This Facebook Ads Targeting Update Has Changed Everything!

Advantage Plus audience has taken the Facebook advertising World by store we first started seeing it six or seven months ago but most ad accounts now have this feature we've done a bunch of testing and have some really interesting results to report and in this video I'm going to let you know whether you should be using it or not so to talk you through this I'm in an example Facebook ad account I'm in ads manager and I've quickly created an example um sales campaign in this instance and I've gone to the adset level and I've scrolled

down to the the targeting sections now the first thing that you may see is that this might look quite different to what you're used to seeing if you haven't yet got Advantage Plus audience I think most ad accounts do at this point and it's probably going to be rolled out to the remaining ad accounts very very soon but if you haven't yet seen this is what it looks like as opposed to our previous targeting setup um that you'd be familiar with we've now got audience controls this section here and then we've got advantage and plus

audience which is obviously what I I want to focus on in this video and I'm going to walk you through audience controls in a second we're going to start with Advantage um plus audience now this is in the process of replacing the previous setup a lot of AD accounts have this not quite all some ad accounts only have this and some ad accounts are able to switch between the two so there's lots of different things going on here I'm going to talk you through how this works whether you should use it or not how it

differs from the previous setup and then I'll explain if you do have the option to switch between the previous setup and this setup and which you want to go ahead and and do okay so if we start with this Advantage Plus audience and I click on this um plus button here the first thing that you need to understand about Advantage Plus audience is that it's a suggestion as a opposed to hard constraints and that's a really big difference so previously if we said look I only want to advertise people that are aged 25 to 35

who are interested in this because I think those are the people that are most likely to be interested in my products or Services Under the previous setup those were hard boundaries and Facebook would not put your ads in front of people that were less younger than 25 or or older than 35 or whatever you said and they would not put your ads in front of people that weren't interested in the things that you had mentioned you want your detailed targeting to be with this it's a suggestion meta is going to use their technology to find

people yes within your suggestion but also that might not fit within those they go you think people that are this age or a different gender to what you've selected or have uh different interests and not categorized within this interest on on Facebook and Instagram we think those people are also likely to be interested in what you have to uh to offer we're going to put ads in front of them and that's a that's a really big deal so when you click into here all these options here they're all suggestions even customer audiences so if you're

looking to let's say retarget webs servers and you put that in this audience here under the previous setup that would have been a hard boundary and you would only have your ads shown to people that um have visited your website that you're retargeting with this you could enter in a custom audience people that visit your website and it's going to yes include those people but it's a suggestion so they can also advertise to other people you could do the same thing with lookalikes obviously the same applies to age as we already discussed same applies to

gender and the same applies to detailed targeting as well so if you're going to be entering in your interest um demographic behavioral stuff in here just as we do and if you're interested by the way in how you go about finding those options and what you should do I'll include a link in the video description below to another video that walks you through um that and how to set up how to find detailed targeting options these things can all be added in as they used to be but they are suggestions now when I've spoken about

Advantage Plus audience before and I've explained the differences between it and the previous setup where we had hard constraints people have understandably asked well how does Advantage Plus audience differ from just say various targeting expansion options so under the previous setup you would have your hard constraint and then you could tick a box to say yeah but I'm happy for meta to go ahead and find other people um that don't fit within my constraints it started out as detail targeting expansion and we had all different types of targeting expansions you can have custom um audience

targeting expansion look likee audience targeting expansion and and things and they've had various names over the last few years as meta constantly changes these things and tweaks with them and the answer is not a huge amount it operates quite similarly in my mind I think Advantage Plus audience because it's a suggestion from the beginning it's more flexible than having the previous setup with detail Target expansion so if you think about it on sort of a Continuum we've got the old setup targeting options hard constraints no targeting expansion and then next we've got that hard constraints

but with Target expansion then next on the list we've got this Advantage Plus audience and then the the the other end of the spectrum would be just complete open targeting targeting everyone that's sort of how I see it is that it's a bit more open a bit more flexible targeting expansion options are only supposed to be used if meta is very confident you can get better results by expanding that audience and primarily they do focus on the audience that you give them with this because it's a suggestion from the beginning I think they're going to

take a bit more of a um a license with who they put your ads in front of and be more flexible and expand that and look to uh to reach other people so that's something to uh to be aware of how I see it but in all honesty there's probably not a huge amount of difference um between the two now I'm going to talk more about whether or not you should use Advantage class audience if you have the option um in a minute but I do think that Advantage Plus audience has a number of interesting

advantages over previous targeting setups there's for a long time now been a debate should you go with open targeting and just let meta work it all out or should you be really specific and take control and we used to be very much really specific take control that was the better approach for all Facebook advertisers many years ago and over time we slowly slowly moved more towards open targeting but I think this is a nice halfway house it's allowing you to take advantage of the open targeting because your audience is still really big you can reach

tons of people but you are providing meta with some direction what we've seen with open targeting particularly with new Facebook ad accounts and with ad accounts that don't have a lot of conversion history is that meta can struggle a little bit at the beginning because there's so many people they could put your ads in front of and it takes a bit of time to work it out as I said especially if there's not data already within your ad account this Advantage Plus audience gives meta some direction it's going we'll start with these people CU based

on our experience running our business we think these people are likely to be interested in these products and services but once you've learned a bit once you've done a bit of testing by all means look to expand into some some other options so I think this this ticks that box really nicely and we can see how that's working um especially with the new recommendation to add in custom audiences and look Alik audiences now that's something we would never have done previously we'd have had a separate ad set for say an interest targeting option a separate

ad set for a custom audience retargeting and a separate ad set for a local like audience we wouldn't have mixed the two that's because within hard constraints if for example you had a custom audience you're only retargeting website visitors you could have a website uh visitor customer audience if you then went and added in detailed targeting that would um act as an and function so you're saying to mattera I want to retarget people on my website who are but only if they are also interested in this interest targeting criteria now because this is all suggestions

it's kind of saying look matter we think people who are interest in our stuff are going to fit under this interest targeting category so we'll add this as a suggestion um by the way these are the people that have visited our website these are people that purch before again here's some more information for you to use oh and here's a loal like audience based on our previous customers again more information to use we recommend starting there but at the end of the day do what you want so we're starting now to test a lot with

um custom audiences and local like audiences being used as part of Advantage Plus audience results are really interesting um and I think as meta moves more and more this way we're all going to be doing this more and more trusting the system and seeing better results from it one thing I do want to quickly note on that point is that if you do want to specifically retarget only retarget um then you can't use Advantage Plus audience and put your customer audience in here so let's say for example you've got a a specific offer that is

only available to people that have uh visited your website like a 10% discount something along those lines well you don't want to use that in as as a custom audience within an Advantage Plus audience um setup because that's a suggestion and then some people are going to see ads that are say oh we saw that you were interested in XY Z product here's an extra 10% off to help you um make the purchase if someone sees an ad that says that and they've never visited your website before that's not going to look good that's going

be very confusing so if you do want to specifically and only retarget don't include your custom audience within the Advantage Plus audience section that way make any sense so in a second I'm going to talk about the audience control section and how that feeds in with the Advantage Plus audience before I do just want to quickly let you know about our done for you Facebook and Instagram advertising services so my company can create manage and optimize your ad campaigns for you if you are interested there's a link in the video description below you can click

on that go ahead and book a free call with one of my team members they'll tell you uh about the work we've done previously we've probably worked with the like yours in the past we've worked with all different types of businesses at this point and we've probably been able to get them great results and should be able to get you great results as well so you can find out more information about that what we charge all that sort of stuff so if you're interested go ahead and book a free call and hopefully we get a

chance to work together so there are now a lot of Facebook advertising experts that recommend just going with open targeting just go with broad targeting don't put in any targeting criteria just let meta work it out and we've done a lot of testing of that against Advantage Plus audience and we are overall seeing better results with Advantage Plus audience as I already mentioned it creates that nice hybrid where you are giving meta some direction now of course if you've got an ad account that's already got more than a thousand purchases in it or 10,000 purchases

in it then open targeting is probably going to work just fine because meta has so much data around who purchases what time a day how many Impressions they need to purchase what age they are what are they interested all the data points they need to get you great results but new ad accounts don't have that so being able to provide that suggestion through Advantage Plus audience uh we think is really beneficial and that's why overall we are seeing better results with Advantage Plus audience you're kind of getting some of the advantages of specific targeting whilst

also getting some of the advantages of open targeting so win-win so that's something to to be aware of and I'll feedback more information about using the custom audiences and look Alik audiences which meta is recommending um that we should do so we're starting to experiment with that uh more and more as well now it is important to note that in this audience control section there is other stuff that we can do so let's go ahead and move on to audience controls I'm just going to click on this um show more options and we can see

the various options that we can actually have control over so where Advantage Plus audience is a suggestion an audience control is a hard boundary and you might think well doesn't that contradict the Advantage Plus audience in the suggestion and yes it does to some extent but sometimes that's necessary and there are things that you probably want to have hard boundaries over even if there are other things that you're happy to be flexible over so the first one is going to be location right so this is just defaulted the country I'm based in which is United

Kingdom um but you're probably going to want to have a hard boundary around where you actually advertise for example if we can only sell our products services in the UK we don't want meta to be expanding to other countries so that's why this is in an audience control section likewise if we just wanted to advertise locally you know we're let's say we're in the UK and we're based in Bristol for example then we want to be able to set a a radius around that area within a certain location look we're only happy to advertise people

that are within you know 15 miles of Bristol um we don't want to advertise anywhere else we don't want meta being flexible with this because we simply can't sell our products and services they're not going come in store or come to our gym or come to our restaurant so this needs to be a hard control whether you're doing that locally or um nationally internationally um as well minimum age now sometimes it's fine to set your age targeting criteria in the Advantage Plus audience section because you you you want to set criteria but you're happy for

meta to be flexible but other times depending on what you're advertising you need a very strict um age category because it might be that where you're advertising the product or service that you're offering can't be advertised to people say under a certain age for example depending on on what you're advertising sometimes that's going to be really important so you can come into the audience controls and be like look legal requirements mean that we can't adverti to anyone under 21 this particular products and services that's going to vary depending what you're advertising that's going to depend

depend on U where you're advertising as well what country in but that's something to to keep in mind you can also exclude customer audiences very specifically so let's say for example you are running a new promotion for a product or service and you don't want to advertise to people that have already bought it because you think well they might not like that they just missed out on this new 30% discount that we're giving you could go ahead and upload a list of people um that have previously purchased and absolutely make sure that they do not

see your new ads and there's other reasons why you might want to exclude custom audiences um as well so there you can put in hard constraints and pop that in there and then also you can do the same with languages if you operate in an area where people speak multiple languages um but you only are able to serve people perhaps you only speak a certain language and you're only able to actually work with people that speak a certain language then again you can go ahead and add in hard constraints so you can't add in you

can see in this um audience control section you can't come in and add the like specific detailed targeting options to be like nope we want these to be hard constraints you can't do that with this and overwrite what you've put in the Advantage Plus audience section but you can put in hard constraints with some of this stuff where that might be necessary for your business again meta is trying to give you the option to be like look we understand there are some hard boundaries somewhere so here you go with these but you're not going to

have this for everything because we don't think it's necessary for everything um we want the rest to be suggestions so we can make it as open and free as possible and one other thing to mention is that most ad accounts that do have this Advantage Plus audience feature you can switch to the original setup so if I scroll down to beneath this um Advantage Plus audience we can see here we've got switched to original audience options and I can click on this and you can see the meta is trying to dissuade us from doing this

right so they they say that if you use Advan plus audience you can get up to to a 33% lower cost per result based on their experiment so that sounds really enticing now you'd always need to be careful and this is a something to be aware of and us as marketers often know this is that when you use up to and then a statistic it means well it could be a 1% a 2% lower cost per result from using Advantage Plus audience we don't necessarily know that it's you know all the way up to 33

but on average they're saying that Advantage Plus audience works better and that would be true in my experience and they you use Advantage Plus audiences the big blue button to take you back um use audience is is sort of gray one to make you less likely to do it but you can click on this and then you will see that instead of this audience control and advant less audience section we now just have audience and you'll see that this setup looks very similar to what we used to uh previously use and you can add in

those add in those hard constraints and go through the process um just like this okay so just to be aware that on most ad accounts it is still possible to um revert back to this if you want to I don't think that many businesses should be looking to do that if you wanted to separate out lots of different adsets and get really specific with your targeting to work out exactly who your audience um who your best audience is and you're a more advanced Advertiser that's okay but most advertisers is fine to stick with advant plus

audience I think it's a bit of The Best of Both Worlds for now it takes advantage of meta's very smart Ai and machine learning process but you can do this not all ad accounts can switch back some are just stuck on the Advantage Plus audience setup now and some don't even have Advantage Plus audience yet meta rolls things out um in stages to different ad Accounts at different times it's not just based on geography um it's also based on things like how long the account's been going ad spend all that sort of stuff they do

it to ensure that a new feature doesn't just break the whole system and if it does cause an issue it only causes an issue for certain number of users um but it does make creating content and giving advice very very difficult because different people are at different stages and hopefully I've sort of put in all the caveat so you'll understand uh where this is at but if you can if you do want to go ahead and change it back and you can there is an option to do so for most advertisers now whether or not

you decide to use Advantage Plus audience it's really important that you understand all the various targeting options that you can either use in inside of Advantage Plus audience or outside of Advantage Plus audience I give you a full walkthrough of all the Facebook ads targeting options which ones are the best how to set them up and all that sort of stuff in this video here if you want to make sure that you've got the best possible targeting options and you're reaching the right people that are likely to buy your products and services and strongly recommend

you go ahead and give this a watch