This clarifies things… There was something about Advantage+ Shopping audience segments that’s been bothering me. The Question You’re supposed to use custom audiences to define your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers. This is used to segment results by Existing Customers, Engaged Audience, and New Customers. But, it was entirely unclear if you needed to exclude Existing Customers when creating the Engaged Audience. The Answer Luckily, I received a message from someone who says they are an engineer at Meta (you can never be sure, but they seem to check out): I wanted to clarify somethi ..read more

There are so many reasons to keep campaign construction simple, but the easiest of those reasons to understand is this… All of your extra and unnecessary campaigns, ad sets, and ads, are sucking away your budget and either making it difficult to evaluate results or hurting your performance. Limit the Number of Campaigns If you don’t need to create those extra campaigns, don’t. It makes sense to create multiple campaigns that have different goals. But, avoid creating multiple campaigns that have overlapping goals. In a perfect world, you could have one campaign for sales, one for leads, and o ..read more

Here’s a real-life example of the benefit of setting up Conversions API… Events OverviewIf you go to the Overview tab of your Events Manager, Meta will highlight this in the Status column. If you see a squiggly chart graphic, hover over it. You’ll get a message like this: “In the last 7 days, you saw about 5.8% more conversions reported for [this event] by using the Conversions API alongside the Meta Pixel.” When I check this on other events, it’s a similar story. 8.7%… 10.8%… 19.2%… 50%! These numbers are constantly changing, so they aren’t the same as what I include in the video. But ..read more

Should you use Instant Forms (often referred to as Facebook Lead Ads) or send people to a website form to build your email list? It’s a common question that I get from advertisers, and my answer has long been based on my own assumptions — or simply an instruction to “test it!” I decided to take my own advice and stop making assumptions. I ran a test that generated 630 leads, and I’m ready to share what I learned. The results were surprising — they were not at all consistent with my assumptions. Hypothesis My assumptions are sourced from years of advertising and an understanding of the balance ..read more

When should you use custom conversions? This is a common point of confusion among advertisers. Custom conversions don’t replace standard or custom events. They have a unique purpose. The Purpose The primary benefit of custom conversions is to segment your results. Here’s an example… The Purchase standard event will fire every time there’s a purchase on your website. You may run a campaign that uses Purchase as the optimized event, and the Results column will reflect that. But, it won’t only reflect the purchase of the product you’re promoting. Custom conversions help you know which product th ..read more

Advantage+ Placements is on by default, which makes all placements available. The algorithm will make adjustments to placement delivery based on performance. But you have the option to remove placements. Should you remove placements? If so, when? When to Remove Placements If you’re looking for some super complex placement strategy, you’re going to be disappointed. This is much simpler than most advertisers think. I almost always leave all placements on. Since the algorithm will make adjustments in real-time to make sure you get the most results for your budget, you’re unlikely to waste lots ..read more

Performance goals define what it is you’re trying to accomplish in the ad set. This is what defines how Meta will optimize to deliver your ads and determines performance in your Results column. There are 21 performance goals in all, but I don’t use most of them. More accurately, I’ve used most of them at some point, but the majority of my ad sets use one of three performance goals. 1. Maximize Conversions I use Maximize Conversions for every step of the funnel when sending people to my website. For sales, I use it with the Purchase conversion event. For website leads, I use it with Complete ..read more

The Maximize Conversions performance goal is versatile… When you select the Website conversion location and the performance goal to maximize number of conversions, how your ads get delivered is still yet to be determined. This is decided by the conversion event. Meta’s not trying to find just any conversions for you. Success is defined by the ability to get you that specific conversion event. Who sees your ads and how they’re delivered changes. Multiple Steps of the Funnel I use this performance goal for every step of the funnel whenever I send people to my website. This is what determines ..read more

Look, there’s a time and place for split testing. But in some cases, it’s an unnecessary obsession that does not help you. You’re worried about which headline works best. The primary text. Whether the background color should be blue or orange. You’re running split tests in search of the perfect combination. And you’re spending $20 per day. Stop doing this. I use a small budget as my example here, but truthfully this can apply for larger budgets, too — especially if you’re running several of these tests at once. What to Do Instead Even if Meta can find a winner for you, it’s often based on sma ..read more

According to a report from Digiday, ads could be coming to Threads later this year. That’s the message from some unnamed ad execs who claim to be in the know. The report provides no details about what the timeline is exactly or the types of ads to expect, but an ad rollout this soon would be unexpected. The Expected Schedule I wrote about this last year when the common question among users was, “When are ads coming to Threads?” I often cite Mark Zuckerberg’s response back then when asked. He sets a milestone of 1 Billion users before monetizing. Threads is growing, but it’s still nowhere clo ..read more