Facebook Ads Targeting Just Changed! Here's What It Means…

0:00Meta has just [music] released a brand new AI targeting feature that could fundamentally change how we target with Facebook ads. In this video, I'll show you how it works, what it looks like inside the platform, and what this means for us advertisers. Okay, so to demonstrate this, I'm in an example Meta ad account. I'm in Ads Manager, and I've quickly created an example leads campaign, although this feature applies

0:20to other campaign objectives as well. And I've jumped to the ad set level, which is obviously where the targeting settings are set. And I've scrolled down to this audience section. And then within this suggested audience section here, if we click on show suggestions, and then we scroll down to detailed targeting. If I click on this, you may notice something new and something different. We've got describe your audience. Now, you can switch and select use original options. If you switch to that, that's what we were dealing with until this new option was added, and what many ad accounts still have. Not all ad accounts have this. Looking

0:53through some of my ad accounts, some have this new feature, some don't. It looks like Meta is testing right now. They always do this, and then they roll out to other ad accounts once once they've been able to work out the bugs. Um but if we click back on describe your audience, and I click on get started, you can see what this new feature does, right? So, it says describe your audience. Describe your audience, and our advanced AI will generate relevant interests and behaviors. Don't include sensitive topics, etc., etc. Right? So, we can add in a description up to 2,000 characters. So, Meta is allowing us to

1:23be really quite detailed here, and I think that alone tells a bit of a story of how Meta's AI is going to interpret the information we give to try and really work out, okay, these are the people that this business really wants to reach. So, I just prepped a a quick description of our ideal customer profile. I actually got three different ideal customer profiles in here for our mentorship program. So, let me just paste that in there. So, what I've got here is small to medium-sized business owners that are currently running their own Meta ads, marketing agency owners and employees running Meta ads for clients, in-house

1:56performance marketers running Meta ads for large corporations. So, those are the the three buckets that make up the people that join my my Meta ads mentorship program. Link in the video description in case you're interested. And and yeah, so I've added those three in there. And then if I go ahead and click generate options, and this is where the video kind of goes a bit wrong, because unfortunately, this feature isn't working properly. Now, when I did this earlier in preparation for this video, having a play with this new tool, it worked just fine. Right now, it isn't working at all. If I click

2:25generate options, just nothing happens. And I thought, okay, do I abandon this video, come back to it later? And I thought, no, I'm going to go ahead and get it done, get it recorded, and get it out to you. A, because I really want you guys to know about this new feature. I think this is a big deal. Talk more about that in a minute. And B, it's actually good for you to see that new features like this are often really buggy, and they often don't work. So, unfortunately, adding this in here, trying to generate options, nothing happens. When you add in a description like this, you can

2:56describe, you know, up to 2,000 characters, your ideal customer avatar, your ideal customer profile in a lot of detail, then what Meta will do is they'll generate a number of detailed targeting options. And then you can choose to you can see sort of grayed out here, click add all or add in specific individual ones into your ad set, and

3:14that can be the basis of your targeting. Now, when I did this earlier and it actually worked, the suggested detailed targeting options were really quite good. I was actually impressed by the accuracy of it. I was looking through them thinking, yeah, that is pretty dead on of the people that we want to to reach. And interestingly, there were some options that Meta came up with that I wasn't aware of that I hadn't been using previously. See, we run ad campaigns for our own offers. We will experiment with adding in detailed targeting options as suggestions. And so, I've got a reasonable understanding, or I thought I did, of the various

3:46options that described our ideal customer profile when it comes to Meta's detailed targeting options. But there are a number of options that came up when I went through this tool that I wasn't aware existed, hadn't used previously. And you may well find something similar. It's easy to forget that targeting options are added and removed all the time. So, you could sort of have an idea of like we're going to target these people, these sort of accurately describe who we're looking to reach, and then 6 months later without you realizing, there's a whole bunch of of other options that might be perfect for your business. And this tool helped

4:20unearth some of those for me. So, I want to talk about what this means for us advertisers, and if we look forward a little bit, what's likely to happen with this feature, not just as it's being rolled out right now, but future iterations of it. But first, I want to go quickly and let you know about Hyros. Hyros is the best tracking

4:37and attribution software for Meta ads. It's the software all the big players in this industry use, including myself. 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

5:06ad account, I might come to the conclusion that this campaign is doing okay, but 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 on that initial transaction, but not those subsequent payments. 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

5:36improve the performance of your ad campaigns without having to touch your ads, go ahead and sign up to Hyros. There is a link in the video description. So, what does this new describe your audience AI targeting feature actually mean for us advertisers? I think in its current form, honestly, not a lot. I don't think it's that valuable. Yes, it's going to help you save time. Instead of going through and browsing through the different categories to find the detailed targeting options you might want to to use, you can use this. It's going to save you time. It might help unearth some options that you weren't otherwise aware of if you've been

6:03advertising a while. And and that's a time saver, basically. So, a little bit of value in that, but nothing nothing massive. Particularly with the way that Meta advertising has gone and targeting has gone over the last number of years, where the importance of adding in things like detailed targeting has become less and less. Used to be really really important, could absolutely make or break your ad success. Very unlikely to do so now. And any detailed targeting options that you do add, either using this tool or the old way of of doing things and adding those in, they're always going to be added in as suggestions, meaning that Meta can

6:36choose to target people who do fit into that detailed targeting category, are interested in that thing you select, do exhibit that behavior that you've selected, or not, right? So, the impact on who actually sees your ads is relatively low right now. So, you might think, okay, well, what's the point in Meta doing this? Should I spend any time on this? Why has Ben gone and created a

6:57video about this? And I think the future of this feature is much more interesting and much more exciting than its current iteration. And I've done this long enough, I've seen enough features, I've spoken to enough people in in positions of authority at Meta to know what's very very likely to happen with this feature going forward. And that's that right now, you use your described audience, the AI analyzes it and comes up with all comes up with all these different categorizations, interests, behaviors, etc. I am very confident in predicting that going forward, this feature will evolve, and it will become more sophisticated than that. And instead of you describing your

7:37audience to then it be categorized and you select those categories, Meta just goes off your description. And that I think is really exciting. The potential for that is enormous, because that would allow us as advertisers to be really specific with who we're telling Meta we want to target. To get really granular and be like, I know you've got these categories, but actually, I only want to serve like 5% of people within this targeting option. I would like you to get much more specific. That's where I'm going to spend my budget most efficiently, get the best return on ad spend. And whilst we've seen this trend within Meta ads of targeting that you

8:17select as an advertiser being less important, that's because of how the platform has evolved, combined with privacy concerns. So, more and more of the targeting is sort of done in in inside Meta's systems, as opposed to us advertising advertisers selecting specific targeting options. That doesn't mean that the principal foundation of targeting, as in making sure that our ads are put in front of people that are highly likely to be interested in what

8:43we're advertising, has gone away. That is incredibly important to advertising. It has been, it has always been. Think of all the ads you see, and this is less likely to be true on Meta, which is a more sophisticated ad platform than say a billboard or a TV ad. Think of all the ads you see as you go through life that not only are you not interested in that product or service being advertised, you never ever would be. Because that's just totally aimed at someone else with different interests, different life circumstances, etc. That's a complete waste of advertising for that advertiser. If they could remove all the people that are

9:17seeing those ads that could never become a customer, they would be able to spend less without seeing any drop in results. Often significantly less at seeing drop in results, because if they're still reaching the right people, then then they'd get all the conversions that they would otherwise have gotten. And whilst Meta's targeting is very sophisticated, there's always room for improvement. And there is a scenario in which you reach fewer people, you spend less, and you get just as many, if not more, sales, leads, etc., than what you're currently getting if we can describe our audience in a lot of detail. So, if we go back to what I

9:50entered as a description here, you know, small to medium-sized business owners that are currently running their own Meta ads. Like that's much more specific than any category that's going to occur within Ads Manager or any other form of advertising platform, right? That's really specific. In-house performance marketers running meta ads for large corporations. That's not a huge amount of people doing that. Incredibly valuable for my business to reach. So, in this world, we would actually end up paying probably significantly more in terms of cost per thousand impressions, which would be great for meta. They would love that cuz that means they can

10:22make more money from their ad inventory. But at the same time providing us advertisers with better results. Cuz you're going, "Actually, I'm willing to pay four times as much to reach someone that is an in-house performance marketer running meta ads for a large corporation because they're absolutely perfect for my mentorship program and then I am someone who has just watched a video on meta ads and maybe had a little search over the last 6 months. They could still be categorized as interested in meta advertising, but is nowhere near as specific as the ICP that I've that I've described there. So, I think that is likely to happen relatively soon. I

10:58think that is a huge unlock of value for meta. One of the big reasons why I think that's going to happen and a huge potential unlock for us advertisers. If it does happen, if we do move in that direction, I will certainly let you know about it. Make sure you subscribe cuz I keep you up to date with this feature and all the meta ads features cuz things change and improve all the time. And whilst we're on the topic of targeting, have you seen my recent video detailing my new retargeting strategy? If not, you

11:21should go ahead and check it out here. Post Andromeda, we've had to update our campaign structure, our recommended campaign structure significantly. As a result, we've had to change our retargeting strategy and I laid all out in this video here. A lot of advertisers are still using old retargeting strategies that are hurting their performance. You want to get updated,

11:39this video show you how.