specific action.

I only started optimizing for Reach because it solved a problem I had. I’ve used it in a way that isn’t even how Facebook intends it (they see it more for broad audience, awareness targeting).

Know how it works. Know what you want to accomplish. Understand the weaknesses. Then test!

11. Bidding Options

If you need a place to start, don’t screw around with Facebook’s bidding options. Just roll with Facebook’s “Lowest Cost” defaults.

But once you’re comfortable, feel free to experiment with Cost Cap, Bid Cap, and Minimum ROAS bidding. They are all ways of manipulating how Facebook bids in the auction, rather than relying on Facebook to do it how they want.

Sometimes, manual bidding just leads to frustration and a lack of delivery. It’s not magical. You can’t mysteriously tell Facebook you want $1 conversions and get $1 conversions. If you under-bid, you just won’t get any results.

Once you understand how it works, though, put bidding on your list of things to experiment with.

12. Attribution Setting

Oh, how attribution has changed…

Attribution, or how Facebook gives credit to an ad for a conversion, has evolved quite a bit over the years. The main thing to know is that the default Attribution Setting is now 7-day click and 1-day view.

This is determined within the ad set.

Not only is this how Facebook will optimize your conversions, but it’s how Facebook will report on them. If you change the Attribution Setting, it will change how Facebook selects your audience. It could also impact how many conversions are reported in your results.

Back in the day, this was no big deal. If you used 1-day click, for example, you could add columns to your reporting to see how many conversions occurred outside of that window. That option is no longer available.

So, now? You can still make the argument that 1-day click is best for opt-ins and low-cost purchases while 7-day click and 1-day view is best for higher-cost purchases. Still, I find I’m reluctant to make that change, fearing a loss of reporting.

It’s absolutely something to test, though!

13. Website vs. On-Facebook Experience

Ever since the iOS 14+ changes related to privacy and tracking, there has been more reason to run ads that keep people on Facebook. It’s understandable. Confidence in results goes way up in those cases.

That doesn’t mean there’s no longer a place for sending traffic to your website. I still do it a ton. It depends partially on your percentage of iOS traffic (mine is low) and appetite for accuracy.

Reasons to keep people on Facebook go up if your iOS traffic is high. Or you have a client with a horrible website experience.

Consider Facebook lead ads, instant experiences, video ads, and Facebook Shops. There are plenty of ways to run your business while keeping people on Facebook.

I still love to use both. Lead ads, for example, have their strengths and weaknesses. You’ll often get more sign-ups because they’re so easy to complete. But the quality of those leads may drop for that same reason.

Don’t throw all of your eggs into one basket, as they say. Experiment with keeping people on Facebook and sending them away.

14. CTAs (or None)

All these years later, and the jury’s still out on whether you should use Facebook CTA buttons with your ads. And if you do, which ones you should use.

Some CTA options may lead to more clicks, but are they the right clicks? Some CTAs may lead to fewer clicks, but people with higher intent.

One way to test this is by using Dynamic Creative.

If you turn it on within the ad set, you can submit multiple CTA options for Facebook to test.

15. Dynamic Ads vs. Manual

It makes a lot of sense for e-commerce businesses with hundreds or thousands of products to use Dynamic Ads to showcase the right ads to the right people while doing minimal work. Create an ad template, provide a product feed, and everything is done for you.

Of course, such ads based on a template may also be less effective on some level, as well. You may get better results by crafting a very specific message based on someone’s activity on your website who is interested in a very specific product.

There is room for both. Try both.

16. Ad Formats

You have options. Single image, collection, instant experience, carousel, video. You can even mix and match, to a point.

When determining which to use, I ask a simple question: What is the benefit of this ad format?

A single image removes options and may make a click away to your website more likely.

A collection or carousel provides your audience with options.

An Instant Experience allows you to tell a story and provide more information within a single ad.

A video will encourage engagement and allow you to communicate with a potential customer in a completely different way, but it may not lead to a click.

Start with the format that is most likely to satisfy your primary goal. From there, feel free to use Facebook’s A/B testing to test what works best. You can also simply create multiple ads, each with different formats, and allow Facebook to optimize.

17. Long Copy vs. Short Copy

It’s long been debated whether long copy or short copy is best. As always, we over-simplify this.

If you take an average of the performance of all ads, you may find out that the highest-performing ads used less copy. That doesn’t mean that you should always use less copy. It just means that, for the average situation, it may be best.

Sometimes, long copy makes more sense. It’s great for the right audience. Use it for people who want to read. Use it to introduce something that people may not know about.

Short copy may be ideal in the case of an audience already knowing about your product or service. They only need to know about the deal.

This is where Dynamic Creative, Multiple Text Options, and Facebook’s A/B testing allow you to test this out.

18. Creative Types

Which image should you use? Should it include a face? Bright colors? Or should you use a video? And how long should the video be?

Oh, goodness. So many questions.

Different images appeal to different people. Know your audience.

Long videos have the benefit of educating your audience. If someone sticks around for the entire video, they are a warm lead. Short videos can get the attention of your audience quickly and get your message across.

They all have a purpose. Test them out by creating multiple ads or by using Dynamic Creative or A/B testing.

Be Mindful of Generating Meaningful Results

Look, the possibilities are endless, as you can see. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the limitless options and features.

Start simple.

Before you completely understand what you’re doing, use defaults. Facebook makes it about as easy as they can to create a campaign that might work without knowing what you’re doing. Just don’t mess with things if you don’t have to.

Also understand the importance of volume. Don’t create a whole bunch of options if you don’t spend the budget or won’t generate the volume to lead to meaningful results.

Experiment. Try new things. But create options within reason. Otherwise, you’ll only succeed at creating a messy campaign that doesn’t really tell you anything.

My Experiment

As I said at the top, I love creating experiments. I just started one last week, and it’s possible you’ve been seeing some of the ads.

The main goal of my experiment is to create ads that both reward my loyal audience and incentivize additional engagement. I’ll do this with micro-targeted audiences. I also want to see how small I can go with these audiences.

Ultimately, I want to figure out what my most engaged — and reachable — audience is. And I want to reward them with exclusive content.

For now, this is built around Reach optimization and a special type of Website Custom Audience. I’ve created audiences based on frequency of page views.

My first ad starts broad, targeting those who have viewed two pages or more of my website during the past 30 days (I eventually move to 180 days). But with each ad, I tighten up the audience. If I stick with frequency, I’ll keep climbing until Facebook no longer delivers the ads.

Of course, how I’m doing this is pretty darn complicated. Since it’s an experiment, I’m also adjusting on the fly as results come in.

How can you participate? Well, reading this blog post is a good start! The more pages of my website you view, the more likely it is you’ll see these ads.

One favor: Engage with the ads and let me know you’re seeing them! I’d love to hear what you think.

Watch Video

Your Turn

What kind of experiments do you like to run with Facebook ads?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Facebook Ads Experimentation Guide 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.

Multiple factors contribute to whether your Facebook advertising campaigns succeed or fail. Copy, imagery, optimization, bidding, placement, and countless other factors all matter. But nothing matters more than targeting.

In order to have this consistent, dependable success, you need to graduate beyond interests, which is best for top-of-the-funnel targeting. For sustained middle and bottom-of-the-funnel results, it’s imperative that you master warm targeting with Facebook Custom Audiences.

Custom Audiences began as a simple concept, launching with the ability to target current customers by email address in 2012. It’s nearly six years later, and advertisers have a cupboard full of ways to target customers and those who engage with them — both on and off of Facebook.

Below is a close-to-complete guide of the ways that you can use Custom Audiences to target warm audiences of people who are ready to act. It’s close-to-complete for a couple of reasons:

1. There are nearly limitless variations you can create based on variables
2. Facebook is constantly adding to these options

But consider this list a starting point. Many of these options are buried, and you’re bound to be exposed to a few for the first time. I encourage you to read through and experiment with the audiences that you can leverage.

Customer File

It’s the granddaddy of Custom Audiences. Originally, this type of audience and “Custom Audiences” were used interchangeably.

With this method, advertisers upload a customer list to Facebook with up to 15 identifiers. Facebook then searches out those same people on the platform. Typically, you can expect anywhere from 30-70% of your list to match up to Facebook users. When you’re done, you can use this to target or exclude users on Facebook.

The primary advantage of creating Customer File Custom Audiences is that those on that list are a customer at some level. They either provided an email address or made a purchase from you. As a result, this will be a valuable list for targeting that can be used for all purposes.

Of course, there are some inherent weaknesses with this method.

First, uploading a customer file results in a one-time, static audience. What that means is that as your customer list updates, your audience doesn’t — at least, it doesn’t without the help of a third party tool. If you don’t update it some way, the audience will be outdated and lose its effectiveness.

Another weakness is that the identifiers that a customer provides to you may not be the same information they provide to Facebook in their profile. Notably, a customer may provide you a different email address than what they publish for their friends. This will make the match rate less successful.

1. Upload, Copy/Paste, or Import

Using this first method, advertisers can provide Facebook with a customer file consisting of up to 15 identifiers by uploading…

…copying and pasting…

…or importing via MailChimp integration.

2. Lifetime Value Lookalikes

The thought here is that you first upload an entire customer list with up to 15 identifiers, as you would above. But you then include a column for Lifetime Value for each customer.

This list wouldn’t be used for targeting, but instead becomes a source so that Facebook can generate a Lookalike Audience of people similar to your most valuable customers. More on Lookalikes at the bottom.

Website Custom Audiences

And now it gets good. Real good.

Website Custom Audiences allow advertisers to create audiences based on actions performed on the pages of their own website. This is thanks to the Facebook pixel, which is a snippet of code added to your website.

The granularity of the audiences you can create depends partly on the amount of traffic as well as your diligence creating detailed pixel events.

What’s nice about WCAs is that they update in real time, and the match-up rate is high. Below is a sampling of the powerful audiences that you can create.

3. All Website Visitors

4. Visitors by Device

5. Visitors by Frequency

6. People Who Visited Specific Web Pages

You can include an entire URL, partial URL, or multiple URLs or keywords. There are a million and one uses for this type of audience.

7. Visitors by Time Spent

Not all website visitors are created equal. Focusing on those who spent the most time — though a smaller audience — can lead to amazing results.

8. From Your Events: Page View

Assuming you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website with events, the applicable events that have fired will appear for you…

The PageView event is one example.

9. From Your Events: Purchases

10. From Your Events: Registrations

11. From Your Events: Adds-to-Cart

12. From Your Events: Searches

13. From Your Events: By Search String Parameter

In the example above, you can create an audience of people who performed any search on your website. But you can also focus on searches by specific keywords.

14. From Your Events: By User Agent Parameter

What operating system and software were people using when they visited your website?

15. From Your Events: By Language Parameter

The language setting on someone’s browser can help you surface content to the right people in the proper language.

16. From Your Events: By Referrer Parameter

17. From Your Events: By UTM Parameter

UTM parameters are tracking codes you can add to the end of links broken down into campaign source, medium, name, term, sq, and content. At minimum, you need to include a source. Here’s an example of such a link…

Homepage

You can create an audience based on any of these UTM parameters…

Using the example link above, we could create the following audience for the “email” medium.

18. From Your Events: By Value Parameter

You can create audiences based on the value of purchases made on your website, assuming you’re using the value parameter with your Facebook pixel event code.

19. From Your Events: By Currency Parameter

20. From Your Events: By Content Name Parameter

21. From Your Events: By Content ID Parameter

22. From Your Events: By Aggregated Value

Earlier, you saw how you could create audiences based on a single purchase. But you can also do so based on all purchases someone made in aggregate.

App Activity

If you have an app (mobile or web) utilizing the Facebook SDK, you can create audiences of people based on their activity within that app. This can be a great opportunity for re-engaging and pushing people further along the funnel.

23. Anyone Who Opened the App

24. Most Active Users

25. Users by Purchase Amount

26. Users by Segment

Segments will be defined by you…

Offline Activity

Back in 2016, Facebook launched Offline Event Sets, allowing advertisers to provide Facebook with offline data that could then help show whether such sales were influenced by your ads. This was extremely valuable for brick and mortar stores, in particular, who struggled to show the impact of their ads.

About a year later, Facebook followed that up with Offline Event Custom Audiences, allowing you to create audiences of those who purchased something offline.

27. People Who Interacted Offline

28. From Your Events

When you send Facebook your offline data, you include a column that indicates the event performed. This can then be used to refine your offline event audience.

Engagement: Video

A great top-of-the-funnel audience is anyone who engaged with a video (or multiple videos) you’ve published. Someone can view your video — with or without sound — and automatically be added to an audience for you to target later.

29. People who watched at least 3 seconds of your video

Clearly, a 3-second view would be the lowest quality but result in the largest audience.

Other options (though all are set up identically otherwise)…

30. People who watched at least 10 seconds of your video

31. People who watched at least 25% of your video

32. People who watched at least 50% of your video

33. People who watched at least 75% of your video

34. People who watched at least 95% of your video

Engagement: Lead Form

Facebook Lead Ads allow advertisers to collect leads (email addresses and other contact info) without sending a user away from Facebook. Thanks to this Engagement Custom Audience, those who engage with the form can be added to one of three different audiences for targeting and exclusion purposes.

Advertisers can create audiences based on the interaction with one, multiple, or all forms you have during a given time period.

35. People who opened your form

This includes everyone who opened the form, whether they submitted it or not.

36. People who opened but didn’t submit your form

37. People who opened and submitted your form

Engagement: Fullscreen Experience

Facebook launched Facebook Canvas in its continued attempts to keep people on Facebook and improve the user experience. Canvas presents an immersive mobile experience for users who can view videos, images, product feeds, text, and more in one view.

For publishers, the one issue with this was losing the traffic and potential targeting power that goes along with sending someone to your website. This was changed with the launch of Fullscreen Experience Custom Audiences. You can create audiences of people who engaged with any Canvas, or one or more specific Canvases.

38. People who opened your canvas

39. People who clicked any links in your canvas

You can provide links within your Canvas, though they don’t need to go to your website. That’s where creating these audiences can be helpful. Think, for example, about a Canvas promoting a product with a button that sends users to an Amazon page.

Engagement: Facebook Page

The Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audience is a sneaky effective audience to target. You may assume that those who visit your website will be more effective than those who interact with you on Facebook, but that is not always the case.

In fact, it makes sense. Interacting with you on your website doesn’t mean they’ll interact with your ad on Facebook. And if someone has engaged with you on Facebook before, they’re likely to do it again.

40. People who engaged with your page

This is the broadest audience of all people who engaged with your page in any manner…

41. People who visited your page

42. People who engaged with any post or ad

This can be particulary effective when looking for an audience to target with your ads…

43. People who clicked any call-to-action button

44. People who sent a message to your page

A small audience, but potentially very valuable…

45. People who saved your page or any post

Engagement: Instagram Business Profile

Is your business on Instagram? If so, you can create an audience of those people who engage with your profile there — in nearly identical ways as with your Facebook page above.

Your Instagram profile will need to be a business profile, and you’ll need to connect it to your Business Manager in order to access this feature.

46. People who engaged with your business on Instagram

47. People who visited your Instagram profile

48. People who engaged with any post or ad

49. People who sent a message to your Instagram profile

50. People who saved any post or ad

Engagement: Event

It’s an old school feature, but many marketers still run Facebook Events. I’m not talking about the pixel events this time, but the posts on Facebook that alert people of an upcoming party or other activity.

Thanks to this Engagement Custom Audience, you can create audiences of people based on their specific activity with any event or specific events.

51. People who responded Going or Interested

52. People who responded Going

53. People who responded Interested

Lookalike Audiences

It may be cheating a little bit to include Lookalike Audiences because these aren’t people who are connected to your business in any way, but this is — at least loosely — part of the Custom Audience family.

Lookalike Audiences allow you to target those who are similar to people who are already connected to or interacting with you. Facebook does this by looking at a source audience (your Facebook Page or a Custom Audience), finding the similarities among those people, and finding a larger group of people who are similar to them.

This is particularly useful when your source audiences are small and you need to start somewhere.

54. Based on a Page

55. Based on a Custom Audience

Your Turn

Any other audiences I missed? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Ads Guide: 55 Custom Audiences to Target People Ready to Act appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of the primary struggles for new advertisers with a small audience is uncovering the most effective groups of people to target. Facebook is providing yet another tool for advertisers with the addition of the value-based Lookalike Audience.

As I type this, Lifetime Value (LTV) Custom Audiences and value-based Lookalike Audiences are available to select advertisers. Help Center pages dedicated to these features (here and here) are evidence that this is more than a test, but a new roll-out.

Let’s take a closer look at what Lifetime Value Custom Audiences and value-based Lookalike Audiences are, how to create them, and how you might use them.

NOTE: I don’t yet have this feature, so the screen grabs I provide below are from Nick Platt and David Herrmann, members of my Power Hitters Club – Elite community.

Lifetime Value (LTV) Custom Audiences

Customer lifetime value is the net profit you’ll earn from a single customer over the lifetime of your relationship.

Your customers aren’t all created equal. Even when uploading a list of customers who purchased a particular product, context is being obscured. Some customers are more valuable than others due to their lifetime value.

Some customers make a single purchase. Some come back again and again and again, ready to give you a credit card. It’s important to provide Facebook with lifetime value to help find other potential customers like them.

We’ll get to the details of how to create this in a bit, but understand that the Lifetime Value Custom Audience isn’t a new audience for you to target. It simply provides another column of data for an audience of your customers that you should already have.

The star of this update is the value-based Lookalike Audience that you can now create based on this.

Value-Based Lookalike Audience

The first step will be to provide Facebook with a lifetime value for all customers within a data Custom Audience. You should not focus only on the most valuable customers, but provide a comprehensive list to help differentiate the most valuable from the least valuable.

You will then be able to create a value-based Lookalike Audience. This allows Facebook to focus on those who provide the most value when finding others across Facebook with similar characteristics.

The end goal is to create a cold audience that is most likely to lead to positive results.

Create LTV Audiences

When creating a Custom Audience, select “Customer File.”

If you have this feature, you’ll then see an option for “Customer file with lifetime value (LTV).”

After selecting that, you’ll get what is similar to the typical process for creating a data Custom Audience off of your customer file.

You’ll notice a couple of differences.

First, you’ll need to “include a column with a range of customer values.”

Second, you’ll see a final step to create a Lookalike Audience. So the entire purpose of this, once again, is to create that Lookalike.

A few tips from Facebook…

1. Use dollar values only. Don’t include ratings or rankings, for example. You should be assigning a dollar value for each customer.

2. Include a full range of customers, from low to high value. This allows Facebook to be able to “hone in on what might distinguish an average customer from a great one.”

3. Don’t use negative values to signify undesirable customers. Facebook won’t count those.

4. Make sure you’re using the same currency throughout. Facebook will assume you are using the same currency otherwise.

5. Decimals for cents, but no other punctuation.

This file should include as much customer data as possible that can be matched to a Facebook user. There are 15 identifiers (including first name, last name, email address, and phone number) that can be used to increase your match rate.

Your file may look like this…

Notice the final column is for “value.”

Calculating Lifetime Value

This whole process assumes you know how to calculate lifetime value of your customers. This is most likely a manual process. And as I consider this for my own audience, it’s not all that easy to execute.

When in doubt, keep it simple. When generating your customer file, add columns for products purchased and price of that purchase. Use a formula to add up the values of those purchases.

This may be easier for some CRM software than others.

Create a Value-Based Lookalike Audience

Now that Facebook has a customer list including values, you will be able to generate a Lookalike Audience of those similar to your most valuable customers. You’ll need to select the country for each audience you create.

At this moment, I don’t have a screen grab for this process. However, I assume it’s no different than creating a Lookalike Audience off of any other source.

How to Use Value-Based Lookalike Audiences

Facebook recommends that you use this audience for lower funnel targeting. For example, use it for promoting a product instead of promoting a blog post or opt-in.

Facebook also says that your cost per result may be higher than usual initially, but that you should focus on the overall return on ad spend. Since Facebook is generating an audience of people most likely to have a high lifetime value, your focus shouldn’t be primarily on a single action.

This is all theory, of course, that needs to be proven in real life. And how we use a feature isn’t always as it’s intended.

My recommendation: Experiment. Try it for promoting content. Try it for promoting opt-ins. Try it for promoting products. You may or may not get great initial results. But you won’t know until you try.

But Facebook’s point concerning return on ad spend (ROAS) is a good one. If the focus of creating these audiences is on lifetime value, we should look beyond the initial action and monitor what these people do over the course of days, weeks, or months.

Future of Lifetime Value Audiences?

When I first heard about this, I assumed it would be based on the Facebook pixel. I’m surprised that the process is entirely manual, forcing advertisers to calculate and upload customer value.

It’s somewhat surprising that this is necessary. Facebook knows who hits a conversion page. They have the capability to assign a lifetime — or at least long-term — value of a single customer over days, weeks, months, or years.

The limitation could be “lifetime.” They can ditch website data after six months for Website Custom Audiences, so they may not have access to more than that at this time. Requiring more could be a storage issue (though I’m certainly no tech person).

Regardless, come on… This could easily be simplified for the advertiser who has routinely used Custom Conversions and events.

Your Turn

Do you have value-based Lookalike Audiences? How are you using them, and what types of results are you seeing? If you don’t have them, how might you use them?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Ads: Create a Value-Based Lookalike Audience appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Lookalike Audiences aren’t new. But an update was just made that could make them more effective — or at least much easier to use.

Let’s take a closer look…

What Are Lookalike Audiences?

Lookalike Audiences allow advertisers to create an audience of people similar to those already connected to their brand. For example…

Let’s say that you have an email list of the people who bought from you during the past year. You create a Custom Audience out of that list, resulting in 2,000 people you can target with Facebook ads.

That’s great, but you’re pretty limited with 2,000 people. Lookalikes help you leverage that group of people.

When creating a Lookalike Audience based on the original source audience of those who bought from you, Facebook looks at the similarities between those in the original audience. They then search out others in the Facebook universe who are similar to those people.

The result: A much larger group of people to target who may not know your brand, but who may have similar interests. This essentially automates the process of selecting interests to target — an often confusing and overwhelming endeavor.

The Problem With Old Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike Audiences are a good top-of-the-funnel targeting option, particularly for advertisers with small built-in audiences. But until now, the creation of Lookalike Audiences has been a painstaking and annoying process.

The reason for this is that Facebook limited you to creating a Lookalike Audience for one country at a time. So if you wanted to target people similar to those who bought from you in the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and Spain, you’d need to create those five individual audiences and combine them in your targeting.

That’s messy. It took longer. And you ended up with way too many audiences.

This also led advertisers to focusing only on a few countries rather than checking off a longer list of 10-20 or more.

Update to Lookalike Audiences

Thankfully, Facebook made a long-awaited update to Lookalike Audiences. Let’s go through that new process.

First, go to your Audiences page in your Ads Manager and click to create an audience. Then select “Lookalike Audience.”

Select a source audience to model the Lookalike Audience on. This is typically a Custom Audience of some sort or a Facebook page audience.

Nothing new yet. Until now…

Recall that previously you could only select one country per Lookalike Audience. Annoying. But now there’s a “Browse” link at the far right which brings up menus for countries and regions.

Expand “Countries” and a beautiful thing happens: Groups of countries appear.

So you can create a Lookalike Audience for all countries within these groups, for example:

• Africa
• Asia
• Caribbean
• Central America
• Europe
• North America
• Oceania
• South America

You could select one or multiple groups to create a Lookalike Audience that includes all of the countries within them. Or you can expand those groups to pick and choose which countries you want to include…

Or you could expand “Regions” to get options for free trade areas, app store regions, and emerging markets.

Free trade areas groups countries into the following:

• European Economic Area (EEA)
• North American Free Trade Agreement
• ASEAN Free Trade Area
• Mercosur
• Gulf Cooperation Council
• Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
• Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Area

Hover over any of the groups to see which countries are within them.

App store regions could be a great opportunity for anyone looking to promote their app. Choose from iTunes App Store Countries, Android Paid Store Countries, or Android Free Store Countries.

The final option is emerging markets, which could be a source of cheaper clicks.

Note that another recent Facebook change makes this all possible: There is no longer a minimum number of people required in a source country to create a Lookalike Audience based on it.

In other words, you could have 100% of your source audience in the United States, but you could still create a Lookalike Audience in Australia, Spain or Cambodia.

Try It!

As I’ve said many times before, I would never recommend you target Lookalike Audiences as your primary audience to target, especially for conversions. But new companies may have no choice.

Long-term, Lookalike Audiences are good for top-of-the-funnel actions (reading helpful blog posts or watching videos), and you can then build Custom Audiences based on these engagements (that you, of course, can use for promoting opt-ins and products).

Since I recently started a track for entrepreneurs, I’ve had to start experimenting with Lookalike Audiences again. While I have a large built-in audience, I don’t know how many of them are entrepreneurs. So I am experimenting with Lookalike Audiences and interests to drive traffic while I build my Website Custom Audiences of traffic on blog posts that I wrote for entrepreneurs.

Have you started experimenting with this yet? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Create Facebook Lookalike Audiences From Multiple Countries or Regions appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[AUDIO VERSION: I also recorded an audio version of this blog post. Click below to listen. Let me know if this is something you find helpful!]

While not everyone agrees, I still firmly believe that building relevant Facebook Page Likes is as important as it’s ever been. As a result, I keep a Page Likes campaign constantly running.

I was going through my regular Page Like campaign maintenance when it occurred to me that I should share this exercise as an example of ways that you might target. I’ve been tweaking and optimizing for years now, and it’s a tried and true process that works for me.

Before I get to the groups I target, I thought it would be helpful to share how I organize these different target groups…

I create a different ad set for each audience (which is actually what Facebook recommends), and then each ad set consists of image and copy variations that will reach that group of users.

Since I target eight groups of people (those groups are listed below), I end up with eight ad sets that all fall within a Page Likes campaign.

When I launch the campaign, I vary the budgets based on the size of the audience (audiences with under 10,000 people, for example, will have a budget of $5/day). But this will be adjusted as I see what does and doesn’t work.

The majority of my paying customers come from four main countries, so these ads target to reach users here:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• Australia

I create imagery and copy that appeals to the target demographic. For the current campaign, I use one set of copy for each audience and four image variations. Much more would water down the results depending on the budget.

So let’s take a look at the groups of people I target in this campaign…

[Tweet “Here are eight groups of people you should be targeting in your Facebook Page Like ad campaigns…”]

Email List

This is a logical group of people to target first. Target those who are on your email list, but aren’t currently fans. You do this with Custom Audiences.

I called out the fact that these people already get my emails, but that’s also because I know my audience. Depending on your audience, you may want to be careful with that language as it could raise privacy concerns from those new to that type of targeting.

Of course, the number targeted is bound to be small. Even though my email list is more than 25,000 strong, it dwindles in a hurry for targeting once you remove fans, the addresses that don’t match up to Facebook users and those who fall outside of the four core countries I’m targeting.

This is why you should also watch your daily budget based on audience size. With a potential audience of no more than 3,600 people (it will be far less after optimization and accounting for those not online), budget doesn’t need to be more than $5.

I’ll also monitor to make sure my oCPM doesn’t get out of hand, which is always possible if budget is too high for the potential audience served.

Note that I could segment this list and focus only on paying customers, for example. Truth is that my email list is about two and a half years old, so some of these people are stale and unlikely to act.

But given I’m already down to 3,600 people, there’s no reason to cut that number down any more.

Website Visitors – 1 Day

If you get decent website traffic, this is something you absolutely should do. Website Custom Audiences allow you to target Facebook users who visited your website recently.

I create Website Custom Audiences for many pages and durations, starting at one day and going up to 180 days.

The shorter the duration, the more relevant. Someone is much more likely to act on your ad if they visited your website today while you are top of mind than if they visited 180 days ago and already forgot about it.

I get more than 10,000 visitors to my website per day, so this gives me a decent number of people to target. Of course, that number drops in a hurry when you account for optimization and those on Facebook in a given day. Once again, address your budget accordingly.

You’ll notice that I call out the fact that the audience visited my website today. This should appeal to my target demographic of advanced Facebook marketers. It may not appeal to many other groups.

Website Visitors – 30 Days

If you don’t get as much website traffic, you may want to expand the net. I like to experiment with 30 days anyway since a larger audience sometimes means lower oCPM costs.

Once again, I call out the fact that those seeing the ad have visited my website. This could be creepy to some, but it works for my audience.

Paying Customer Lookalike

I prefer to focus first on people most closely connected to me. But that doesn’t mean I stop experimenting with other groups.

Lookalike Audiences are the next in line for my targeting prioritization. Facebook matches up the interests, demographics and activities of a particular audience and finds other users similar to them.

In this case, I’m using my most important audience — my paying customers — as a model for my Lookalike Audience. While the initial group may have been too small to target, the Lookalikes help me target a much larger group of people similar to them.

WCA Lookalike

You can also target people similar to those who visit your website with Lookalike Audiences. In this case, I’m targeting users similar to those who visited my website during the past 30 days and read an article published in 2014.

Page Lookalike

One more Lookalike Audience to consider is modeled off of your current fans. Of course, you should only do this if you have a high confidence level in the quality of your current fan base. If you bought fans or used any strategies that would water down the value of these people, Lookalikes probably won’t help you.

Single Interest

Interest targeting isn’t something I do much of. In fact, I even labeled it “dead” in a blog post not long ago. But there can be exceptions.

Using Audience Insights, I discovered that more than 10,000 of my fans in the US also like the Facebook for Business page. In fact, more than 16,000 in my four core countries like that page. That was enough for me to take notice.

You could target many interests, but it’s then difficult to see what works and what doesn’t. So in this case, I’m targeting only the one that is most relevant to my fan base.

I could choose to create a separate ad set targeting fans of Social Media Examiner. While relevant, I don’t consider it as relevant as Facebook for Business since Social Media Examiner deals with more than just Facebook marketing.

Lookalikes, Interests and Behaviors

Finally, I will experiment with a combination of Lookalike Audiences, Interests and Behaviors. For the ad set highlighted above, I targeted the following:

• Lookalike Audiences: Website Visitors and Fans
• Interests: Facebook for Business
• Behaviors: Business Marketing or Facebook Page Admins
• Education: At Least Some College
• Income: $75,000 or More

These are again qualities I found were important with my current audience using Audience Insights.

Your Turn

These are the groups of people I target when building Facebook Page Likes. How about you?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 8 Effective Targeting Strategies for Building Facebook Page Likes appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

In the video above, I cover the New Lookalike Audiences and how they impact Facebook ad targeting. Some key points:

• Lookalike Audiences: The Way They Were.
• What are the New Lookalike Audiences?
• How to Find Users Similar to Those Connected to You: Mobile Apps, Website Visitors, Facebook Fans
• The Bottom Line: Increase Sales

[Tweet “Facebook’s New Lookalike Audiences: Everything you need to know…”]

The Important Links

In the video above, I address several features and topics that could use a bit more explanation. Relevant links are below:

• Facebook Lookalike Audiences: Website Visitors, Fans and Conversions
• The Death of Facebook Interest Targeting: Shifting Budget Priorities
• Facebook Website Custom Audiences: Increase Fans, Traffic and Sales
• Website Custom Audiences: Target Visitors with Facebook Ads (Not FBX!)
• Facebook Website Custom Audiences: What You Need to Know [Video]
• Facebook Custom Audiences: Target Facebook Ads by Email List

Subscribe to My YouTube Channel!

If you haven’t already, subscribe to my YouTube channel to stay ahead on all things related to advanced Facebook marketing!

Do you need some help with Lookalike Audiences? Schedule a one-on-one session with me!

The post Facebook’s New Lookalike Audiences: What You Need to Know [Video] appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[AUDIO VERSION: I also recorded an audio version of this blog post. Click below to listen. Let me know if this is something you find helpful!]

Facebook announced expanded capabilities for Lookalike Audiences so that you can target even more users who are similar to those closest to your brand.

Let’s take a closer look at the following:

• What Are Lookalike Audiences?
• Lookalikes of the Past
• Lookalikes for Website Visitors
• Lookalikes for Conversion Pixels
• Lookalikes for Pages
• Lookalikes for Mobile App Users
• How to Create
• How to Target

[Tweet “Facebook now lets you target users similar to your fans and website visitors. Here’s how…”]

What Are Lookalike Audiences?

Lookalike Audiences have been around since March 19, 2013. They allow advertisers to target Facebook users who are similar to their customers away from Facebook.

Advertisers could ask Facebook to find the top 1% (optimize for similarity) or 5% (optimize for greater reach) of users in a specific country who were similar to their customers.

This is great for expanding the net since small customer lists of 1,000 people could often be turned into Lookalike Audience targeting capabilities exceeding 1 Million users.

Lookalikes of the Past

In the past, this was a two-step process:

1. Create a Custom Audience
2. Create a Lookalike Audience from that Custom Audience

In the vast majority of cases, marketers were uploading an email list to create that Custom Audience. Facebook would match up those email addresses to actual Facebook users to allow advertisers to target them in ads.

Advertisers could then turn around and ask Facebook to find users similar to those on that list. While email lists were most common, this could also be done with lists of phone numbers and UIDs.

Lookalikes for Website Visitors

Back in January, Facebook launched Website Custom Audiences. This amazing feature allows advertisers to target visitors to their websites. This includes any general visitor as well as visitors to specific pages.

Soon after, Facebook briefly made Lookalike Audiences available for WCAs. But that period of time was very short-lived. Until now.

This is great news on several levels.

First, you can find users similar to any visitor to your website. If you don’t get much traffic, this will allow you to target relevant users while expanding the net from what was otherwise a very small group of people.

Second, you can find users similar to those who visited a specific page of your site. You could use the success page following a conversion, for example, as your basis for a Lookalike Audience. So Facebook would then find users similar to those who bought a particular product (though that will come up again shortly).

Finally, you can find users similar to those who visited a specific section of your site. For this to work, the URL structure needs to include that category within it — or visitors need to be guided to specific landing pages when looking for product types.

An example would be visitors to a retail website that sells men’s and women’s clothing, shoes, hats and bags. It’s important that Website Custom Audiences be created for visitors to each individual section so that they — or their Lookalikes — can be targeted on Facebook.

Lookalikes for Conversion Pixels

Facebook now also allows advertisers to generate Lookalike Audiences for a specific Conversion Pixel. This would allow marketers to target users similar to those who converted (sale, registration, lead, etc.).

Keep in mind that this can essentially be done via WCA Lookalike Audiences, too. There has actually been talk of merging conversion pixels and Website Custom Audiences, and here is an example of why that may be necessary.

Regardless, a dynamic way to target Facebook users similar to those who have bought from us is an important development. While you could target a Lookalike Audience based on email addresses of customers in the past, that email list was not dynamic.

Lookalikes for Pages

Quite possibly the most interesting development of all. Advertisers can now generate a Lookalike Audience of pages within their control so that they can target users similar to their own fans.

[NOTE: No, you cannot create Lookalike Audiences of pages outside of your control.]

This will be very helpful for brands looking to grow, but lacking substantial traffic or an email list.

Lookalikes for Mobile App Users

Finally, advertisers now have the option of generating a Lookalike Audience of users who currently use their mobile apps.

Mobile App Custom Audiences are relatively new (they came out along with Website Custom Audiences) and allow marketers to retarget those who make specific actions within their apps.

Now they’ll be able to target users similar to those who make these actions.

How to Create the New Lookalike Audiences

First, click the Ad Tools drop-down at the top right of Power Editor and select “Audiences.”

Next, click the Create Audience drop-down at the top left and select “Lookalike Audience.”

That will give you a dialog that looks like this…

Within the “Source” text box, you can select a page that you control…

…a Custom Audience (including a Website Custom Audience or Mobile App Custom Audience)…

…or Conversion Pixel.

You will then need to select a country (your native country is chosen by default). Note that you can only generate one Lookalike Audience per country at a time. But you can create as many as you want if you want lookalikes for other countries.

Finally, use the slider to determine whether you want to optimize for Similarity or Reach. In the past, Facebook only gave you the option of one or the other. Now you can pick your audience size.

When I keep the slider furthest to the left on Similarity, I can generate a Lookalike Audience for my page of 2.3 Million people…

When I move that slider all the way to the right to optimize for the greatest Reach, that potential Lookalike Audience expands to 23 Million…

Once you click the “Create Audience” button, Facebook will start building your audience. Expect it to take 6-24 hours to complete.

How to Target Lookalike Audiences

Once that Lookalike Audience is ready, you can target it in your ads.

This is done within the Custom Audiences text field of the “Audience” step of ad creation…

You can also exclude Lookalike Audiences.

Your Turn

Have you started creating these types of Lookalike Audiences yet? What results are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lookalike Audiences: Website Visitors, Fans and Conversions 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.

[AUDIO VERSION: As an experiment, I also recorded an audio version of this blog post. Click below to listen. Let me know if this is something you find helpful!]

I don’t like making things black and white. There is a time and place for interest targeting in Facebook ads. But it’s far less central to my advertising than it once was.

This isn’t because it’s necessarily less effective than before (though some may disagree since the merger of precise and broad interest targeting). It’s more about the emergence of better options that has made interest targeting less necessary.

The purpose of this post is to explore why interest targeting is dropping in priority and align the types of targeting you should be using instead.

[Tweet “Interest targeting is fifth in priority for my Facebook ads targeting. Here’s the list and why…”]

What is Interest Targeting?

I shouldn’t assume you know what I’m talking about here.

When creating an ad in Power Editor or the self-serve ad tool, you’re able to list interests to target.

As you can see in this screen grab, this allows me to target “people who have expressed an interest in or like pages related to” particular people or brands.

While this does include people who like these pages, it also includes users interacting with them.

The Weaknesses of Interest Targeting

First of all, the merger of interest targeting (combining precise and #interests) has caused a headache for some marketers. I’ve heard of examples where the potential audience targeted has multiplied as a result. Bigger is not always better in this case.

Now, that’s also why it was important to be targeting a very specific interest to start. For example, I was targeting a group of brands that includes Mari Smith, Amy Porterfield and Social Media Examiner. The audiences for those interests changed very little, if at all. But if you targeted something more broadly (like “social media marketing”) you’ve likely seen effectiveness decrease.

The second major weakness of interest targeting is that you are putting a great deal of faith in the brands you focus on. You assume they built a highly relevant audience that would be interested in your brand, but what if their fans were bought or brought in through poorly targeted advertising?

You guessed it, you may be accidentally running ads targeted at bots and fake accounts. There’s little way of knowing how a brand built their audience, so you take a bit of a risk by targeting it.

The New Facebook Ads Targeting Priority

Interest targeting now only needs to be done when you have no other options. The truth is that you can very easily target users who already have a connection to your brand.

Here’s how I prioritize the type of targeting I’ll use with Facebook ads…

1. Fans: Some will scoff at paying to reach your fans. Such people don’t have a proper understanding of Facebook, and don’t grasp how valuable this group of people can be.

Yes, you should pay to build your fan base with ads. Yes, you will reach them organically. And no, you won’t reach every fan with a single post.

When you understand how Facebook works, you know that expecting a high percentage of your fans to read a single post is unreasonable. But if you promote it, you can reach more.

These are the people most likely to buy from you. I’ve found it time and time again. You can get incredibly high ROI when running ads promoting your product to your fans.

Sure, you could just share an organic post to this group. But, as you know, you likely won’t get 10% of your fans to see it organically. So why not promote the post if it is likely to result in positive ROI?

I always scratch my head when I hear a marketer tell me they pay for Facebook ads, but don’t promote anything to their fans. You’re leaving money on the table!

2. Custom Audiences (Email Subscribers): This is likely your most valuable list. This includes not only those who subscribed to your newsletter, but those who bought from you.

Create ads that target your email subscribers who aren’t currently fans. Do this to increase your fan base, but also do it to promote posts and sell products.

You may wonder why I list your current customers second after fans even though I mentioned this is your most important list. I’ve personally found that fans respond best on Facebook — they expect to see you in their News Feed and provide the most positive feedback. It’s all about context.

That doesn’t mean that email subscribers who aren’t fans don’t want to see you. It’s just that, in my experience, this group doesn’t get me quite the response that I get from fans.

When you target this group, make sure to exclude fans. There’s no reason to hit them twice. Run ads to get them to like your page, read a blog post or buy a product.

3. Website Custom Audiences (Website Visitors): You have no idea how happy I am that this feature is available.

Very few of your website visitors are subscribers to your email list. Or, more precisely, this is the case if you get much traffic from places other than your email list (60% of my traffic comes from Google).

As a result, this feature fills a gaping hole. Without it, you could target your fans and email subscribers, but there were still potentially huge numbers of users who read your content but who are not being targeted in your ads.

In a little over two weeks, my base Website Custom Audience has nearly 100,000 users on it. That’s 100,000 unique users who have visited my website and are on Facebook.

Considering there are only 16,000 people on my email list and about 40,000 people who like my Facebook page, that means there are at least 44,000 new people being targeted who are familiar with my content.

And what better group to target when promoting a post than someone who has recently visited my website? You could make an argument that this may be even more relevant than your fan base when it comes to post promotion.

The beauty of WCA is that you can promote a post while also excluding those who already read it. That’s being efficient and limiting waste!

Of course, you should also target website visitors who aren’t fans and try to convert them. And they are also likely buyers, so you should target them when promoting products.

An example of this is my ad that promotes my one-on-one service…

4. Lookalike Audiences: It’s a very short step from Lookalike Audiences to interest targeting, but I prioritize lookalikes first.

If you aren’t familiar with Lookalike Audiences, this is when Facebook generates an audience of users you can target who are similar to one of your Custom Audiences. We can assume they do this by combing through mounds of data that will include interests, demographics and more.

The key here is that you aren’t guessing which brands to target. You are using your proven customers or website visitors as the starting point for this lookalike audience list.

While I rarely target Lookalike Audiences when selling products, I will target them when building my fan base, promoting an especially popular post or driving registrations for a free webinar.

5. Interests: And that brings us here.

As you can see, there are four really good targeting options before you even get to interests. I still target interests, but I put a smaller percentage of my budget into them than I once did.

I use Graph Search to help me find the interests to target. And I’ll also cross interests with users on Lookalike Audience lists (users on a Lookalike Audience also connected with certain interests) to make that targeting more relevant.

This is mainly for audience building now, though it isn’t as effective as targeting website visitors who aren’t fans. And I’ll also occasionally target people by interests to promote posts.

The Evolution of Your Facebook Ads Targeting

Now, I also understand that the first four targeting types may not always be much of an option.

Let’s assume that you just started both your business and your page. In that case, you don’t have fans yet. Your email list is just getting started. And traffic to your website may be nonexistent.

So in the beginning, the bulk of your budget may go in this order:

1. Interests
2. Lookalike Audiences
3. Fans
4. Custom Audiences
5. Website Custom Audiences

That doesn’t change the priority list. That order remains the same. It’s just that you’re going to exhaust that list so quickly that you need to expand the net to grow.

This is also why it’s so important to not only build your fan base, but grow your email list and website traffic as well. The more people who visit your website and subscribe to your newsletter, the larger the relevant audience of people you can target.

As you grow, more and more of your budget should go towards targeting your fans, email list and website visitors, shifting away from interests and lookalikes.

Your Turn

How much of your budget do you dedicate to targeting interests versus the other methods?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post The Death of Facebook Interest Targeting: Shifting Budget Priorities appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[AUDIO VERSION: As an experiment, I also recorded an audio version of this blog post. Click below to listen. Let me know if this is something you find helpful!]

If you’ve been following closely, you know that I’m excited about Website Custom Audiences. Feel free to brush up on my latest posts on the topic:

• Website Custom Audiences: Target Visitors with Facebook Ads (Not FBX!)
• Facebook Website Custom Audiences: What You Need to Know [Video]
• Facebook Website Custom Audiences: Increase Fans, Traffic and Sales
• Experimenting with Facebook Website Custom Audiences

I’m obsessed with this feature. I’ve already created over 50 Website Custom Audiences.

My one disappointment when this feature started rolling out was that you couldn’t generate a Lookalike Audience from it.

Now you can!

In this post, we’re going to focus on the following:

• What WCA Lookalike Audiences Are
• How to Create a WCA Lookalike Audience
• How to Apply WCA Lookalike Audiences
• Ways to Use WCA Lookalike Audiences

[Tweet “You can now target Facebook users SIMILAR to your website visitors through WCA Lookalike Audiences. Check it out…”]

What WCA Lookalike Audiences Are

The Lookalike Audience is something that has been available within Power Editor for a while now. If you had created a Custom Audience and uploaded a customer email list, you could have then targeted users similar to your customer list by generating a Lookalike Audience.

This process involves Facebook finding the top 1% (Optimized for Similarity) or 5% (Optimized for Reach) of users similar to those within your Custom Audience. Facebook isn’t clear on how this is done, but we can assume it involves comparing demographics and interests.

This is great for anyone with smaller audiences. Instead of relying entirely on an audience of 3,000 people, for example, Facebook may turn that into 500,000 or even 3 Million people.

How to Create a WCA Lookalike Audience

Within Power Editor, click on Audiences at the top left to view all of your current Custom Audiences and Saved Audiences.

Highlight your Website Custom Audience. Then click the “Create Lookalike Audience” button.

That will bring up the following dialog…

You can only create one audience per country at a time. You can, of course, create multiple audiences, one for each of your main targeted countries.

Just a reminder about the difference between the two options:

• Similarity: Top 1% of Facebook Users
• Reach: Top 5% of Facebook Users

While optimizing for similarity will certainly result in the more relevant audience, I tend to create both and test to see what is most effective.

Note that it can take up to (and sometimes longer than) 24 hours for Facebook to generate this Lookalike Audience. The status will appear as “waiting” while it is generating.

How to Apply WCA Lookalike Audiences

Once you’ve created your Lookalike Audience, you can target it within an ad.

From the Audience step of ad creation, simply start typing the name of your Lookalike Audience in the Custom Audience text box.

You can list several Custom or Lookalike Audiences here. You can also choose to exclude them.

Note that if you have several that you will often use, it may be best to create a Saved Audience to make this step easier.

Ways to Use WCA Lookalike Audiences

Your priority with creating Facebook ads should be on targeting your most relevant audience. That starts first with targeting your fans, email list and website visitors.

Targeting your email list and website visitors is also a great way to increase your fan base by reaching those who are on that list, but aren’t fans.

However, what if you want to expand the net a little bit and still reach a relevant audience? That’s where Lookalike Audiences come into play.

When I run ads to increase page likes, I tend to create separate ads targeted at the following groups:

• Email List (not fans)
• Website Visitors (not fans)
• Similar Interests
• Email List Lookalike Audience (Similarity)
• Email List Lookalike Audience (Reach)
• Email List Lookalike Audience (Similarity) + Similar Interests
• Email List Lookalike Audience (Reach) + Similar Interest

[Note: I use this process to build an Interests targeting list.]

Well, now we can add the following to the mix:

• Website Visitors Lookalike Audience (Similarity)
• Website Visitors Lookalike Audience (Reach)
• Website Visitors Lookalike Audience (Similarity) + Similar Interests
• Website Visitors Lookalike Audience (Reach) + Similar Interests

Of course, you could also try targeting these groups when you have other goals, like driving traffic, sales and other conversions.

While I tend to focus on my fans for conversions, I’ll often target non-fans when promoting especially popular pieces of content. This would be another group to target in those cases.

Your Turn

How are you looking to use Lookalike Audiences for WCA? Let me know in the comments below!

The post WCA Lookalike: Target Facebook Users Similar to Website Visitors appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Now that Facebook has started their roll-out of Website Custom Audiences to target your website visitors with ads when they return to Facebook (see my tutorial here), it’s time to start thinking about ways that you can take advantage of a potentially powerful advertising tool.

There are three main reasons you should experiment with Website Custom Audiences:

• Get Relevant Fans
• Drive Website Traffic
• Increase Sales

With this post I will explore specific strategies for achieving each goal.

[Tweet “Here are ways you can use WCAs to increase relevant Facebook fans, website traffic and sales…”]

Get Relevant Fans

The number of Facebook fans you have, in and of itself, means very little. But make no mistake: The number of relevant Facebook fans who care about your brand means everything.

Building that number of quality fans, of course, is a challenge. You may target your offline customers who aren’t currently fans through the use of Custom Audiences. And you undoubtedly target users by related interests to attract the right crowd.

But with Website Custom Audiences, you can now reach a neglected group: Users who visit your website but who are neither Facebook fans or on your email list.

I’ve already begun targeting this very valuable group with my own Page Like ads. What’s beautiful about this is that you no longer need to guess: These people know who you are.

Following are a couple of ads that I have been running to all of my website visitors who live in my four core countries (United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada)…

As you can see, these ads play off of the fact that anyone who sees the ad has been to my website — and that I know they have. Since I know my audience (people who are looking to succeed with Facebook ads), this is a risk that I expect to pay off.

So far, that has been the case. I am seeing costs per page like at levels that are nearly half of what I was seeing before.

I am also running a simple Page Like Sponsored Story (of course, this will no longer be possible soon), and finding good success there as well. However, the custom copy has certainly been more effective.

I see this as a potential game changer when it comes to quickly and affordably building a highly relevant audience. If I can continue to maintain low costs, I’ll ultimately be able to build that audience more efficiently.

Drive Website Traffic

If I am going to promote a post that drives traffic to my website, what type of user would be most likely to click the link? Someone who has been there before, of course!

I currently have a very simple strategy when it comes to promoting posts. When I create an organic Facebook post that drives traffic to a new blog entry, I’ll promote that post to reach the most fans. And if that post is more popular than most, I’ll also promote it to a specific non-fan audience based on interests and Lookalike Audiences.

Website Custom Audiences changes everything. Now I can make sure to also target users who have generally visited my website during the past 30 days (or up to 180 days, if I choose).

Here’s an example of a post I promoted that does just that…

But here’s where it really gets interesting…

I can promote my post to those who have visited my website, but exclude those who already read that post.

This is huge. Why promote a post to someone who already read it? That’s a waste of money. I want those who are not only most likely to want to read the post, but those who have yet to see it.

Website Custom Audiences are dynamic (your list is constantly building as visitors come to your site), so Facebook knows just who visited your site and when. And since you can use AND/OR logic, you can have Facebook exclude those who visited a particular page of your site.

Not only could you exclude those who already read that post when promoting to website visitors, you could do this when promoting any post to any audience.

This is huge!

Increase Sales

The bottom line may just be where Website Custom Audiences make the greatest difference for Facebook advertisers.

Sure, you could very generally target any visitor to your website with a Facebook ad that promotes a product. I fully expect this approach will be more effective than your current targeting method for converting sales.

But let’s bump this up a notch…

Let’s also create an ad that only targets those website users who already visited the landing page for your product or service but didn’t complete the purchase!

You undoubtedly see dozens of similar ads like this every day. You’ve visited Amazon or some other online retail site and looked at a product. You come to Facebook, and there it is again.

You can do this with Website Custom Audiences!

The first key is that you target those who visited that landing page. So if I were to create an ad that targets people who visited the landing page for my Power Editor training course, I would create a Website Custom Audience for that URL.

The second key is that I’d create a second Website Custom Audience for the success page that a user sees when making a purchase. This way, I can exclude anyone who completed the purchase.

This is how to make the targeting dynamic. But I’d also make sure to upload my old email list of customers who purchased the course to exclude anyone who falls outside of the 30-day window (or before the day I created the audience).

This way, I can reach warm leads that — for whatever reason — decided not to buy. Maybe they were distracted by something else. Maybe they needed a little more convincing.

Use this ad to seal the deal.

Here’s another thought: Since you know the people you target in these ads visited your landing page but didn’t purchase, use that to your advantage. Instead of simply driving them back to your landing page, ask them if they have any questions you can answer about the product. Send them to an FAQ or contact form to get the conversation going!

Your Turn

My mind is spinning with ideas of ways that I could use Website Custom Audiences. What I’ve described here is just the tip of the iceberg.

What other ideas do you have? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Website Custom Audiences: Increase Fans, Traffic and Sales appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook advertising can be a bit complicated. There are endless terms and features that you need to know about, and this makes learning advertising on Facebook a challenge.

That’s why I created this Facebook ads glossary, and now why I’m excited to share my first (professionally done) infographic!

Bookmark this and keep this baby handy for later!

This is just one in a series of infographics that I’ve published lately that will help simplify Facebook marketing for you:

• Ultimate Guide: Facebook Insights Glossary of Terms [Infographic]
• All Facebook Image Dimensions: Timeline, Posts, Ads [Infographic]

Like this infographic? Share it! Hover over the graphic to share to Pinterest. Or you can snag the embed code at the bottom of this page to share it on your website.

Enjoy!

[Tweet “Check out this COMPLETE glossary of every Facebook ads term and feature you’ll ever need…”]

The post Facebook Ads Glossary: Reference of All Important Terms [Infographic] appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Forrester recently published a blog post called An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg that carelessly attempted to claim that Facebook advertising and marketing are ineffective, using a survey of 395 marketers and business executives as the proof.

I was initially going to write a post that would pick apart the endless flaws found throughout that study. But after reading the comments attached to the post, I realized I wouldn’t be breaking ground here — most rational people know the report can’t be taken seriously.

But what a post like that does is provide validation for the people who fail at Facebook. They use this as their excuse when things don’t go as planned. This allows them to put the blame on Facebook for their failures rather than accepting responsibility.

Still, that post got me thinking. It raised many questions. I wanted to know whether the 395 marketers and executives had ever used any of the countless tools and strategies common among those who succeed with Facebook.

As a result, I use that awful post as inspiration. I am willing to wager that the vast majority of brands and marketers who don’t find success on Facebook aren’t doing many of the following things…

[Tweet “If you’re failing at Facebook marketing, it’s probably because you aren’t doing these 14 things…”]

1. Provide Value

This should be obvious, but failure on Facebook can often be tracked back to this simple step.

Are you providing value? Are you making the lives of people better when sharing content? Are you educating or entertaining? Would you want to see your content every day in your News Feed?

If all you do is post content that tries to sell your stuff or act as your brand’s PR, you aren’t providing value. You are spamming.

2. Use a Consistent and Frequent Publishing Schedule

Now you need to provide that value on a consistent basis. Once or twice a week isn’t going to cut it. Post multiple times per day, spaced out by at least a few hours.

Implement a content plan and use scheduling software (or Facebook’s built in scheduler) to make sure you have content flowing through on a regular basis.

3. Involve Your Fans

When Fans comment on your post, respond. When they ask you a question, give them a thoughtful reply.

Create posts that involve your audience. Ask them what they think. Ask them to share their story. Ask them to provide their opinion.

Don’t know what types of content your Fans want to see? Ask them!

4. Focus on Relevant Fans, Not Cheapest Price

Far too often, the brands that fail on Facebook slip up here. They care about the “almighty Like” more than the people behind the action.

As a result, they buy Likes. Or they run poorly targeted ads that bring in bots and people who don’t care about their brand. All because they are concerned first with cost and last with relevance.

Craft content that appeals to your target audience. Run ads that are micro-targeted to reach those who matter most.

Forget about ads that generate Likes at 10 cents a piece. You will spend more. But when your focus is on quality, these efforts will pay off.

5. Find Your Target Audience Using Graph Search and Lookalike Audiences

Sure, you have committed to finding your ideal audience and attracting them. But how do you go about it?

You could guess by running ads that target precise interests that you think are associated with your target audience. Or you could be more scientific about it.

Whenever I run ads that target non-Fans, I create separate ads that reach each of the following groups:

• People who like similar Pages and interests
• Lookalike Audience (Reach)
• Lookalike Audience (Similarity)
• People who like similar Pages and interests + Lookalike Audience (Reach)
• People who like similar Pages and interests + Lookalike Audience (Similarity)

First, let me explain how I generate my list of similar Pages and interests.

Come up with two brands that you consider your competitors or would have a very similar audience to your own. Then run a series of Graph Searches.

When I search for Pages liked by people who like Social Media Examiner and Mari Smith, I get the following first page results:

• Mari Smith
• Mashable
• Social Media Today
• Seth Godin
• Guy Kawasaki
• Social Fresh
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Tech Crunch
• Social Media Club
• New Media Expo
• Amy Porterfield
• The Next Web

This is a great start for a Precise Interests list when targeting ads (I’d turn that list into a Saved Target Group).

Next, you’ll want to take your email list and generate a Custom Audience. You could use your full email list or a list only of those who have bought from you.

From that Custom Audience, have Facebook generate Lookalike Audiences optimized for both Reach and Similarity.

When you’re done, you’ll have the building blocks for targeting relevant non-Fans.

6. Focus on the Metrics that Matter

What determines the success or failure of your Page or advertising efforts? Are you focusing on the metrics that matter?

Far too many marketers get bent out of shape obsessing over things like Reach and Page Likes. Neither of these two things, in and of themselves, mean a whole lot. And if they drive your strategy, you are bound to fail.

How much valuable engagement does your content drive? How much traffic to your website?

Do your ads result in conversions and sales? What is your cost per conversion?

These are the types of things you need to be worried about. Don’t distract yourself with metrics like Reach, CPM, CPC and Click Through Rate.

7. Don’t Click the Boost Post Button

While there are over 1 Million advertisers on Facebook, I guarantee that a high percentage of these people are casual advertisers who have only hit the Boost Post button.

It’s easy to do. But with simplicity goes a lack of control, and this way of advertising will likely lead to wasted ad spend.

You are more sophisticated than this. You want to reach a specific audience in specific placements.

8. Use Power Editor

One way to promote a post effectively is with Power Editor. You can, for example, target only Fans and reach them only in the News Feed.

If you’re serious about Facebook advertising, you need to use Power Editor. This is how you get full control over your ads and get full access to all of the tools and features that come with Facebook advertising.

While using the self-serve ad tool is certainly a step up from boosting a post, you can do better.

9. Use Conversion Tracking

Every time you run an ad that leads to some sort of conversion (purchase, registration or lead), you need to use Conversion Tracking.

Every. Single. Time.

If you don’t use Conversion Tracking, you won’t know whether your campaign truly was a success or failure. You’ll guess regarding the number of conversions it brought. And you’ll focus on metrics that could be completely independent of a conversion (CPM, CPC, CTR, etc.).

If your ad leads to a conversion, the only metrics you need to be aware of are Conversions and Cost Per Conversion. You want the lowest Cost Per Conversion as is possible.

But if you don’t use Conversion Tracking, this isn’t an option.

10. Target Your Email List

When you build your Fan base, do you run an ad that targets your email list to attract those who have already done business with you?

When you launch a product, do you run an ad targeted at those who have bought from you before?

You can do this with Custom Audiences. And if you don’t use this feature, you are ignoring a very important segment of your customer base!

11. Sell to Your Fans

While your focus on Facebook shouldn’t be only to sell, your Fans are the people most likely to buy from you.

If you spend more on ads that target non-Fans with product offers than Fans, you are likely throwing money away.

Target non-Fans to bring in new Fans. Gain trust from them by consistently providing value. Then sell.

It’s a simple Facebook sales funnel. And one that can lead to a very high ROI.

12. Optimize Your Images

When you share a link or run a link ad, does the thumbnail image take up the width of the News Feed, whether on desktop or mobile?

Bigger images lead to more engagement. Those thumbnails are begging to be clicked on.

If your link share results in a tiny, square thumbnail image, don’t expect it to get clicked!

13. Create Multiple Campaign and Ad Variations

You can’t report success or failure based on a single ad. There are far too many factors that lead to whether or not an ad works.

Test different copy, images and targeting. Test with different ad types, using Sponsored Stories or page posts. Test using link shares, videos or photos.

Don’t trust small sample sizes. Find what doesn’t work and stop those ads. Find what does work and escalate!

14. Optimize Ads Using Ad Reports

You may have an apparent failing ad that actually has success buried within the results. But you won’t know that without using Facebook’s ad reports.

With this amazing tool, you can figure out the Cost Per Action based on age, gender, country and placement. Placement, in particular, can result in wildly varying costs.

Use these reports to find what does and doesn’t work. Then optimize your ads!

Your Turn

What other tools and strategies are common among those who succeed on Facebook? Let me know in the comments below!

The post 14 Steps to Succeeding at Facebook Marketing appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Now that all advertisers have access to Custom Audiences via the self-serve ad tool and Power Editor, it’s time to start talking more about some creative ways to use them.

If you haven’t heard of Custom Audiences before, this is how you can target your customers in Facebook ads, whether they are Fans or not already.

To create a Custom Audience in Power Editor, click on “Audiences” on the left and then click “Create Audience” and select “Custom Audience.”

Then name and describe your audience. You’ll want it to be something descriptive so you’ll know what it is later.

Finally, you’ll upload your file that has your list of customers on it. This should be either a CSV or TXT file. If it’s an email list, make sure it’s only one column and only has valid email addresses in it.

It will take Facebook up to an hour to generate a list of Facebook users who are also on your email list. Expect anywhere from 30-70% of those email addresses to match up to Facebook users.

Once you have that list, what are you going to do with it? Here are four suggestions…

[Tweet “Here are 4 creative and powerful ways to use Facebook Custom Audiences to target your email list…”]

1. Increase Page Likes

This is a layup. Once you upload your email list and Facebook says it’s ready, this should be the first thing you do.

Until now, you’ve probably been stressing over which interests, ages, countries and other targeting options you need to use when targeting your ideal audience. This one’s easy.

You already know the people on your email list have interest in your content. Now you just need to be sure that you get as many of them as possible to like your Page — if they don’t like it already.

Within the Audience step of ad creation within Power Editor, you only need to do two things:

1. Exclude current Fans from targeting
2. Add your email list to targeting

To exclude your current Fans, go to the bottom where you’ll see Connections. Here, you’ll want to enter your Page name within the text box for “Target users who are not already connected to…”

Then click the “Advanced” link within the Audience step and enter the name of the Custom Audience you created that represents your email list within the first Custom Audiences text box.

To clarify what you just did: You are now targeting everyone on your email list who is not currently a Fan of your Page. You want those people!

The only concern left is choosing what type of ad to create. Personally, I’d recommend a Page Like Sponsored Story as well as a standard Page Like ad that drives users to a landing tab where you offer something of value in exchange for a Like.

Keep in mind that the Sponsored Story will have a smaller audience because you’ll only reach Facebook users on your email list who aren’t currently Fans but have friends who are Fans of your Page.

2. Extend the Reach of Your Posts

This is one I’m doing more and more of lately.

When you publish a post to your Page, you’ll likely reach anywhere from 10-16% of your Fans organically. If you’re like me, you want to reach more of them so you’ll promote a post (through Power Editor — don’t click the Boost Post button!) that targets your Fans only in the News Feed.

You may also target non-Fans who have specific interests similar to your niche. But you have to treat that group carefully since many Facebook users don’t like seeing content from Pages they don’t like in their feed.

But you could instead reach non-Fans who are on your email list. These are people who have already expressed interest in your content, so they’re bound to embrace seeing you in their News Feed.

First, let’s promote a post. Thanks to the new Objective flow, there are now two different ways to do the same thing.

Objective: Select “Clicks to website” and “Page post linked to your website.” Then select the post you want to promote.

Old Ad Types: Select “Ad” and “For a Facebook Page using a Page post.” Then select the post you want to promote.

What you do next is the same for either ad creation flow.

Now do exactly what you did in example #1 to target non-Fans who are also on your email list.

The result: You’ll reach more people who are interested in seeing your content. You should also expect to get some of these people to like your Page when your post is shown in their News Feeds.

3. Sell or Upgrade a Product

I’ve found that current Fans are overwhelmingly more likely to buy from me than well targeted non-Fans (this is why I talk about creating a Facebook sales funnel). So you should target this group when selling a product.

The method is just like what you did in step #2 where you promote a post to non-Fans who are on your email list. One addition is that you should also track conversions. You do this by clicking “Track conversions on my website for this ad” and select the pixel that applies to this promotion (if you need help on Conversion Tracking, see my tutorial).

Another opportunity is for upgrades. Hopefully, you have customer lists that are segmented based on their action: newsletter sign-up, opt-in and specific product purchase.

Let’s assume you have a list of people who purchased Widget 1.0. You are now announcing the release of Widget 2.0. If you’re a smart marketer, you’re going to send an email to those who bought Widget 1.0 to let them know of the release.

But you should also target these people in Facebook ads. This allows you to craft copy and imagery around the people you are targeting. For example, the copy should assume that the user who is seeing the ad already owns Widget 1.0. Let them know it’s time to upgrade!

You would target these users by creating a Custom Audience that is for the list of people who purchased Widget 1.0 only. Then enter that audience in your targeting as described earlier.

4. Target Users Similar to Your Subscribers

This goes a bit beyond Custom Audiences, but let’s assume you have a modest-sized email list. You want to target a larger group of people to perform any of the three steps suggested above. You can do this by creating Lookalike Audiences.

While you aren’t specifically targeting your email list in this case, you are using that email list to target other Facebook users like them.

To create a Lookalike Audience, click on the name of your Custom Audience within “Audiences” on the left of Power Editor. Then click “Create Similar Audience.”

Then select a country and whether you want to optimize for Similarity (top 1% of Facebook users) or Greater Reach (top 5%).

It will take up to 24 hours for Facebook to generate this list (possibly longer).

Now when you create an ad to get Page Likes, extend the Reach of your posts or sell a product, you can create a variation that targets users who are similar to those on your email list.

Your Turn

Do you have any other creative examples of using Custom Audiences? Let me know in the comments below!

The post 4 Creative Ways to Target Your Email List with Facebook Custom Audiences appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

If you’re looking to reach a cold audience of people who are likely to act on your Meta ads, a good place to start is with a lookalike audience.

Sure, you could experiment with interests and behaviors, but that’s always a bit of a guess. The nice thing about lookalike audiences is that they are modeled after people who may be your current customers.

Let’s walk through it…

What Are Lookalike Audiences?

Lookalike audiences first rolled out in 2013 (when this post was originally published). They allow you to reach people who are similar to your existing customers or others who are closely connected to you.

Lookalike audiences are based on a source audience that you’ve already created. Meta’s system builds it using information such as demographics, interests, and behaviors from your source audience to find other people who are most similar to them.

You can control the size and similarity of your lookalike audience by setting a percentage from 1 to 10 to focus or broaden your audience based on the country or region these people are pulled from.

Source Audiences

Meta recommends the source audience have between 1,000 and 5,000 people, though the quality of that audience also matters. The more closely aligned the source audience is to your goals, the more likely the lookalike audience will be valuable.

For example, if you used a very broad and large source audience, there may be very few tight similarities between those people. Meta may struggle to put together a lookalike audience that will be effective for you.

Your source audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country in order to create a lookalike audience off of it in that country.

How to Create Lookalike Audiences

Go to the Audience Manager section of your Business Tools to create a lookalike audience.

At the top left, click the blue “Create Audience” button and select “Lookalike Audience.”

It will look like this…

The first thing you will need to do is select a source. Meta prefers you select a value-based source, but it doesn’t need to be. Examples of value-based sources would be (assuming you pass value with purchase events)…

• Meta pixel
• App
• Product catalog
• Offline events

After selecting the lookalike source, you’ll need to select an event source (either Website or Store).

Then select which event with value you want to select. By default, Purchase is selected (and recommended). But you can select another.

Meta will tell you the highest and lowest values passed as well as the number of unique customers and events during the past 60 days.

Of course, you aren’t required to select an event with value. When selecting your lookalike source, there’s a tab for “Other Sources.”

Unlike the Value-Based lookalike source where you could simply select your pixel and an event, you won’t have that option here. You’ll see a list of custom audiences and page names. You can type the name of an audience into the search bar to find it.

After entering your lookalike source, select your audience location by entering at least one region or country.

Next, you’ll need to select the number of lookalike audiences that you want to create. We’re only going to create one, but you could create up to six at once if you wanted.

Next, you’ll need to select the percentage you want to use. The size of a 1% audience in the United States will always be the top 1% of all Meta app users in the United States who are most similar to your source audience. The size of your source audience won’t impact the size of the lookalike audience.

I’m going to use 1% since this is most relevant and still equals 2.8 Million people in the United States. But if you use smaller countries, you may want to increase this percentage.

The final product looks like this…

Create from Ads Manager

Another (and possibly easier) way to create a lookalike audience is directly from the ad set in Ads Manager.

After selecting a custom audience in the Audiences section, click the little arrow to the right and select “Create Lookalike Audience.”

That custom audience will be automatically selected as your source audience.

Populating and Updating

Meta says it should take between six and 24 hours for your lookalike audience to populate. However, you can still use it for targeting while you wait.

This audience will continue to update every three to seven days, as long as you’re actively targeting it in an ad set. It will stop updating otherwise, though updating will restart as soon as you begin using it again.

Within Audience Manager, there are columns to see when the audience was created and last edited.

Targeting

To target a lookalike audience, enter the name and select it from the Custom Audiences field within the Audience section of your ad set.

Note that your targeting will automatically exclude people in the source audience that your lookalike audience is based on.

You could also choose to exclude a lookalike audience.

Advantage Lookalike

One reason to go with a 1% lookalike audience, regardless of the size, is that you can turn on Advantage Lookalike. This is one of the Advantage Audience Expansion products.

When Advantage Lookalike is turned on, Meta can expand the percentage if it will lead to better results. There are times, based on objective, when you won’t have the option of turning this off.

Should You Target Lookalike Audiences?

Back when lookalike audiences were first launched, they represented a huge advancement in cold targeting. Lookalike audiences simplified the process of finding the ideal group of people to target when prospecting.

Lookalike audiences likely represent a better option than interests and behaviors these days as more interests are removed on a regular basis. But you should still test it.

Of course, completely broad targeting has emerged, as well. Is there an advantage to using lookalike audiences (with or without Advantage Lookalike turned on) instead of removing all targeting filters?

That’s for you to figure out. Like everything, there is no universal rule. Always experiment and find what works for you.

Your Turn

Do you use lookalike audiences? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lookalike Audiences: A Complete Guide appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.