We Lost ANOTHER Facebook Ads Targeting Option

0:00Facebook ads targeting has changed an enormous amount over the past few years and we have officially just lost another Facebook ads targeting option and in this video I'm going to show you what we have lost and more importantly I'm going to explain what this means and how it's going to affect us Facebook advertisers okay to show you what's going on here I'm in an example Facebook ad account I'm in ads manager I'm just going to quickly create a campaign I'm just going to go with leads but this will apply to other campaign types as well and I'm going to select manual campaign to demonstrate this now if I go ahead and

0:27jump to the adset level obviously where we um set up all our targeting options and decide who we want to put our ads in front of now if I scroll down and I switch to so this is set up by default with the Advantage Plus audience options as you can see here but if I switch to original audience options met is going to try and convince me not to but a lot of advertisers are still using original audience options and the targeting option that we have lost applies to uh original audience options now in this audience section if we scroll down to this uh detailed targeting section and I

0:57click edit what you will now see or what you won't see what we have lost is the ability to exclude detailed targeting options if we go up here and you can see in custom audiences there's this little button here called add exclusions I'll explain more about that later on we used to have uh something very similar for these detailed targeting options where you were able to exclude certain demographics interest behaviors from your targeting um that is no longer an option that have officially retired that ability now a few years ago this feature detail targetting exclusion was very popular with Facebook advertisers cuz what advertisers would do is they would

1:31separate out their interest targeting options by adsets you might only have one interest targeting option in each adset and what advertisers would do is they would exclude let's say the interest that you're using to Target people in adset a from adset b c d Etc so that you could prevent audience overlap and a lot of Facebook advertisers felt that you get a better test to work out which audience produced the best results because when you're targeting interests that are related to your products and services they're normally going to be quite similar to each other and you would typically have a lot of over overlap uh between those

2:01interest or or other detailed um targeting options so that's why Facebook advertisers used to use it a lot as targeting has changed and as we've seen much more of a shift towards uh Advantage Plus audience where the detail targeting inputs are suggestions as opposed to hard boundaries meta can use them but they also have the flexibility to not as we've seen a shift more and more towards open targeting and in general letting meta do a lot more of the heavy lifting when it comes to targeting Forest advertisers and us having less control this uh option of using detail targeting exclusions um and excluding certain targeting options from

2:35some adsets that you're using in other adsets that has been used less and less anyway so it has been becoming less and less popular over time but but at one stage it was really quite popular and there's still certainly advertisers that until very recently have been using this feature now even back then I didn't recommend using detail targeting exclusions I was absolutely recommending that you had separate interests per adset so you could test to see which one forms best and that allowed you to optimize your campaign and improve um over time but I still wouldn't for example exclude the interest that we're using to Target an adset a from adset b

3:06or the other adsets uh because there was so much overlap and I felt that actually wasn't a good test because if you're excluding 70% of the audience that's contained within the interest for adset b um from adset B because it overlaps with adset a that's not a really very fair test um anyway so it's not something I'd recommend and we now have data to back this up So Meta announced this change these updates detail targeting um recently and said that they were going to be getting rid of detail targeting exclusions they started this July 29th so by the time you see this video um this will be well in effect and

3:37there's a good chance that you won't have it it is being rolled out in phases so some people watching this may still have detailed targeting exclusions um some people may not as meta does with everything nothing just gets rolled out and one go it's always phased uh between AD accounts uh let me just get this this out of the way but meta shared some really valuable and interesting data and this is something that I sort of intuitively knew having run ad campaigns for many years and why didn't recommend using this in the first place is that it made your results worse so here we go a

4:04recent Advertiser test showed that the median cost per conversion was 22.6% lower when not using detail targeting exclusions so in other words advertisers that used detail targeting exclusions uh got worse results the ones that didn't use deta targeting exclusions got 22.6% lower cost by conversion which is pretty significant and it's a really important point I want to highlight here because meta releases a lot of information around various tests they run and and data to back up uh changes that they're making sometimes they will talk about here cost per result um and whenever they talk about cost per result you need to take their data with a pinch of salt a little bit

4:39because in cost per result can be included things like link clicks or Impressions or video views and you're thinking well this change might have reduced the cost per result which sounds good but does it actually matter because does it actually get us leads and sales cheaper which is what we will really want right whenever they say cost per conversion that's a much better data point so saying here that look you get 22 % better results um on a cost per conversion basis which is the most important thing to the vast majority of Facebook Instagram advertisers that's something that I uh go ahead and and pay attention to and that backs up the fact

5:13that you shouldn't really be using detail targeting exclusions and they're using that data to justify getting rid of them right and if I scroll down a little bit further we will see here existing campaigns will remain unaffected until January 31st 2025 So Meta often does this when they retire um Facebook and Instagram advertising features is they will say right no new campaigns no new adets can use this feature so detail targeting exclusions can't be used from July 29th in in most cases but if youve already got a campaign or adset running you can keep using it until a later date in this case 31st of of January and they do that

5:44because they want to give advertisers time to um adjust and be able to sometimes change strategy even if if the change is quite significant I don't think that's likely to be the case um here so if you are if you do have campaigns running and assets running that are using detail targeting exclusions and you feel like that's really beneficial for your campaigns as long as you don't make adjustments to those you can keep running those until um the 31st of January and whilst I haven't recommended most of the time using detailed target exclusions I'm recommending that broadly there are always use cases where individual businesses have found that because of

6:18their market dynamics because of some specific reason they need to do things that contradict the general advice and the best way of doing things and detail targeting exclusions can absolutely uh be one of those let's say for example you advertise to a really small and specific subsection of your Niche and you know that if your ads are put in front of people that are interested in the niche broadly they're not going to convert at all but if they're put in front of just that very specific subsection that they will well maybe you wanted to exclude people that would be categorized in the sort of broader interest to do with your niche as

6:49opposed to those more specific one you may well have seen better results um using detail Target exclusions you can keep running until July January 31st 2025 and then unfortunately it is going to go okay so in a second I want to talk about custom audience exclusions because that's a different thing we're still able to do that and that's very very important before I do just want to quickly let you know about Facebook ads Mastery which is my new course with community and in this course myself and my team have' created the best Facebook and Instagram advertising educational material we've ever created um it's literally the stuff that we are using to

7:19train new staff members um and we obviously want that to be as good as it could possibly be before we let them loose on uh on client accounts and things like that so it really is the very best stuff we've created there's a whole community that comes with it using School for that we've already got 600 plus members um people just like you Facebook Instagram advertisers interacting wanting to help each other out get better myself and my team are in the community all the time answering questions we also do live calls we do live q&as we do live trainings providing people with as much support as we

7:47possibly can so that they get the best results um they possibly can the price is just £97 per month we want to make this as affordable as possible there is a link in the video description you can click on that come through to a page and check out um the details and find out more information hopefully I see you on the inside okay so jumping back into ads manager into our example ad account at the ad set level just going to scroll up within this audience section slightly and we're still within original audience here by the way and we can see that in this custom audien section we've still

8:14got ad exclusion so we still have that option to exclude custom audiences custom audiences being people that have already interacted with your business so warm audiences that you can create you can still um exclude those and that's really important that's actually much more valuable than being able to ex include detailed targeting options anyway uh many businesses will use customing soluions because they want to Target people at a certain stage of the sales funnel so mightbe they want to create a custom audience out of people who have become leads but not yet converted and put ads in front of those people to help convince them to convert

8:45so to do that you would need to create a custom audience of people who have become leads and then a custom audience of people who have converted and exclude the people that have already converted to make that work a lot of people will use custom audience exclusions um in order to be able to run offers that own only apply to new customers and they don't want their old customers to see it or the existing customers to see it and be annoyed that this is only a new customer deal or something along those line so they will create a customer audience out of their existing customers and then exclude uh people that uh that

9:13that are in that so that they only reach new people so you can absolutely use um ad exclusion still within the the custom audience section here within original audience and if we jump over to back to Advantage Plus audience which is what I actually recommend most people do and what most um advertisers will use if I come in here click edit into the audience control section and click on show more options we can also exclude these custom audiences when we're using advant plus audience so remember that everything within the audience control section so this section here with an Advantage Plus audience adset that's a hard boundary so our location data is a

9:50hard boundary minimum age is a hard boundary if we exclude custom audience that's a hard boundary whereas all the information that we put down here in the Advantage Plus audience section when it comes to targeting those as you can see here are audience suggestions So Meta can use the suggestions they cannot according to whether they think it's going to help improve your performance so either way whether you're using original audience options or Advantage Plus audience you can still exclude custom audiences that ability hasn't gone away and I don't think it will for the reasons I just described um I think that's quite valuable to advertisers I I

10:22can't see Meta getting rid of that anytime soon so because we're keeping custom audience exclusions I don't think that losing detail t targeting exclusions is really going to be a big deal yes there are certain advertisers that use it um and probably benefit from it even though it's not typically what's recommended and for those advertisers it might hurt uh but I think across the board this is not a disaster for Facebook advertisers or anything like that I've seen quite a lot of grumbling and people concerned and I think that's less to do with the fact that detail targeting exclusions have gone and more just a concern about this is the trend

10:53we're heading on where more and more targeting options are being taken away and what are we going to be end up with are we going to end up with a situation where you just have to trust meta completely with all targeting all the time and you can't have any input uh we may well do I don't think that'll happen for a little while uh but that might be coming down the line I think that's probably why people are more concerned about this but just to say I don't think this is a big deal if they got rid of custom audience exclusions a much bigger deal by the way if you want more

11:18information about custom audiences I sort of glossed over it the concept I'll include a link in the description that shows you how to create custom audiences and what they are and all that sort of stuff if you want to do some of those things that I I mentioned um minute ago but as long as we keep that I don't think the detail targeting exclusions going away is is that much of a concern for the vast majority of Facebook advertisers and if you haven't already I'd strongly recommend you check out my new video on the ideal Facebook ad campaign structure which you can find right here Facebook ad campaign

11:45structure has changed a lot because of a lot of the targeting changes that have happened over the last few years and the way we do things now is very different to how we did them a couple of years ago this is absolutely something you need to stay up to date with so if you haven't already check this out