I recently saw this notice pop up on several Facebook ad accounts.
And as soon as I read it,
I realized this has the potential to fundamentally change the way retargeting
works across the Facebook and Instagram ad platform. So it's kind of a big deal.
Here's what it says.
This ad account has been selected to participate in a nine week study to help
improve campaign performance. Okay. Pretty standard.
A small proportion of ads using custom audiences will be delivered to people
beyond the custom audience.
Expanding your audience is often an effective way to improve results,
but you can opt out and that notice did come with a button and an option to opt
out. I'll tell you what I did shortly. Now.
The first thing to pay attention to here is that it is just a test.
This isn't something that's been rolled out across all accounts yet,
but it does follow a trend.
And the trend indicates that it is likely that this is something that we may see
rolled out across all accounts in the near future.
That trend I'm talking about is the addition of lookalike audience expansion and
detail targeting in which we saw not too long ago.
That means that now Facebook will go outside of your lookalike audiences and
your interest targeting and find new people to advertise to even if they're not
in those target audiences. So to see this happen to customer audiences,
now wouldn't be a big stretch. So what does this all mean?
And why is it potentially such a big change? Well,
the custom audiences are fundamental to the way retargeting works on Facebook.
It's how we do things such as showing ads to people who visited our website,
or maybe people who are already on our email list,
or perhaps people who are already in our sales funnel.
They're a powerful tool for putting really specific ads in front of very
specific people at just the right at time.
The people that we put inside custom audiences have performed a specific action.
And for that reason, we want to show them specific ads.
And usually these are ads that we only want the people inside those custom
audiences to see not anyone else. But with this change,
Facebook is saying that when they deem it appropriate,
they're going to show our to people outside of these custom audiences,
because they think they'll get better results.
And that's why it's such a big change because generally we don't want anyone
outside of our custom audiences to see those ads.
Often they're things that are really specific and maybe wouldn't even make sense
to people who aren't in our custom audiences.
So to lose that control is going to be a big deal.
And a lot of advertisers heavily use remarketing and that's most advertisers on
the platform. Well,
that means they're going to have to shift their entire strategy and make a lot
of changes within accounts to make sure this doesn't become a problem.
And sure there could be cases where this is actually helpful.
Maybe you are doing some broad targeting, targeting everybody.
Who's visited your website in the last 180 days,
or maybe you're targeting every body who's engaged with your Instagram account
or your Facebook page in the last year. Now in those cases,
having Facebook go and find more people like those audiences could actually
help because it's going to expand your audience and perhaps reach more people.
But for those situations where you only want to target,
let's say past customers or people in your sales funnel,
or maybe people who've registered for your webinar and things like that,
then that is where it becomes a real issue.
And another thing to note here is that when Facebook goes outside of our
customer audiences, there's no way to actually know that they've done,
that we simply have to trust the system, hope that if, and when they do that,
they're going to show it to the right people.
So that lack of transparency makes this change even more worrying because we
just don't know what's actually going to happen on the back end.
And we can't even see what's happened retrospectively. Okay.
So we know this is definitely going to affect our targeting,
but let's talk about the other important use case for customer audiences,
which is excluding people from our ads.
Often we use custom audiences to make sure that people who shouldn't be seeing
our ads, don't see them.
Let's say somebody has already purchased one of our courses or programs. Well,
in that situation, we wouldn't want them to see ads for our course anymore.
So we use a custom audience containing all of our customers.
Then we exclude them from our ad set. Another example is for a webinar,
once somebody's registered for a webinar,
we don't want them to continue seeing ads for that webinar.
So we use a custom audience to exclude them.
So you're probably wondering how will this change affect that important use
case? The good news is I don't see this affecting custom audience exclusions.
I think it's very unlikely that if you exclude a custom audience,
Facebook is going to apply that same audience, expand general rule.
I don't see a reason for them to do that or any benefit to the advertiser
if they do that. So I don't think that is going to happen again.
I'm guessing here, but it's an educated guess.
And I think we're pretty safe when it comes to excluding customer audiences and
this new audience expansion setup. So all in all,
while this moves towards man vision of an ad platform where they basically do
most of the targeting work for us, and we just set up and create the ads,
which seems to be where they're going. I don't think this is a great change.
I would much rather still have very granular control over my custom audiences
and all of my retargeting efforts versus letting them go outside of that.
I think it could cause problems.
People seeing ads when they shouldn't and creating confusion amongst our
customer and lead bases. But a lot of this is yet to be seen.
What I do know is I actually sent this to my newsletter a couple of weeks ago
and shared my thoughts there.
So if you wanna make sure you get this kind of information and all the good
stuff first, make sure you are on that newsletter.
The link will be in the description below this video.
So make sure you've signed up for that. So for now,
if you see that notification pop up and you're using retargeting and you have
really specific audiences seeing specific ads, I would opt out,
that's exactly what I've done.
And I recommend you do the same if you use retargeting like most advertisers
do. And just be aware that this change is in the works.
It might be rolling out on a broader scale in the not too distant future.
So be aware that it might be coming. And if it does,
you might have to rework some of your campaigns.
And since Facebook seem to be moving to this world where we are relying more on
their AI and their algorithms to do a lot of our targeting,
we can actually do more targeting with our copy and creative.
I cover that in more detail in this video.
So make sure you check that one out next until next time. I'll see you soon.
Bye.