Facebook Ads Retargeting Has Completely Changed

0:00Facebook ads, retargeting has completely changed. In this video, I'm going to break down what's changed, why old-school retargeting techniques no longer work, and what you should do now instead. Let's get into it. So, to demonstrate one of the major changes when it comes to Facebook and Instagram ads retargeting, I want to show you an example campaign and show you a very interesting piece of data. So, this is a campaign we've run for a client. I'm at the ad set level, and this campaign, this ad set, is set up to be a cold audience targeting campaign in the traditional sense. If I just go ahead and click edit on this, and scroll down

0:30to the audience section, you can see that it is basically open, designed to target cold audiences. We're targeting the whole of the US, open age range, open gender, no custom audiences, so no warm audiences added, and one interest targeting option added as a suggestion, right? So, very much a cold audience uh campaign setup in in the traditional sense. But, if we go ahead and take a look at the data, and we go into breakdown, and then use audience segments, something I'd strongly recommend you you check out and take a look at. What this does is it breaks down where the results and spend have been allocated between engaged audience,

1:06existing customers, and new audience. So, engaged audience are going to be warm audiences that have interacted with a business before, but haven't actually purchased, they're not a registered customer. So, it could be that they visited the website without purchasing, they're on an email list, um they've consumed content on Facebook or Instagram, they follow you, lots of different ways for someone to be in a warm audience. Existing customers are people who have actually bought from you previously, and then new audience are the people left over that don't fit into either category. Now, even though this campaign, like I just showed you, is set up to be a cold audience targeting

1:38campaign, look at the split in spend, right? So, this campaign has spent $80,000 just under, um 47,000, 48,000 of which have been spent on genuinely new audience. So, what's that coming in at? 40% almost being spent on a combination of engaged and existing customers. And because it's less expensive to generate, in this case, purchases from engaged audiences and existing customers, the proportion of website purchases that come from those audience are disproportionately high. You can see that the cost per purchase is significantly lower um from engaged audience and existing customers than it is from new audience. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. We know that new uh that warm audiences um

2:20convert better. So, out of the 942 purchase generated, more than half have come from engaged audience and existing customers. The traditional way of doing things is where you would have a cold audience campaign, which is clearly what this is set up to be, and then a separate warm audience campaign. Kind of looks a little bit silly when you look at this data and think, "Meta is very much going to retarget. They're going to find my warm audiences and put my ads in front of both existing customers and engaged audiences anyway, whether I set the campaign to do it or not. So, what's the point in having a separate warm audience

2:54campaign or warm audience ad set?" And I'd encourage you to check this in your ad account to see your split between um the three audiences. Obviously, it's going to vary depending on the size of your existing customer audience and your engaged audience. If you're just getting started, well, not much money is going to be spent um on those. If you come through here, by the way, and you just see all unknown, and you just don't have any data, that's probably because you

3:14haven't set up your audience segments. Definitely something you want to do. Let me quickly show you how to do that. So, I'm just going to jump into a different ad account that doesn't have it set up. Then you want to come over here to advertising settings, and you'll see right up here with the shortcuts, we've got um engaged audience and existing customers e- either of the which are

3:30defined, which is what we want to do. So, if I click on this, and this is where we need to select the custom audiences that correspond to our engaged audience. So, this would be something like um website visitors, right? So, I could go with all website visitors 180. You could also look to add in here people who have engaged with your Facebook page, your Instagram account, lead form, watch videos of yours, could be people on an email list, people who have interacted with an app of yours, lots of different types of customer audiences. I've got other videos talking through um custom audiences and retargeting and how to create all of

3:59those, something you definitely still want to do. So, I'm just going to add that in to to demonstrate the the process here. And then we've got existing customers, um so this would be normally a customer list. Could be something that you've imported externally, could be data that you're getting from like Shopify, could be people who have triggered the purchase conversion event, different ways to go about doing that. So, if I go ahead and click confirm, we've now got both of these defined, and if you do that, then when you check back um at your data once you've run your ad campaigns, you'll be able to see that breakdown uh like we

4:29just described in the uh audience segments, and you'll be able to see the split in spend between engaged, existing, and new audiences. Now, because Meta is going to retarget anyway, you might be thinking, "Well, there are a number of things that I don't need to bother with, like creating custom audiences." And that's wrong, that's bad advice. Um yes, Meta is going to have more visibility over who has taken certain actions that would classify someone as a warm audience, um and they will retarget automatically, but it is still absolutely worth you

4:55setting up your custom audiences. Firstly, so that you can define, you create those custom audiences to then be able to define who engaged audiences are, existing customers, like we just did. That's important. Secondly, there may still be instances where you want to directly retarget or have a retargeting focused campaign. I'll talk more about

5:11that um and those instances in a minute. Thirdly, there are customer audiences that your that Meta does not have visibility over. So, when you create your custom audiences, depending on the custom audience type, you can only create those so many days into the past. So, if it's someone who has engaged with a lead form, for example, you can only do that within the last 90 days. Um with Facebook page engages, it's going to be 365. With website visitors, it's going to be 180. So, Meta doesn't have visibility over the audiences from people who have taken actions longer ago than those time frames, but you can upload external data, external

5:45lists, for example, that include those people. So, that's really important because that's going to help Meta better understand who it is that has bought from you before, is likely to buy again, engaged with your stuff, and help them improve performance. Particularly important for newer ad accounts where you can provide your custom audiences, provide direction to Meta to be like, "We know you don't know who our customers are yet, here's some indication to help you go on your way and and improve performance, okay?" The other thing that you might think is no longer necessary is setting up the Meta pixel. I've heard that come up a number

6:16of times recently, and that is absolutely false. Meta still needs that to have visibility over the actions that you will take on your website, and the fact that they reached your website in the first place. Very, very important. Even if you're not specifically retargeting your website visitors in an ad set, it doesn't mean that you don't want to get the pixel set up with all the conversion events and and tracking and and everything like that. Absolutely still very much important to do both those actions. Hyros is the best tracking and attribution software for Meta ads. It's the software all the big players in this industry use, including

6:44myself. I use it to track results for my own ads, as well as all my organic results as well. So, if someone books a call for our done-for-you services, for example, I can see exactly where that person came from with a lot of accuracy. That allows me to make better decisions for my marketing and my business. Hyros has been able to track that from our ad spend in this campaign, we've generated 96,000 pounds, but 58,000 pounds of that was not reported by Meta. So, if I was just looking at my data within my Meta ad account, I might come to the conclusion that this campaign is doing okay,

7:13but in reality, this campaign is doing a lot, lot better. Now, this is a relatively extreme example because of the nature of our business. So, most of our products, services have a recurring billing element. Meta might be able to see what we make initially from our ad spend or that initial transaction, but not those subsequent payments, and that's why it it shows the importance here of being able to accurately see what did we actually get from our ad spend in order to be able to make better decisions and optimize correctly. So, if you want to improve the performance of your ad campaigns without having to touch your ads, go ahead and sign up to

7:43Hyros. There is a link in the video description. So, nowadays, we rarely run separate retargeting campaigns or separate uh retargeting ad sets even. What we'll often run is a hybrid. We will understand that you're not really setting up any ad set as a cold audience ad set or warm audience ad set. Meta is going to do its thing anyway. I mean, I showed you an example that was set up as a traditional cold audience ad set, and Meta went ahead and did a bunch of retargeting within that, but the inverse is also true. If you set up an ad set or a campaign to be retargeting focused, so

8:14target my warm audiences, Meta is going to put your ads in front of cold audiences as well. So, often you could run uh a campaign that you think is set up to be retargeting, and a campaign that you think is set up to be cold audience, and the split between how much of the budget is spent between warm and cold audiences is the same across both of them. Basically, they're in effect the same campaign, even if the targeting looks quite different. And that's because the custom audience section is within the suggestion audience part of targeting. Basically, Meta can choose to target your warm audience or choose to

8:45ignore it. If I show you what I'm talking about, I'm here in the ad set level, right? In audience, we've got controls, so those are hard boundaries, hard constraints, Meta won't go outside that targeting. It's basically just location and a few other things, but then we've got within the suggestion audience, we've got um show settings, we've got include these custom audiences, and this is where we could look to add in our warm audiences. So, because it's within this suggestion audience section, it gives Meta full flexibility, and like I said, we run many campaigns, many examples where we've got what we think is a warm audience campaign, what we

9:13think is a cold audience campaign or ad sets, you can talk about those interchangeably in this instance, um and they just end up targeting the same people, and that obviously causes issues and is not ideal. So, we often, like I said, we'll run a hybrid. We know that our one ad set is going to target both cold and warm, and then we create the rest of the campaign with that in mind. So, we're not going to often produce ad creative that only speaks to warm audiences. Um we want it to apply to both warm and cold. We were also going to take advantage of the fact

9:42that hybrid [snorts] ad sets, a mixture of cold and warm audiences, allow for very dynamic budget reallocation, which is great. What do I mean by that? Let's say you start advertising and you have really small warm audiences. Well, over time, those warm audiences are going to grow. More people who have engaged with you, you're probably going to build a larger customer base, and that means that over time the proportion of your budget that is spent retargeting those warm audiences, those existing customers, is going to increase, which is going to help improve your overall results. If you have that in separate ad sets or separate campaigns, you have to

10:15manage that manually, that becomes more complicated, less likely to get it right. If it's all within the one ad set, Meta can just do that dynamically as things change over time, you can have budget reallocation to try and get you the best performance. So, separate retargeting campaigns often feel quite pointless at this stage, not just because it's not actually a retargeting campaign or not exclusively a retargeting campaign, Meta's going to target cold audiences within that as well, but also it can create some issues, right? So, why have two ad sets or two campaigns targeting the same people with the same offer when you can have one? Much better to consolidate

10:48that data as opposed to having fragmented data. We know that one campaign generating 50 conversions a week is likely to optimize better than two campaigns generating 25 conversions each a week because the extra conversion volume is beneficial. You can also end up with issues with auction overlap. If Meta's targeting the same people with separate campaigns, even if you thought one was retargeting and one was for cold audiences, well, how does Meta plan ad delivery when it comes to impression frequency? So, within one ad set, Meta might be thinking, "Right, we will put an ad in front of this individual four times over the next 48 hours. We think

11:24that's most likely to convert." Well, how does that work if that person is also being targeted in another campaign or another ad set? Things get confused, that's effectively what auction overlap is, and and yeah, not ideal. Now, if you do need to create a separate retargeting campaign that is just retargeting, your ads are only being put in front of warm audiences or existing customers, perhaps because you've got a special offer that only they can see, it would cause you issues if true cold audiences saw it, or you really want to customize your messaging and your ad creative. Let's say people have bought something and you really want to ascend them to another

11:55thing, and it no one's going to go ahead and buy that high-ticket thing if they haven't bought the the smaller thing in the first place, so you really just want to retarget the people that are in that middle step between buying the small thing and potentially buying the big thing. And you can do that in most ad

12:09accounts, not all. It depends whether or not you've got this feature. So, I'm back in the example campaign at the ad set level at the audience section, and it depends whether or not you've got this option here, further limit the reach of your ads, which sounds tremendously like not something you would want to do, but but it will help you do it for this specific instance. If you click on that and then you go ahead and click switch setup, Meta's going to come up with all sorts of warnings to try and convince

12:31you not to do this, by the way. Then what we've got now is we can use these targeting options as hard constraints as opposed to a suggestion, which will actually allow you to just target the people within your warm audiences. So, if I go here, for example, into custom audiences, click on this, and let's say we just wanted to advertise to our existing customers, so we've got example customer list, and you could do this with other warm audiences, add that in there, and then you also, very important, want to make sure that

12:57you don't have use as suggestion ticked. If you do, then it's just going to function as the previous setup, it's not going to work in terms of only targeting your warm audiences, but if you have that unselected, use as suggestion, add in your warm audiences here, and then Meta is going to put ads in front of

13:13these people and these people only. Targeting is never 100% accurate, there will be some people outside of your warm audiences that see your ads, but that is what this is now designed to do. Not everyone has this, not everyone has the the further limit the reach of your ads option, which basically puts you back into an older style of of targeting when it comes to Meta ads, but that is an option. It wouldn't be my recommended default to use this. I think it's much better in most instances to just go with the hybrid ad set, a mixture of warm and cold audiences for the advantages that

13:42I've talked about, the data consolidation and um and not running into auction overlap issues, but there are specific scenarios where you need to do this, and this is how you do it. And speaking of things that have completely changed since the Andromeda update, we've completely changed how we test new Facebook ads. I know this is an issue that a lot of Meta advertisers are struggling with, so I lay it all out in this video. You can still test ad creative post-Andromeda, it is really important that you do, but you have to use a new tool, and you have to do it the right way. I've written it

14:10all down right here.