Facebook Targeting Has Changed! Do THIS Now...

0:00have you seen the changes facebook has made to targeting thousands of targeting options have completely disappeared and that is making life incredibly difficult for a lot of facebook advertising fortunately we've worked out three solutions to this problem if you've been hit by these targeting changes make sure you go through this whole video because i'm going to show you how you can fix this problem right now so what on earth is facebook playing at here why are they getting rid of thousands of targeting options and making life more difficult for facebook advertisers well here's an announcement that was released by meta on november 9th um last year and if we

0:30scroll down to this section here they said starting january 19th it didn't happen all at once it was sort of it's been going over the last few weeks and recording this just over a month after this date here they said we will remove detailed targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive such as referencing causes organizations or public figures that relate to health race or ethnicity political affiliation religion or sexual orientation examples including they give a bunch of examples so okay that kind of makes sense there's a lot of bad press around all social media platforms particularly the advertising side of things being

1:04able to target based on some sensitive stuff so i can completely understand why they're removing this stuff i think what's annoyed a lot of facebook advertisers that facebook has gone a step further than this and they have removed a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't even really fit into these categories maybe it just does a little bit and they've all gone as well which is as i said made live for facebook advertisers much more difficult than it needs to be so this is what facebook are doing this is why they're doing it now we need to get into how we go about actually fixing this problem so what a

1:33lot of facebook advertisers are experiencing right now is this they come into their campaigns i'm obviously an ads manager right now i've got an example campaign created by the ad set level in the audience section and they come down they click on detailed targeting and they're finding that their demographics interests or behaviors that they used to target potentially that performed really well even are just no longer there or perhaps you're a new advertiser and you just can't find anything relevant in here anymore because literally thousands of targeting options have been removed and that's making things very difficult for a lot of facebook advertisers as i said there

2:02is a big positive to this which i'm going to explain later on by the way so make sure you stick around for that you're going to find that quite interesting but that's what they're finding well these detailed targeting options used to use they're gone ah what do i do so we need to think about different ways of reaching people and that's the very first thing i want to get across the people that you want to target the people that maybe you used to be able to target with detailed targeting options they're still there it's just a case of being able to reach them and that's a really important thing

2:28to to keep in mind it's not like those people are gone you just need to do things a little bit differently so there's three potential solutions i've already mentioned let's go through the first the first is going to be look-alike audiences but look-alike audiences based off of different audiences to usual so for those who don't know a look-alike audience is a group of people that's very similar to another group of people so let's say you say to facebook these are all the people that have bought from me in the past year um i want you to advertise people that are very similar to these people that have bought from me and that's

2:55normally a great audience to target because people are very similar to your existing customers are great people to advertise to there are other types of lookalikes you can get into though right that's what a lookalike is let's um let's go ahead and jump over to audiences because i want to demonstrate what we would what we've been doing with lookalike audiences to overcome this detailed targeting issue so this is a new um ad account there's nothing in there yet but if we create a custom audience and you can create custom audiences which are warm audiences that you are the sources for your uh look-alikes you can do it on a

3:25whole bunch of things and explain more about a second we're going to start with a website visitor custom audience so we're going to go with all website visitors i'm going to change that retention to 180 days and then we're going to call this all website visitors 180. okay we're going to create that audience now this custom audience is going to contain everyone that has visited our website within the last 180 days assuming you know the pixels pick them up all that sort of stuff then we can go ahead and click on that so this is the source and we can click on create lookalike select your location

3:57i'm just going to go with the uk in this instance one percent perfectly fine to start with create audience and boom there's our look-alike okay now this audience is going to contain people that is that are similar to people that have visited our website which is a great audience to target because people that have visited your website are usually fairly representative of your potential customers people have bought from before and advertise to people that are similar to them is great okay um so that's one of the look-alike audiences that we're using to help overcome this detailed targeting issue that's been removed and that is helpful but there

4:29are some other ones that i want to get into so if i click on create audience and custom audience and we want to select a different type of custom audience i want to talk about in app sources so you can see this used to say facebook sources of course but now it's meta sources because it's the overall company so you can create um custom audiences and then subsequent look-alike audiences based on people that have done stuff within facebook and instagram and that's important because with the ios 14 changes that happened last year the pixel tracking is not as reliable as it used to be okay so our website custom

5:02audiences for example aren't as accurate as they once were so we're switching more and more to in-app sources so for example if you've been running video ads on facebook absolutely go ahead and use video if you're doing a lot of advertising on instagram you can do people who've been engaged with your instagram account if you're running lead generation campaigns then you can go ahead and select um people have engaged with your lead form i'm going to show an example of people have engaged with um a facebook page so this custom audience there's a number of different options but will include everyone who engaged with your page and that could be a

5:32number of different things you can see it says here visited your page take an action on a post or an ad reacted shares comments links a whole bunch of stuff okay a good audience to target particularly now when we've got less visibility over pixel tracking and i'm going to call this facebook page engages 365 right create audience and that remember that's our custom audience so that is those people then we want to go ahead and click on create a look-alike i'm going to go with the united kingdom again obviously you'd want to put in whatever location you want to target one is absolutely fine create audience okay and then boom we've

6:07got our other look alike so we've got a lookalike here based on website visitors we're going to look alike here based on people who've engaged with our facebook page then we can jump back over to ads manager and in our example campaign we can jump to the ad set level go ahead and click on edit over new sales ad set scroll down the audience section and we can go ahead and pop our look-alikes in here we can put both of those in we could just do the one that's very much up to you but this has been working very well for those clients of ours that have had

6:36detailed targeting options that they've used in some cases for years that have all of a sudden disappeared this is an option that may well work very well for you so absolutely test this if you want more information by the way about look-alike audiences how to create them because i just gave you like a very quick demo there and check out the link in the video description below to a full ultimate look-alike audience tutorial go through all the different types how they work all that sort of stuff okay but i just wanted to quickly briefly cover that here so that's one potential solution to this detailed targeting

7:03options being eradicated in in many instances by uh by well meta i suppose it should be called okay let's get on to the the second option okay so potential solution number two is to run with something that basically looks like this broad targeting open targeting it's got a number of different names but where you don't add in any detailed targeting options whatsoever and you basically give facebook an enormous audience you can see here we're looking at you know 47.3 million to 55.7 million just targeting the whole of the uk and this 18 plus and that can work incredibly well in some specific scenarios so i would only

7:42do this option or try this option if you have a product or service that has mass appeal you know some things that people sell only appeal to a particular group of people it's fairly niche it might be something quite hobbyist something like that other things appeal to a huge percentage of population you know things to do with the home cars things that everyone just about everyone buy travel holidays appeal you know there might be subsections you know luxury travel versus more budget travel things like that but these are things that can apply to a huge percentage of the population what's targets that's the first thing box you

8:15want to take before you go ahead and test broad targeting is is there broad appeal for what i advertise the second thing is how mature is your facebook ad account ideally you will have generated 500 maybe even a thousand plus conversions and conversions i mean the thing that you're really targeting in your campaign so whether that's a lead or a purchase whatever it is you want to generate a good volume of that i've said at least 500 maybe a thousand plus in your ad account um before you go ahead and test broad targeting and the reason why is because facebook needs a lot of data to be able

8:49to work out who from a 50 million person audience or if you're targeting the us could be a you know 250 260 million plus person audience um who in that is best to target they need data they need examples of what type of person goes on to convert from your campaigns so brand new ad accounts rarely work very well with broad targeting um but mature ones do so if you've got a broad appeal product or service and you've got a reasonably mature ad account as i said hundreds uh but definitely got thousands of conversions that could be another great potential solution so absolutely go ahead and try

9:25that just try broad targeting on one of your ad sets if you've lost out on detailed targeting options used to work you may well find that the results are even better than what they used to be with detailed targeting we've done that in certain circumstances seeing great results that's a great potential fix the third potential solution to these detailed targeting options going away is to think about how you can target the people that you want to reach using other detailed targeting options so if for example we wanted to reach christians as a group we may have been able to target that previously but that's just the sort of thing that

9:53facebook's gotten rid of so whilst we can't target those people specifically with a detailed targeting option can we target the media outlets that those people are likely to follow often those targeting options are sticking around so have a think about your target audience and think about what are the tv shows that they watch what are the podcasts they listen to the social media influencers they follow the magazines they read even okay if for example we wanted to reach people in the u.s of a more conservative political leaning then you could go with something like you know fox news for fox broadcasting company in this case okay

10:29um that's likely to be an or the people that are interested in that are more likely to have that political leaning um than other targeting options if we wanted to do the opposite you could probably put in something like um mpr if i can spell it right um you may disagree with these examples of course you know i don't live in the us but um you know so there are ways that you might be able to think around this problem and media outlets is a really good option because a lot of those are still around and they may be pretty close to pretty representative of the sort of audience

11:04that you're looking to target if you know your audience well you know what media they consume definitely worth creating some ad sets breaking out a few different options and testing them don't have to spend a lot of money on them but it may just be the solution for your business in terms of recovering results you used to get with detailed targeting options that no longer exist so if you have found that detailed targeting options that used to work for you really well have been removed they've disappeared or you can't really find very relevant targeting options in general try one two three of these potential solutions different businesses are going

11:35to find success with each that's why we have three different options because as an agency this is what we do we troubleshoot we try and work out solutions for our clients we've found that some have worked really well with the lookalike option the more mature ad accounts broad targeting's worked well and with some we've been able to target other detailed targeting options that still can deliver great results but they're just a little bit different you have to think around the corner a little bit with the media outlets and things along those lines but depending on what's appropriate for your business trial three you may find that all three

12:02work you may find that one works but don't just feel like your detailed time coach has been removed there's nothing you can do now facebook won't work for you that's almost certainly not true so in a second i'm gonna explain how you can use these targeting options in a new facebook ad strategy really really exciting stuff before i do that i want to quickly tell you about our facebook and instagram advertising services i've mentioned it through this video but we offer done for you services we create manage and optimize campaigns for our clients if that's something you're interested in you can book a free call with one of my team members just click

12:29on the link in the video description below you'll be taken through to our website you can book a slot directly into our calendar we do have a 3k per month minimum budget requirement but if you meet that go ahead book a call um no obligation of course we just find out more about how we work and hopefully we get a chance to work together now if you've seen a drop off in your facebook ad results it might also be time to try a new way of advertising on facebook and i'll show you exactly how to do that in this video here in fact in this video i

12:53demonstrate a new facebook ad strategy it's something that almost no one talks about but it can generate incredible results i'd strongly recommend that you go ahead and check it out