Don’t Make THIS Facebook Targeting Mistake!

0:00i was on a consulting call with a client recently and i thought i absolutely have to share this with you guys because this client had made not silly not stupid but some very very costly targeting mistakes and i'm sure that there are tons of people within my audience that have made the same targeting mistakes they're very easy to make they don't they're not stupid they're not things that you might think would be a big deal but they can be very very costly so fortunately this client gave me permission to share their setup provided i kept it all anonymous so what i'm going to do in this video is

0:26show you what their targeting setup was why there are so many mistakes in it and how you should set up the targeting in your facebook ad campaign so if you're running facebook ads right now this is going to be a really really valuable video so in order to keep everything anonymous what i've done is i've recreated their campaign their ad sets their targeting setup within an example facebook ad account of ours and we've got two different ad sets here we've got one cold audience and one warm audience ad set because unsurprisingly they had different setups for each ad set and the targeting obviously but also the

0:55mistakes made were different across the two and they really need to be treated as different things so i'm going to walk you through each one we'll start with the cold audience ad set now before we get into this i need to quickly tell you about the industry because that's going to play into this it's men's sports apparel fitness gym related apparel clothing things like that that you exercise in across a number of ranges a range of different activities is is what they're selling an e-commerce business so anyway let's scroll down firstly they had a look-alike audience based on a one-percent like audience in the u.s that's where they sell their product

1:24based on all website visitors over the last 180 days not got a problem with that that's a decent look-alike audience definitely something we would test if you were only running the one look-alike audience we would switch this out for a look-alike audience based on previous customers people who triggered the purchase and conversion events something like that that's likely to be higher value but if you're testing a range of look-alike audiences you know including all website visitors is absolutely fine no issue with that next they were excluding everyone that had bought from the previously so everyone in their customer list now i do have an issue with that i don't like

1:55excluding previous customers really at all there are a few exceptions i'll explain in a minute but i certainly wouldn't want you to exclude all your previous customers when you're advertising products in this case that people can either buy again or buy more of that's a really big no no you're missing out on some of your best possible prospects and what when i was talking to this this client what this business owner explained and i've heard this a lot before is they go well what's the point in paying to advertise to people that have already bought from me before surely they'll they're on my email list they'll remember the product

2:28surely they'll buy again anyway and that's just not true it's just not how it works unless you're selling something that is massive and life-changing for someone which is very rare i mean you're talking like a house or a car something really huge that they're going to remember and maybe they don't need to see ads for because they're interacting with it all the time unless you're selling something like that which is almost no advertisers the reminders really do help people aren't going through their lives thinking about the product of yours that they bought and how they'd like to go to your website and check out all the other

2:56products that you may offer it's just not how life works it's too busy putting your ads in front of people that have already bought from you before is absolutely something that you want to do so i would absolutely get rid of this exclusion just just to clarify this is not us targeting people on the customer list here this is the way this is set up you know exclude people who are at least one of the following this is designed to exclude anyone's previous customer list so none of those people would see ads i would absolutely get rid of that that's a big targeting mistake and look if you

3:24if you really really wanted to include some sort of exclusion around previous customers you don't want to have to pay to advertise to them again then adding in say an exclusion from people who've bought within the last 14 days or people have bought within the last 30 days maybe that would be okay but i'd still much rather um you left it off i think it causes more harm than good and just think the percentage of your total audience size that is made up by your previous customers is going to be absolutely miniscule so it's not going to cost a lot to reach those people but they are fantastic prospect

3:54then we get down to location targeting if i click into edit we have a quick look at the graph and i i may not have the um the cities exactly right as what they have i think it's pretty close but you can see what this client is let me zoom in what this client was looking to do is they figured that their customer were people who live in and around big cities so they were trying to target the major cities um across across the us right and i understand why they want to do that they're thinking that's what my customers are from i can save money by

4:24not advertising to the whole country it's not really how facebook works if you are going to go with something like a lookalike audience with your cold audience but even with detailed targeting options you are much better off just going with the whole of the us if that's where you can sell your product here's why facebook will work out if your best prospects come from the major cities and they will target those people but facebook will also work out that person that lives in rural idaho that is a perfect prospect for whatever it is that you happen to sell you don't want to miss out on those people that

4:53can add up to a lot across a country like this so what i would be looking to do instead of just the this specific cities is go ahead and add in the entire country you make your audience larger which all things being equal is better trust facebook here give facebook more leeway now of course if you're just limiting yourself to specific locations because that's the only places where you can deliver your product or service then stick with those don't open up to the whole country if you can't deliver in those locations locations but in this case where this company can and does ship all across the

5:26u.s target the whole us don't overthink it next they've gone with a fairly specific age range of 25 to 35 for something like this you know men's sports apparel that's narrower than it should be there's 100 going to be 24 year olds that are interested in this product and there's 100 gonna be 37 year olds that are interested in this so i was saying look look i think this is a little bit too specific there's no reason to keep yourself targeted in that much what i would be looking to do in this sort of case would probably be open it up to something like 18 or 21 the products

5:57weren't super expensive and put this all the way up to say 50 55 what i actually recommended was go with 65 plus and the reason why is because we're using a lookalike audience and when you're using a look-alike audience you don't want to artificially constrain yourself here with narrowing down the age parameters if we were just going with detailed targeting it'd probably look like something like 18 to say 55 maybe 18 to 50. still much much broader than they were going but that's a big targeting mistake is to be overly small on the age range again with targeting all things created equal large audiences are better but because we've

6:33got a look-alike audience in here we're going with 18 to 65 and let facebook have a lot of leeway they narrowed down the gender just to men which is fine that's very much very very much their target market here in an industry that is obviously there are certain products tailored to men certain products tailored to women it's very um specific in that in that sense so that's fine but again if you're using a lookalike audience and um and you like like we are here and you wanted to go with all that would be fine too and if your product would say 90 male 10 female i would definitely be going with all if

7:04i'm using a look-alike audience okay then we get down into the detail targeting section now the first thing that i would say is what we've got here 11 12 different options and we've got a mixture of interests based on things that they think these people like to be interested in like adidas and nike and crossfit sport stuff like that you know this is men's like sports physical exercise apparel and then we've got all the stuff within fitness and wellness bodybuilding physical exercise physical fitness running weight training yoga etc so first thing is if we are using a lookalike audience you absolutely do not want to also be including detailed

7:39targeting options it operates as an and function so what you're now saying to facebook is i want to advertise to people that are within this lookalike audience and meet this detailed targeting criteria so that's a big no-no so if we're using a look-alike audience like we are here i would be getting rid of the detailed targeting options all of them very important big facebook ads mistake doesn't look like it but it is next thing is let's say we weren't using a lookalike audience would i advertise to this many detailed targeting options in one ad set absolutely not i'm a big fan of using one detailed targeting option per ad set

8:13i tell you why if instead of having you know all 12 lumped into one ad set here we had 12 different ad sets with one of these each in there we could then work out exactly how good of a targeting option nike is how good of a targeting option physical exercise is and maybe out of those 12 the average cost per purchase is 20 but maybe there are some like physical exercise and physical fitness that produce a cost per purchase of say 12 or 10 and there are others like bodybuilding the producer cost per purchase of 30 or 35 that's how we get the average of 12 out of 20 whereas if

8:46you if you split them all out you can work all that out and you can just then narrow in on the best possible detailed targeting options and go with those so i'm not a fan of stacking interest in detailed targeting if we're using a lookalike like like we are up here the one percent look like based on the website listeners i'd be getting rid of all these detailed targeting options um which i'm going to do because that's how we're setting up the ad set if we didn't have the lookalike audience and we were going with detailed targeting i'd be looking to just have the one in there

9:16so you can see that these aren't those weren't silly or stupid mistakes by any means but they can make a huge difference it reduces your audience size uh massively and what the ad set looks like from a targeting standpoint is now very very different to what it did previously okay that's the cold audience ad set let's jump over to the warm audience ad set so we've got a lot of stuff that was very very similar let's start from the top just like we did okay first thing is they were targeting a custom audience that includes all website visitors within the last 14 days i'm a big fan of using custom audiences

9:52of all web services in your retargeting in your warm audience assets but why 14 days definitely extend that time horizon so i would look to swap this out get rid of that and add in and all website visitors within the last 180 days that audience is gonna be much larger which is great and you're gonna have lots of prospects in there that are great people that you wanna put your ads in front of that don't necessarily fit within the last 14 days you don't want to cut yourself off at the 14 days particularly after the ios 14 changes where it's more difficult to track um people coming to your

10:27website so the people that do make it there it's more valuable to be able to retarget them you don't want to miss out now what the reason why people go with things like all website visitors 14 days as opposed to 180 is they think well those are the people that are um more interested they're keener they're more excited about the product because they visited the website more recently you're right and facebook knows that so they're going to start by advertising to people that visited your website yesterday two days ago five days ago before they advertise to people that visited your website five months ago but there may be someone that was not on

11:00your website within the last 14 days maybe they visited two months ago but because facebook can see a lot of what people's activities are on platform and to some extent off platform maybe facebook knows oh this person is actively just joined a new gym or this person is actively looking for sports where um they just purchase some from this website let's go ahead and put ads in front of that people if you limit yourself to 14 days only you miss out on all those people so absolutely extend your time horizons i like to go with a maximum of 180 days again they're excluding the customer list in this um

11:34thing they wanted to advertise people to visit the website but not people who have bought i'd get rid of that for the exact same reasons as i talked about then when it comes to um retargeting absolutely again your audience here is going to be much much smaller than your cold audiences so you don't want any artificial constraints here whatsoever so i would absolutely be looking to remove the city targeting which is what they had set up and go with the entire country go with everywhere you can deliver your product or service the same then applies to um age we're gonna go with 1865 then with gender i really with a

12:12retargeting ad set would like you to include all very important if you're advertising something like men's sportswear for example well okay yes your target audience may exclusively be male or just about supposed to be male but there might be lots of women that are visiting your website to because they're thinking about purchasing some of your products as a birthday present or a christmas present something like that perhaps they prefer men's sportswear themselves because of the way it fits or whatever um so you don't want to be excluding those people particularly on the retargeting standpoint that's extra important and then they've included a single detail targeting option and again just like

12:49with the cold audience ad set and the lookalike audience it acts as an and function so you're saying to facebook i want someone to be a website vista within the last 180 days and i want them to be interested in physical exercise now we know that these interests are not as accurate as we'd like them to be there's recent data suggesting that they're they're inaccurate 30 of the time someone could easily be interested in physical exercise in real life and just not make it into that interest category within facebook and instagram anyone that visits your website for me that more than says enough that they're interested in what you have to offer

13:22therefore you absolutely want to remove all detailed targeting options all the time with any warm audience asset and this setup is hopefully going to help you get much better results if you found this video useful don't get subscribed and i'll talk to you soon