The ONLY Facebook Ads Targeting Tutorial You Need

0:00I've been running Facebook ads for more than 11 years, and during that time period, Facebook ads targeting is probably the single element of Facebook ads that has changed the most. Now, as a Meta ads agency, we have more than 500 Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns live for over 100 clients at any one time, and we have to stay at the very cutting edge of what's working when it comes to Facebook ads targeting. And in this video, I'm going to share and show you how to use all the targeting options that we're currently using for our clients and get the best possible results, and I'm going to explain which

0:27ones you want to use and when. Okay, so to walk you through this, I'm in an example Facebook ad account. I'm in Ads Manager. I'm going going to go ahead and create an example campaign, click on this green plus create button, and I'm going to go ahead and select leads as the campaign objective. Now, what I'm about to show you can absolutely apply for sales campaigns, um if that's more appropriate for your business, or traffic campaigns if you can't track either um leads or sales. Uh the targeting options we're going to go through can absolutely apply to those as well. Wanted to to make that clear. I'm

0:53just going to go ahead and use leads for demonstration purposes. There are also going to be a number of things in this campaign ad set, etc., that I'm not going to touch. This is very much a video focused on targeting, so if you think, "Oh, you haven't changed this," or you didn't I'm not addressing that.

1:05We're just leaving those as the default. This is very much targeting focused. So, I'm going to go ahead and select leads and then click continue. And now, what we see the next option that Meta's trying to push us towards a tailored leads campaign. Again, this uh variations of this will apply to other campaign objectives as well. And what I'm going to do for this video, what I'd recommend you do, is go ahead and click on manual setup. When you go with a tailored leads campaign, you are very restricted in terms of the targeting options. Effectively, Meta is going to decide it all for you. That's probably

1:32not the best approach, particularly when you're a beginner and you need to learn the platform and how targeting works and what options to use. And particularly if you've got a relatively new ad account where Meta doesn't have much in the way of previous conversion data within your ad account to use to inform how to do the targeting and how to um get you the best possible results. I think taking a

1:50bit more control makes a lot of sense. So, we're going to go ahead and select a manual leads campaign, and I'd recommend um you do the same thing. Now, this is we've gone into the campaign window here. I'm going to go ahead and jump to the ad set window. As I said, I'm not messing around with anything else of conversion location or performance goal or budget, anything like that. I have loads of videos about all that sort of stuff that you can uh find on my YouTube channel. Just have a

2:12have a search around. Now, one of the really big changes that's taken place over the last 12 months or so is this shift from original audience uh targeting options to this Advantage Plus Audience and Audience Control combo that you can see on screen in front of me now. This was introduced, then it became the default, um and now a lot of Facebook advertisers, when they do select a manual campaign, they have to use um this setup. They don't have the original options. If I scroll down a little bit, you can see that on this ad account, I can switch to the original um targeting options if I want to. I'd

2:43recommend that most Meta advertisers don't, and I'll explain why explain the differences. So, with original audience options, original targeting options, the targeting inputs that you gave to Meta, they acted as hard constraints, hard boundaries. So, let's say for example, you wanted to target a specific interest or a specific online behavior or a specific demographic, Meta would only advertise to those people. They wouldn't go beyond that. Whereas with Advantage Plus Audience, you can see here, these inputs, the targeting inputs we give, are audience suggestions. So, what Meta will do is they will take that information, they will go, "Okay, we get it. You want to target roughly these

3:16people. That's who we'll start by targeting. That's where we'll focus. But if we think we can get you better results by expanding that and targeting some other people that perhaps don't fit into that interest targeting criteria or don't fit into that demographic, then we will do so." That's the big shift. And one of the things I like about Advantage Plus Audience is it stops Meta advertisers from making big mistakes like targeting audiences that are too small because Meta has that flexibility to override the targeting inputs that you have given. Now, the reason why we've now got an Advantage Plus Audience and Audience Control combo is there are

3:47still certain elements that we need to use as hard boundaries and hard constraints. Things like location targeting. Obviously, uh you don't want your ads being shown in other parts of the world if you can't serve customers there. And there are a few other options as well. So, we're going to go through this now, um and I'm going to start with the audience control section, and then we're going to work our way through and I'll explain the various elements and the various targeting options that you need to use. So, the first thing is location, and that's an obvious place to start, um and a really important thing

4:14to get right if you want your Meta ad campaigns to succeed. Now, I'm based in the UK, Meta's given me the UK here, um but we can add in other countries. We can also get much more specific and just target locally, and I'm going to walk through those options. Now, the general rule of thumb here when it comes to location targeting on Meta is to target the areas where you can serve your customers. Don't artificially constrain your targeting options. Don't go smaller than you need to, but also don't go wider, don't go broader than where you can actually realistically acquire customers from. So, us as a Meta ads

4:45agency, we have we have clients all over the world. We have clients in the UK, we have major markets like the US, Canada, Australia, but we also have clients in Dubai and Singapore and India and South Africa and Germany and literally all over the world. So, we could target worldwide if we wanted to. If I was new to advertising on the platform, and I was advertising my own business, Meta ad

5:07agency, I would stick to my core market. So, in that case, it's going to be UK, uh United States, um let's say Australia and Canada. Those are going to be, say, 85% of our of our clients, with other countries having other ones um dotted around, okay? That's what I might look to add in. Now, obviously, if we only served only worked with customers in the UK, we would just go with the UK. If we only served customers in the US, we would just go with the US. And let's say we had a business that operated only locally. So, I live in a town in the UK called um

5:35Cheltenham. So, if I go ahead and add that in here, we've got Cheltenham, uh England, and what we can see here is that Meta has defaulted to this town plus a 25-mile radius around the town. So, if you're a local business and you only serve customers locally, you want to enter in wherever you are and then select the right area around that to target. And this is going to be a judgment call based on you as a business owner and as a marketer trying to work out realistically, how far are people willing to travel to come and work with us? Let's say you've got a gym or a

6:08restaurant or something like that to come to come and be our customer. Uh or how far are we willing to travel? Let's say you're a landscaper or a roofer. How far are we willing to travel um to service customers? And that would be your target area. So, we can change this radius. We could just do the current city only if we wanted to, if we think, uh you know, only people that actually live here are going to are going to be interested in this. That's a possibility. You can do um a radius obviously is default is 25. We can go up

6:31to 50 miles, 10 miles. And that's going to be a judgment call, as I said, based on, you know, we think our customer is only going to travel 15 miles, or we want to expand it a little bit to include this extra um town here, or something along these lines. That's very much going to vary depending on

6:44your business. What I see a lot of advertisers do is they will either think, "Oh, I've heard that when you advertise on Facebook, you want really large audiences." So, even though they only operate locally, they go and add in a massive area around where they are. That's not a good idea. You can see this audience size has been reduced to 440 to about 517,000 people. Um but if that's where you operate, it's absolutely fine. If you bring that audience right down and you've only got 50,000 people in your town, but that's the only place that you operate, that again, that's absolutely fine. Prioritize your business and where

7:15you can do business first over what's ideal in terms of optimizing a Facebook and an Instagram ad campaign, which is typically large audiences, but only um where it makes sense. I also see the opposite, where let's say uh business can advertise nationally or even internationally, but they decide to pick certain prospects. So, like let's say we could deliver our products to the all of the UK, but we think our best prospects

7:38are going to come from London. Therefore, we decide to just advertise in London. That's not a good idea. If your best prospects are primarily in London, Meta is going to work that out for you, and they're going to put your ads in front of people that are in London for the most part. But if there are other prospects outside of London, then if you only target London, you're going to miss out on those. Whereas if you target all of the country, Meta might think, "Yeah, 80% of the ads are being shown to people in London, but there's someone in Manchester that is that is highly interested in these

8:08products. We think they'd be a great prospect. Let's put an ad in front of them." And there's lots of those people. Could be someone that visited your website, for example, could be retargeted. So, so the general rule of thumb is wherever you can deliver, um that's what you want to target location-wise. I'm going to go ahead and just add in the UK for demonstration purposes uh for this video. Okay. So, now you can see that's the the obvious thing that comes up here as the audience controls. There are other options. It's really important to go through this. So, if you go ahead and click more, you can

8:38set a minimum age. So, this only goes up to 25, goes from 18 to 25, and it's only a minimum age, so you can't cap the age range at the top end. Um but this is going to be really important for certain businesses. If you're advertising certain things that you can't advertise to people under a certain age, you can go ahead and add these criteria in. It might be that you just want to set 25 as your minimum age if you're advertising something that you just know does not

9:04appeal to people under a certain age. Like for us, for example, as a Meta ads agency, we are rarely going to get clients under 25. Every now and then does happen, but most of our clients are going to be probably average is probably in their 30s, but we have clients in their 40s, 50s, 60s, probably 70s. Uh we do have some in in their 20s as well, but we might set a criteria being like,

9:24"This is the majority of our audience." But and again, sometimes it's like a legal requirement. You can't advertise certain products to anyone under 21, for example. So, you might need to set that, okay? You can also, if you want to, exclude custom audiences. I'm going to show you exactly how to use custom audiences and what they are later on in this video, but just to say that a custom audience is effectively a warm audience. So, it's people that have interacted with business before. You might decide that you don't want ads from a new campaign to be put in front of the existing customers. Let's say you've got a special new promotion

9:51that's only available for new customers. You don't want your existing customers to see it. You can go go and add this in here um as an exclusion. And then, the last thing you can do with an audience controls you can set as a hard boundary is languages. You can set your languages. Now, most advertisers are going to be able to leave this as all languages, that's absolutely fine, but it might be that for example you're running ads in Canada and you only or you find your best results you only really serve French-speaking Canadians, you only speak French perhaps, and therefore you might want to specify that

10:18within your languages and metal put ads in front of people that are far more likely to speak that language. There are obviously other examples of different locations, but just something to be aware of. Most people seem to be fine leaving that as all languages. So, those are the options that we have within audience controls and those are all going to act as hard boundaries. So, if we set a minimum age of say 21, our ads are not going to be shown to people

10:38under the age of 21. Then we get down into the Advantage Plus Audience section. You can see here that we've got audience suggestions, optional. I'm going to go ahead and open this up. Now, I'll get to custom audiences in a minute cuz that's a whole topic and I want to want to go into that

10:53cuz that's really important. First, I want to talk about age. Now, because in audience controls we set the minimum age as 18 as 21, we can see that the the age criteria has changed there. If I go ahead and change that back to 18, that'll change to 18. But we can edit this age range. Now, you might be thinking why have you got an age range in Advantage Plus Audience and in Audience Controls? Well, the reason is

11:14very simple. This here is a suggestion. This is not a hard boundary. So, let's say you're like, "Okay, my target audience is people age 35 to 45." Okay, that's my core. Metal will take that information on board, they will start by advertising primarily to those people, but they will expand beyond that if they think it's appropriate. So, what I would recommend you do here is give metal some direction in terms of your typical age range of the people that are interested in your products and services, but don't get overly specific. I wouldn't go any more specific than 10 years and often we would shoot for more like a 20-year

11:53gap. Um but as again, metal's really smart in working out who to target based on your input. I'd rather they had more flexibility than less. I know they have lots of flexibility anyway, but um yeah, we would we would normally look to make this broader. So, for example, to give an example, if we're advertising for our Facebook and Instagram advertising services, we would literally target 25

12:14plus. So, we'd leave it really broad. Just want to be clear on that. Okay, genders is the next one. So, you obviously have all men or women. If you have a business that is 80% or more skewed one way or the other, then I would get more specific and say, "No, look, like 95% of our customers are women." Fine, go ahead and enter in women. Not going to have a

12:38problem with that. If it's kind of 60/40, 65/35, I'd recommend going with all. Again, metal's going to be able to to work that out. But if you are very heavily skewed one way or the other, you can select men, you can select women, that's not a problem. Then we get into this detailed targeting section. So, here is where we're going to enter in interests,

12:57demographics, behaviors. So, what you want to do here is not overthink it. You can either click in and search for various options to do with your products and services or you can click on browse. If you have the time, I'd recommend going through the various categories and finding the options of like, "Oh, yes, our customers are parents and what kind of parents what kind of age children they have" and going through all the various options and seeing what there there is available. If you want the the quicker and easier version, you can just search for things related to what what it is that you're offering. So again, let's

13:25say we're advertising our Facebook advertising services, we might start entering in things like digital marketing as an option, okay? So, people interested in digital marketing. We might enter in small business owners as a targeting option, right? As a behavior in that case. Um we could enter in things like Facebook page admins. You know, if you're an admin of a Facebook page, there's a good job that you um have a business and we could you could see that Facebook page admins when I added that in, there is even a more specific one if you wanted that, which is business page admins, which is usually what we would go with as opposed

13:58to Facebook page admins cuz that's going to include a lot of people that are admins of pages to do with communities and sports clubs and etc. etc., okay? So, you just go through and you have a little search and you see what comes up. We entered in something broader like marketing, we can see there's going to

14:11be a bunch of suggestions, right? There's marketing as interest, there's viral marketing, influencer marketing, marketing strategy, loads of different options that you could use. Now, one thing I want to highlight here is we can see we've got a number of different marketings. thinking, "Well, why are there so many different options?" You can see over here on the right-hand side, that's because they have different categorizations. So, one is field of study, one is job title, one is employer, one is schools, and there's marketing as an interest as well. So, that's just important to be aware of because you might be thinking, "I want to reach people that are interested in

14:42marketing, that might be interested in the hiring a marketing agency." You don't want to go ahead and select marketing as a job title necessarily or as an employer because if someone actually works in the industry or they work for another agency, they're not going to hire us for our services. So, just be aware of that. Make sure you reach the right people when it comes to

14:58to that sort of thing, okay? So, when it comes to adding in these detailed targeting options, I think this is the best place for beginners to start. I would recommend you add some in. And remember, these are not hard constraints. So, it's very difficult to make a big mistake here. Metal has the flexibility and you can add in as few or as many as you want. You could add in

15:16none or you could add in a whole bunch. Um I would recommend usually starting with something like four or five if you wanted a rough guideline. But um there's no right or wrong answer on that. And I think this is good particularly for new ad accounts cuz it does give metal that direction because as soon as you start running ad campaigns, the AI and optimization process is going to try and get you the best results possible. It's going to be trying to work out all the various bits and bobs and and who to put ads in front of and what time of day and how many

15:44impressions does someone need to to get conversions. They're going to try and learn all this stuff. The more direction you can give them at the beginning being like, "Oh, and by the way, instead of trying to work out from everyone who to target, start with these people. We think this is where we're going to get

15:56best results." You can do that easily by adding in these detailed targeting options. Don't overthink it, don't spend tons and tons of time on it, just go ahead and and get those in, okay? Now, if you wanted to, you could get more specific and narrow audience. So, let's say that you found some interest targeting options that you thought were

16:13kind of there, but not quite. Let's say for example we had small business owners, but you only worked with certain types of small business owners like you only worked with photographers, you might want to say, "Okay, I want someone to be a small business owner, but I also want them to be interested in photography." Okay? So, we could have we could have photography as a job title even, which probably be a a better example in there. But there are circumstances where you think, "Actually, it's not those people and it's not those people, it's actually the combination of two. It's someone that fits into both categories like the you

16:43know, the Venn diagram as it were like it they overlap. It's those people that we want." So, you can do that by by narrowing down and adding in um extra criteria. Now, you can see we've got some warnings on the right-hand side saying the audience is too narrow, which doesn't surprise me, that's likely to happen if you try and narrow down. It's not something I'd recommend most beginners do, but I wanted to just highlight that this is an option and if you advertise to the whole of the US and you have really large broad audiences and then you want to get more specific, you're probably going to

17:09be able to do this more just because of the the audience size and population size. I'm going to go ahead and delete that. Okay, so in a second I'm going to go through custom audiences and lookalike audiences, which is going to allow you to retarget and do all sorts of cool things with your Facebook ads targeting. Before I do, I just want to quickly let you know about my new course with community called Facebook Ads Mastery. Now, in this course myself and my team have packaged everything that we've learned spending more than $50 million on Facebook ads generating more than $200 million in revenue from those

17:37Facebook ads for our clients. And we're literally sharing the the strategies, the tips, and the techniques that we use to train our staff to get our clients the best possible results. It also comes with a brand new school community where there's tons of interaction in there from me and my team answering questions and engaging with the community, live calls and trainings. Uh the starting price is just 97 pounds per month. We want to make this as affordable as we possibly can. There is a link in the video description you can click through

18:03and go ahead and check it out. Hopefully, I'll see you on the inside. Now, the next thing I want to explain when it comes to Facebook and Instagram ads targeting is this custom audiences section, which is a huge part of targeting on the metal ads platform. So, just to explain what custom audiences are, I briefly touched on it. They are warm audiences, people that have

18:21interacted with your business before. There are a number of different examples and by creating a custom audience, that allows you to retarget. That allows you to put ads in front of people that already interacted with you, which is obviously a hugely important part of any form of digital marketing strategy nowadays to get people from having interacted with you a bit to over the line and a customer or buying again,

18:44reactivating an existing customer. That's a huge part of any digital marketing strategy. We've all experienced clicking on products, not buying them, going elsewhere online, seeing ads for that business pop up and and that's what they're doing. They are retargeting and I'm going to show you how to do exactly that, okay? So, to create custom audiences, what we want to do is we want to leave Ads Manager for a minute and we want to go ahead and jump into audiences. So, if you click on these three little lines in All Tools and then you can select audiences. I've got it up here in the shortcuts, if not,

19:11you'll have it down here in the Manage Business menu. And when we go into audiences, this is like a hub where we can create all different types of custom audiences cuz there are obviously different types of custom audiences, different people that have seen and interacted with our business in different locations. Now, because this is an example ad account, there's already a bunch in here. Don't worry about that, we're going to go through the process. Now, your page, your window that you see might look a bit different from this if you haven't created any custom audiences yet, that's absolutely fine. All you need to do to follow along is find the

19:38Create Audience button. So, we're going to go ahead and click on Create Audience and Custom Audience. Lookalike Audience is going something we're going to talk about afterwards. So, we go ahead and click on Custom Audience and we can see that there are lots of different types of custom audiences. Remember, custom audiences are people that are warm. They're not cold. They've interacted with us before. We've got two major categories. We've got your sources. So, these are all the locations outside of Meta, outside of Facebook and Instagram where we've got interaction. And then there are the Meta sources, okay? So, we're going to start with your sources and we're going to go through not every

20:09single one, but the ones that we routinely use as an agency for our clients. So, the first one is going to be website. So, we'll go ahead and click on website and then select next. Now, in order to create a custom audience from people that have visited your website, you will need to have the Meta pixel installed on your website. That's the the thing, that's the piece of code that actually is able to track people and work out who has visited your website, who hasn't, and work out who should be included in that retargeting audience, and then who should be um retargeted. If you haven't got the pixel installed or

20:36you don't know how to do that, I'll include a link in the video description below. You can click on that, go through to another video that shows you exactly how to get uh the Meta pixel um installed on your website. So, that's the first thing. Source, make sure you've got the right pixel selected. You can see we've got a nice green tick there. If you've got multiple pixels, then you might want to just click on the

20:51drop down and select the right one. Then we've got events, okay? So, a few different options in here. So, the default is all website visitors. And that's fairly self-explanatory, right? That's anyone that's visited the website within the time frame that we give, that's who we want to to retarget. I'd recommend that most Facebook advertisers start there because it's the easiest one to understand, it's going to give you the largest possible custom audience, and in general larger custom audiences produce better results. But you can, if you want to, get more specific. So, for example, you could click on people who visited specific web pages. Now, let's say you had two

21:22different product lines. You had hats and you had shoes. Now, you might want to create a separate custom audience for all the people that visited pages to do with shoes in comparison to all the people that visited pages to do with hats, and that will allow you to create different retargeting campaigns and different retargeting ads. So, you can put shoe offers in front of shoe people and hat offers in front of hat people,

21:41and you'll probably get better results. So, that is something that you can do. I'm going to talk about audience retention in a second, in a second. But once you've selected this here in events, you want to come down to this URL um section. You can do URLs contains, and you could, for example, just pop in shoes, and then that any page on your website that has shoes within the URL, I'm assuming that's how you've got your website URLs constructed, it's going to include all those pages and therefore everyone in there cuz it's URL contains. Um you can change this to doesn't contain if you just wanted to exclude something,

22:10or equals. So, let's say, you know, you're www.um clothes .com/shoes. You know, you only wanted to specifically that URL, um you didn't want any others, you could go ahead and just enter in the URL there once you've changed that to URL equals. Um that's fairly uh self-explanatory. One thing you can do as well is, so for example, you could add in, if we change this back to contains, and say, "Look, we want to retarget anyone that has visited the page on our website with shoes in the URL, but we want to You can click on exclude, you know, but we want to exclude people." So, again, we get the

22:44same option now. So, we've got source, we've got events. Let's say people visited specific web pages. We want to exclude anyone that has actually bought. We don't want to keep advertising to them. So, we want to exclude any anyone that has visited a page that's got thank you on it. Again, assuming that's how you've got your URL set up, so that anyone that comes through to a thank you page that has thank, you know, {dash} you in the URL, and therefore you create this custom audience of people that have visited your shoe pages, but haven't yet uh checked out and purchased. Um because otherwise they would be disqualified

23:17from this custom audience using this criteria. You could also just create separate custom audiences um and do this at the ad set level, but I'll explain a bit more about that um later on. Okay. Again, most advertisers aren't going to want to start by using people who visited specific web pages, and they're certainly not going to want to add in exclusions. Or you can refine further by So, we want people who visited this page and then another page. It works similar to what we talked about with the detailed targeting options. These are more advanced techniques and not something that most people need to worry about, but I just wanted to let you know

23:45that if you did want to do it, you can go ahead and um and include these here. Now, there are other event options as well. So, we've talked about all website visitors, we've talked about people who visited specific web pages, and we can also select visitors by time spent, and we have different percentiles. So, people who spent the most time on our website, the top 5% of them, the top 10% of them, the top 25% of them. Um we don't use this as much. Typically, this would be used on a website that gets, say, a lot of organic traffic, and people are consuming, say, blog content,

24:16and you only want to be retargeting the very best prospects. Because it's a bit of a stretch from them reading your stuff to buying a relatively high-end product or service, then we might come ahead and use um this sort of setup. We would also only normally do this if there are lots and lots of people in the custom audience, a lot of people had visited the website. But again, that is an option. And you can also do so from events, right? So, we've only got certain events actually set up and firing because this is an example ad account, but these are conversion events for people who have So, we could create

24:44a custom audience out of people who have triggered the purchase conversion event. That would effectively be previous customers. People who visited the add to cart conversion event. Perhaps we want to use an add to cart custom audience so that we can retarget people that added to cart but didn't quite get over the line and purchase. You can go ahead and click on add to cart, and that would create exactly that custom audience,

25:02okay? But like I said, most Facebook and Instagram advertisers are going to want to use all website visitors. Part of the reason why, and I'll tie this into this audience retention section, is because Meta knows all that other information anyway. Let's say we include all website visitors. Meta knows that perhaps 2% of those people have added to cart in the last 7 days but haven't yet purchased. Well, Meta's going to start

25:26by putting ads in front of them. Just like Meta knows who spent the most time on your website versus who hasn't. So, if instead of using the visitors by time spent and having all these separate intricate little custom audiences, you can just then go, "Actually, we're just going to have one big custom audience of all website visitors and let Meta work it out because they have all this information." For the exact same reason, I would recommend changing the audience retention from the default, which is um 30 days, to the maximum time given,

25:53which is 180 days. Because I like really big custom audiences. Custom audiences in general perform better than cold audiences because these people have already interacted with your business. But there usually isn't as many people in there, so it's more difficult to scale. So, we just want these things to be as big as possible. And again, the argument for shortening the audience retention is that if someone has interacted with your business in the last 3 days, they're more likely to buy than someone who interacted with your

26:19business 179 days ago. And that is true. But Meta knows that. So, they're going to start by putting ads in front of someone that interacted with your business 3 days ago, visited your website in this case. Um but Meta also knows that, let's say, you offer bicycles, and someone visited your website 5 months ago but has been searching around for bicycles. They've been in Facebook

26:41Marketplace looking for bicycles. They've They've Their online activity shows that they are now primed and ready for an ad. You don't want to miss out on that person. Meta's going to realize that, put that ad in front of that person even if they only visited your website 5 months ago, and you might generate a sale because of that. So, in general, nice big custom audiences is what I'd recommend you start with. Then I wouldn't recommend adding in any um exclusions or anything like that. And then we just give a name. So, I would just call this all website visitors

27:09uh 180 to denote the audience retention. That's the max, by the way. If we could go longer than that, I absolutely would. And then we want to go ahead and click create audience. And you can just go through that exact process of what I described. um create the other types of custom audiences if you feel like that's appropriate for your business. I've walked through a few scenarios where that works. Don't worry about any of this, we're going to get to that um later on, okay? So, we've just created an audience of all website visitors in the last 180 days. But there are other custom audiences that I want to show you

27:34how to use as well. So, if I click on create audience and custom audience. So, we've covered website and the various forms of website custom audience that we can use. The next big category of um your source custom audience that we use are customer lists. We'll go ahead and click on customer lists and click next. And now what we can do, depending on our on our setup, is effectively take data that we have off platform of people that have either bought from us, hence the name customer list, but you could also use an email list here. So, people who haven't bought from you but have just

28:07signed up to your email list. So, for example, when we're advertising for our own product or services, we have about 35,000 people on an email list. That is a tremendously valuable custom audience that we want to make sure we put ads in front of so they know about our latest promotions or stuff like that. So, we make sure that we always use that in our as a custom audience in our retargeting campaigns. Now, if you're using Mailchimp, which a lot of people will be, um you can just import directly from Mailchimp. You just click on this, um you just go ahead and follow the steps, log in to Mailchimp. Once you've done

28:34that, you will just be able to select which list you want to import. You click like three buttons, it gets imported, and that's it. Very, very straightforward. If you're not using Mailchimp, then what you want to do is export the list from whatever CRM you're using, and then import that list um right here, okay? So, you can see that the way this works is that Meta uses identifiers. So, that what they're basically doing is they're going to take the data, the the names, the individuals that you have within your list, within your exported file, and they're going to try and match that with people's Facebook and Instagram

29:12profiles so they can work out, "Aha, okay. This person's data that you have on this spreadsheet, that correlates with this user. Therefore, we know this is this person, and we can include that in the custom audience, and we can then retarget them." So, they're going to use things like email addresses, phone numbers. It depends what data you have to be able to go ahead and do something like this, but that's just what Meta is recommending in terms of adding in various um identifiers. And the more information, the more identifiers you have in the list that you upload, the better, okay? I'm just going to go ahead

29:42and click next for a second. And then you can see we come through to this page here where we can go ahead and upload the list. Uh supported formats are CSV and TXT files. When you export your list from um your CRM, you will probably be able to do so in either a CSV or TXT file. If not, you can convert an Excel file um relatively easily. So, then you just want to go ahead and click on upload file, and then I've got this example

30:05email list here. Um and what we can see here is Meta is asking us whether or not there's a column for customer value. Now, this is really useful if you do have it. It's not essential, though. So, what that would look like is alongside each customer, let's say this is a previous customer that's not an email list. Alongside each customer, you might have this person spent $80, this person spent $240, this person spent $600. And that's really useful information because Meta can not only see that these are previous customers, but they can work out amongst those which ones were previously more valuable to your business, and therefore which

30:40ones are likely to be more valuable to your business going forward, and they would prioritize putting ads in front of people that spent more previously, or people that are similar to people that spent more previously. Um I'll get more onto that in a minute. Now, this example customers that I just created doesn't have a value column, but if yours does, you want to go ahead and select yes, and then Meta will be um will ask you which one is the value column. You'll basically be able to identify that in the next step, but I'll show you how identifying works anyway, okay? So, we've got no, we're going to continue

31:08with a customer list that doesn't include a customer value. Um name is example email list is absolutely fine. Then we can go ahead and click next, and here's where we map the identifiers. So, for example, mine just had um email in there as ben@example.com. Uh that one's been mapped, so Meta's been able to match those. They've worked out that that is an email address, and they've categorized that as email. But this one here, they've got action

31:29needed, they've got name as Ben. Meta wasn't able to work out what that was, so I need to go ahead and tell them from the drop-down list that this one was in fact first name, okay? So, that one's first name, and now they're both mapped. And you can do that like Meta will try its best to map as many as it can, but a lot of them might have actions, but you can just go through and select and make sure they haven't got it wrong. And this is also where if you have a value column, you would say this one's the value column. So, you can see

31:53exactly um how this operates. Then we just go ahead and click on import and create. Depending on the size of your list, might take Meta a little bit of time to to put that together, but there you are done. Again, don't worry about any of this stuff, we're going to get to that in a minute. You can click on done. So, I'd recommend that you do that for your customer list, so all previous customers, and that you also do that for your email list. So, basically anyone that you have available there, you want to go ahead and and get it uploaded. If you don't have a customer list, you

32:19don't have an email list yet, no problem. When you do, make sure you go ahead and and get these uploaded. Now, if you use the import from Mailchimp feature, the one I showed previously, Meta will automatically update those audiences for you, which is fantastic. So, as time goes on and new people get added, you um you get those new people

32:36being synced. If you're not using that feature, um and you've just uploaded a list like I have, you will have to manually re-upload new lists to update them as obviously you get more people added to your customer list and more people added to your email list, but it's worth doing because that data is really really beneficial. And you can do that. Um the frequency of that depends on how many new people you're actually adding to your email list. If you're only adding, you know, 10 people a week, you don't need to do it very often. If you're adding 1,000 people a day, you might

33:04want to do that pretty pretty regularly. Oh, I should quickly mention while we're talking about that that the website custom audience that we created, um that will update automatically because it's based on pixel data. So, that the audience retention was 180 days into the past, but in 3 months' time, um that audience, like half of that audience will have changed because obviously, you know, each day that goes past, people that visited your website 180 days ago,

33:26they drop off, and new ones come in. That updates all automatically. I've talked about custom audiences in previous videos, and I know that's been a question, so hopefully that helps clear things up. Okay, so we've added in website visitors, uh customer list {slash} email list. I'd recommend you do both if you have them. Um and then we want to go ahead and create some Meta source custom audiences. So, obviously you can use app activity if you've got

33:46an app. Um there's catalog activity. Most advertisers aren't going to um use those, or they're not going to focus on them uh early on. The two that I've talked about are ones we will look to use all the time. And then again, from these Meta sources, certain ones of these we're going to use um a lot more than others. I'm going to focus on the most important ones. So, I'm going to start with video. So, select select

34:06video, and let's click next in here. Now, we get to choose an engagement type. If I click on this drop-down, the first thing we need to decide is how much of our video or videos does someone need to have consumed to be included in this customer audience? Now, obviously, the larger the percentage or the the amount of time that someone's consumed, the warmer that person will be, um but the smaller that audience will be. So, that's really the trade-off here. Now, when I talked to you previously going with the largest possible customer audience, and I do think that's a good idea as a default start point, there may

34:39well be certain circumstances where you've been putting out videos that demonstrate how your product or service works, perhaps it's something that people aren't very familiar with, and they need to understand the process and how it works to want to to move forward. And in which case, you might want to trial going with say 75% of your video, or 50% of your video. Um but I think for the majority people, let's just start with the largest audience as the

34:58default, and go with the biggest one. Again, Meta knows within all these people that watched 3 seconds who uh actually engaged with it more, who watched 75%. And they're going to start with those people. So, once you make that selection, then you want to go ahead and select videos, and there are a number of different places where you can get video sources from, right? So, you could for example um have them from your Facebook page. So, I could select here my Ben Heath Facebook page, and then we've got all these various videos, right? That we could be like, okay, anyone that's watched this video, and you can go ahead and select

35:29them. We could also get them from uh my Instagram account instead, and be like, right, okay, anyone who watched this video, anyone who watched this video, and and and so on and so forth. You can also, if we click in the drop-down, get them from a specific um ad campaign. Now, what should you choose here? If your videos are all very much on the same topic, and you want to retarget everyone, I would just go ahead and

35:49select as many as you can. But there may well be times where you're segmenting based on the topics of the videos and products. Remember we talked about hats and shoes? Or maybe you've got videos about, in our case it could be our Facebook and Instagram advertising services, so we create custom audience for anyone who's watched videos about that, but we also offer Google Ads services, so maybe we create a custom audience out of people that have consumed our Google Ads related content. Um so, we would have two separate custom audiences based on the video consumption, and then we could retarget specific offers, you know, Google Ads to

36:17Google Ads people, Facebook Ads to Facebook Ads people, okay? Um so, that's general rule of thumb of what I'd be looking to do. A default of everyone if you talk about roughly the same thing is not a bad idea. I've just got a few selected there for demonstration purposes. Then we go ahead and click confirm. Now, the default audience retention here is 365 days. You'll find that with Meta sources, things that take place on platform, um you get much longer audience retention windows. Um it's seen as a little bit less, you know, in invasion of privacy by tracking people around other places on the internet. It's like, look, you're on our

36:48platform, we can see everything on here. It is what it is, okay? So, I would call this for example now uh video viewers 365. And if you had more specific criteria, then you could obviously go ahead and add that in, like video viewers, Facebook Ads video viewers, Google Ads 365. Okay, that's our video viewers. That's the first of the Meta source custom audiences. So, let's go to

37:11custom audiences, we're not uh done yet. Now, if you're using lead forms, not everyone watching this video will be, but I should quickly demonstrate in case you are, then you can create a custom audience out of people who have engaged with your leads for lead form, what's referred to at the ad set level now as instant forms. It's a little bit confusing having that distinction. Uh again, we've got events, so we can have anyone who opened this form. We could also have people who opened but didn't submit the form, or opened and submitted form. So, you can think about the use cases for that, right? Like, everyone

37:35who opened this form is just like, let's just get everyone. People who opened but didn't submit is like, they showed interest, but we can probably put a retargeting ad in front of them to get them over the line. And people who opened and submitted might be, okay, they've become a lead, but we're struggling to now get them from lead to paying customer, therefore we've got retargeting ads that show client testimonials, or proof that we can do a good job, that sort of thing, to help get them over the line. Uh most people I'd recommend going with the starting default option, and then you can experiment with these more advanced

38:03options depending on the needs of your business, and honestly how your sales funnel is going and where people are dropping off. Like, if you're getting loads of leads but not many conversions, then you want to go with this option here. But if you want more leads, then you want to go with this option or this option, right? Okay. Anyone who opened

38:17this form, I think is is usually fine. Make sure you've got the right page selected. Then if you've got multiple lead forms, just select the uh lead form of choice, or you could go ahead and select all. And then when it comes to audience retention, the maximum for lead forms is 90 days. I know that's an on Meta source, and that sort of contradicts what I talked about with the video stuff, um but lead forms are seen as a little bit different cuz you're sort of collecting someone's information as opposed to just their activity on um the platform. So, you have the shortest possible retention windows, which is 90

38:43days, and that is the default. That's why I'd go with. So, then we would go ahead and call this uh like lead form engagers 90. And then we click create audience. Okay, so that's our lead our lead-based um custom audience. So, if you are running campaigns with lead forms or instant forms, you it's a no-brainer to go ahead and get that set up. Then we go ahead and select custom audience, and there's um a couple of others that I want to show you. I'm not going to talk about instant experience, shopping, augmented reality, these augmented reality particular very much a fringe case, events. Um this is not what most

39:15Meta advertisers are going to use, and if I go through all of these, um this video would be 14 hours long. Um so, I'm going to talk about the two others that we use most of the time, and and and these ones I'm covering are really the ones that we use um very often with our

39:28with our clients, right? Um and that's Instagram accounts. So, if I go ahead and click on Instagram account, and then once we come into here, we can now create custom audiences based on people's interactivity with our Instagram account. Okay, so the first thing we need to do here is obviously make sure that we've got the right Instagram account selected if you've got multiple Instagram accounts. And then like previously, we've got this event section. So the default here is everyone who engaged with this professional account. Um that's going to be the largest uh custom audience option out of the various Instagram custom audience Instagram account custom audience

40:02options. You could change it to people who started following this professional account. Obviously, that's a bit of a higher bar, someone who's not just engaged but then gone ahead and followed. People who visited your profile, people who engaged with a post or ad um specifically. You've got people who saved a post or ad, that's probably really high bar to entry, people who are really liking um your stuff. So there are use cases where you want to get more specific and you think I only want to target followers or I only want to target people who have engaged with uh a post or ad recently so I get the most

40:29engaged custom audience. But once again, for the same logic as I talked about previously, I would go with everyone who engaged this professional account. Meta's going to work out who are the most keen. Um and then we can go ahead and add in here Instagram engagers 365. Okay. And then we can go ahead and

40:45click on create audience. And then what we just did for our Instagram account, we can do the same thing for our Facebook page. Right. So go ahead and click next. Make sure you've got the right right Facebook page selected. Events looks very very similar. Page followers, you can people who visited your page, engaged with a post or ad, clicked a call to action button, or saved a post. But I'd recommend most people go with everyone who engaged with your page for the same reason. 365 is the maximum retention window, that's what we want to use. So I'm going to call this one Facebook page

41:16engagers 365. Okay. And then we create that custom audience and click done. So now we've got all the custom audiences that we use very regularly created. If we click back into custom audiences, you see there are other options that you might want to play around with depending um on your business. Hopefully, the logic of what I've been through there um will help you with those other ones that I'm not going to going to go through specifically in this video as well cuz a lot of the same thinkings and principles behind which options do you go with when it comes to retention windows or which options do you go with when it comes to

41:48um the event selection uh still apply to a lot of the other stuff as well. And some of these ones I created might not apply to your business. Like if you don't use uh lead forms, you can't use that custom audience. If you never advertise with video, you can't use that custom audience. If you only have a Facebook page and don't have an Instagram account, you can't use that custom audience. So you're going to have to adjust this to your specific business, but then that's always the case no matter what content you can see online, there's always an element of um adjusting it for your specific

42:13circumstances, right? Okay, so now we've got a bunch of custom audiences. If I close this down, we will see that we've got a bunch of custom audiences here. Um and some of these are populating. It'll take a little bit of time. Anything that is Meta-sourced or pixel-based will update automatically. The other ones need to be um updated manually. And now what we can do with that custom audience is firstly add it into our campaign. We can also

42:37use it to create lookalike audiences. Both of which are things that I want to show you because they're both really important. So let's start with actually using this within an ad campaign, right? So I'm going to go ahead and jump back into Ads Manager. Just clicked on the all tools button and then Ads Manager. Um we're going to add in these custom

42:53audiences into our um example campaign. If I just go down here and click on edit draft, and we'll come back into the sort of typical Ads Manager window. We'll go to the ad set level. Um and then we're going to scroll down to our Advantage+ audience section. And then we're going to add in our custom audiences in there. Now, assuming that this was a retargeting campaign, and I would for the most part recommend that you separate your cold audience campaign

43:19from your warm audience campaign still. Typically, if we're running the direct offer strategy, so we're directly advertising our products or services, we will have two campaigns. We'll have a cold audience campaign and a warm audience campaign. Yes, there will be overlap. Yes, with Advantage+ audience, they're going to operate um similarly to some extent, but I still think it's worth having those um separate for being able to track how other parts of your marketing working in terms of building your audience and then converting those to customers using your Facebook and Instagram advertising. Anyway, so within the custom audience, so we're just going to add all of these in, right? So we

43:50just type in the names. We've got website visitors. We've got uh what else do we have? We had lead form engagers. We had our example email list, and you'd also want to add in your example um customer list if you had it. We have Facebook page engagers. Uh doesn't seem to be Ah, here we go. Facebook page engagers 365. We've got

44:14our Instagram account engagers. Uh any that I missed? Uh yes, video viewer custom audience as well. And then of course, if you created any others, then you can add those in. And you can just go ahead and pop these in here and create the largest possible um custom audience. Um I think for most Facebook advertisers, that is going to deliver the best results. You might want to have different campaigns if you're retargeting say a hat range to certain people and a shoe range to other people, you can separate those out into different campaigns. But if you're advertising mostly the same product range, the same service offering, you

44:49can pop all of these into one uh warm audience campaign. Now, once you've added in your custom audiences, this now becomes a warm audience uh campaign. I would therefore leave everything else open. So we wouldn't normally include, for example, these custom audiences and these detailed targeting options. We would take these out when we've got custom audiences added, right? Um and and keep this really open. And we might go with the age range if This is This is pretty open already, but we might go with the age range all the way down to to 18. If we had a gender selection of just uh men or women, we would then um

45:21spread that out. And because we've got those custom audiences, we're already very much um targeting those, we're happy for uh Meta to not be constrained by other factors as well. Okay, so this is now our warm audience ad set, our warm audience campaign. So if I just go ahead and close this down, I'm going to label things up to make it um more obvious, right? So we've got new

45:41leads warm campaign. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and create a new leads campaign, which is going to be called you guessed it uh manual again, remember. Um this is going to be called new leads cold campaign. Just to separate those out and demonstrate how we would typically um do things. And then if we jump to this ad set level, I'm going to call this as well new leads cold ad set. Just so we can see. And this is the one now where we would be looking to add in, you know, those previous targeting criteria that we talked about where we get more

46:11specific around um age or gender or the detailed targeting options like digital marketing um etc. etc. Not going to add them all in now. Uh we've already been through that, but you get the idea. Now, one thing that you might want to do within your cold audience ad set um now that we've created these custom audiences is exclude custom audience,

46:31which I talked about previously. So you might, for example, want to exclude uh have we got any Yeah, we've got a purchase custom audience. We didn't create that today, by the way. That was created I said this is an example ad account, so we have stuff in here. Um you might want to create a custom audience of people who have purchased by the website and you don't want to run ads to those people. You add this up here in the audience control section underneath the exclude these custom audiences. And that would allow you to run a campaign that's say great for new potential customers, but you

47:01don't want to put in front of previous customers cuz perhaps it's got a an introductory offer that just won't go down well with existing customers would be the the classic um example of of why you would use this. I'm not a big fan of doing this in general, and specifically, I'm not a big fan of doing this to just save a bit of money. Unless you're in that scenario where you have a really good offer that's only available to new customers, I wouldn't just go ahead and uh add this in thinking, "Well, my customers already know about me. Why would I spend money to put my ads in front of them again? Um

47:30I only want to reach new people." That's a little bit short-sighted. People aren't walking around thinking about your business wondering, uh "I wonder when they release the next product next product." They need to be reminded. There's a reason why all the big brands run ads all the time, it's cuz they need the reminders. Um and your website purchases are going to be a very small percentage of your total audience size, you're not going to spend much money on them. It's definitely worth

47:50putting ads um in front of those people. Just a quick aside, by the way, this is a website purchaser custom audience. Remember when we went through and created our all website visitors custom audience, there was a section where you could select based on conversion event or to to create this was select that purchase conversion event and everything else was the same. Um and that's how you create one of these and exclude it. So not a big fan of doing this. There are circumstances where you want to use it. I wanted to highlight it in case that applies specifically um to your business. You would only want to add that into your

48:20cold audience campaign most likely. As opposed to your warm audience campaign. But I'm going to go ahead and delete that out anyway. Right. Now, in this cold audience ad set, we scroll down to this Advantage+ audience. We haven't got any custom audiences in here, but there is a type of audience that I would use in a cold audience ad set um that I think that we haven't got to so far and that can be really valuable and really useful. And that's a lookalike audience. So I'm going to show you how to go ahead and create lookalike audiences now. So we click on these three little lines again, all tools, and

48:49jump back into audiences. And once you've created custom audiences, lookalike audiences are actually very very easy to create. And just to explain what a lookalike audience is whilst that's loading up. A lookalike audience is an audience, a group of people, that are very similar to another group of people. So let's say we take our previous customer list that we've got loaded and I've shown you how to do that. And we say to Meta, "Look, Meta, these are the people that have bought

49:14from us previously. I would like you to find people that are very similar to them and put ads in front of those people because people who are very similar to those that have already bought from us previously are probably really good prospects for us and probably likely to buy going forward." And Meta can see based on your previous customer list that the average person is a 42-year-old female who's interested in

49:36um cycling. Great. Let's put our ads in front of more women in their early 40s that are interested in cycling cuz that's likely to perform really well. So, we could take for example, you could do this based on any of your custom audiences, but let's say we take our email list, right? Let's say we've got our email list and we say, "Look, Meta, I want you to find create a lookalike audience

49:55based on these people." Um you can go ahead and select the example email list like I've done with this little checkbox, click on these three lines up here, and click on create lookalike audience. Now, once this lookalike audience window has loaded, there's a few things that you need to decide. The first thing is the audience location. Now, you can't do this really specifically. So, remember we talked about local businesses like let's say I just wanted to advertise in Cheltenham, um advertise locally, you can't I can't put in Cheltenham. I can't get that specific here, but that's fine. You can create a lookalike audience that operates nationally um or or within a

50:28larger geographical area and then further specify at the ad set level. So, select audience location. I could for example add in the whole of the United States as a lookalike audience. Now, the percentage is the next thing that we need to choose. So, what percentage of the Facebook and Instagram users in the United States in this example do we want to be included in this lookalike audience? We've got 1% being 2.8 million because there are roughly 280 million Facebook and Instagram users in the US. And the percentage as it goes up will be um based on the percentage of Facebook and Instagram users within the location that you have

51:07selected. So, if for example you're advertising locally, you want to go with the largest possible custom audience and go up to 10% because it's 10% of the whole of the US in this case, which is 28 million people, but then when you're just advertising in Dallas, that's going to shrink massively because obviously you're only advertising to a

51:26small fraction of the total population. So, you want to go really broad with your lookalike audience. Likewise, if you're advertising in a country with a small population, you're advertising in Ireland for example where there are 5 million people roughly, you're going to want to go with a large percentage lookalike audience to have a nice large audience. If however you are targeting the whole of the US and you're targeting nationwide, a work your business, then

51:47going with a 1% is absolutely fine. Uh Meta released new information recently around ideal audience sizes and they're recommending 2 million plus. With a lot of local businesses, you won't be able to do that and that's absolutely fine. We've already covered that, but they're recommending 2 million plus. Um so, just think about it when you're selecting your audience size, think about firstly what percentage of the country do I need to So, if I'm targeting all of the US, 1% is fine cuz

52:10we've got 2.8. Um but if we're targeting just I don't know, just Eastern time zone of the US, which I think is roughly 50% of the population, then that's going to put you slightly under, you need a 2%. If you're targeting just California, you can run the numbers, you might need something like a 7 or an 8%. If you're targeting just a city, you're going to want to go with 10%. So, hopefully that kind of makes sense in terms of the size versus specificity. Try and make sure that your resulting custom audience, once you've added in your location targeting criteria plus factored in this percentage, is over 2 million if you

52:42can. Local businesses often can't. I'm going to go with 1% here, which is fine. Then we go ahead and click create audience. Okay. And now what we want to do, we now we've got that lookalike and you can create lots of different lookalikes by the way. You can create lookalike based on your email list, lookalike based on your website visitors, lookalike based on um Facebook page engagers, Instagram engagers. And I'd recommend that you create a number of different lookalikes based on all of these options. Um so, for example, and we've got another one here based on website visitors, so I'll just That's from a previous video,

53:08that's great. I'll use that as an example. So, now what we want to do is we want to jump back into Ads Manager and I'll show you how we would get this added into our ad set. Now, a lookalike audience, very important I distinguish here, is a uh cold audience. Now, because it's in the custom audiences section, it often seems like a warm audience and that can be very misleading. A lot of people think it's a warm audience and that causes issues. It's not. The people in your lookalike audience are similar to the people that have interacted with your business before. Those people themselves haven't actually interacted

53:41with your business before. That's a That's a big distinction there. Um so, they don't want to be treated like warm audiences and they don't want to be added into the warm audience ad set. They want to be treated like they are, which is cold audiences, and we've come into our cold audience campaign. I'm going to go to the ad set level and I'm going to scroll down to the targeting section again. Um remember this is within Advantage+ audience, so the

54:00lookalike audience is only a suggestion. We're saying to Meta, "We think these people will be great, but you have the flexibility." That's what we want to do. Then you just add in your lookalike audiences in here. So, I've got for example add in example email list. I could add in one based on website visitors. I could add in one based on website purchases. These are ones that have been created previously, as I said, cuz this is an example ad account. So, add in all the lookalike audiences that you want to target in here. You could have them based on Facebook page engagers, Instagram account engagers, all of that's absolutely fine. Get those

54:26in there. And you can also have these alongside detailed targeting options. So, people that are interested in digital marketing and people that are interested in social media marketing and things like that. Uh social media marketing, I'm sure that comes up as an option interest. Yes, it does. Now, this is not how we would have run things under the original audience settings at all. We would have segmented things out. We would have gone with one lookalike or one interest targeting option per ad set and we would have worked out which one produced the best results and that would allow us to make decisions going forward and improve

54:59results and do all that really important stuff. But with this Advantage+ audience setup, I think this is a really good move to have the flexibility, it actually makes a lot more sense to include these together. Because if you didn't include these in together, then there would be so much overlap and you're going to end up with audience overlap and auction overlap, not the topic of this video, but just I'll tell

55:21you now, not something that you want. It's not going to help your results and this is a much easier and cleaner way of doing things. You have less campaigns, you have less ad sets, and that's how I'd recommend you go ahead and set it up. So, lookalike audiences, interests, behaviors all in one ad set in your cold ad set and then your custom audiences, the people that have actually interacted with your business before, in a separate warm audience ad set is what I'd recommend for most people. Now, just quickly before moving on to the next thing, one thing I wanted to highlight

55:45is we've added in our lookalikes here. We've got a US-based and two UK-based lookalike audiences. So, for this to actually work and run, we need to make sure that the location targeting matches up. So, we would need to make sure that we had both the UK and the United States selected um as locations and that's how it would

56:03work from a from a targeting standpoint. Now, again, if you created say a lookalike audience in the UK, let's say you created a 5% lookalike audience in the UK and you're like, "Yeah, but we only operate locally, how does that work?" That's absolutely fine. That's when you just want to go ahead and add in like we talked previously, uh Cheltenham, include your UK audience. We would want to get rid of the United States in this scenario and then we want to come down to this lookalike and only include the UK-based ones um and then

56:27you would operate it that way, right? So, it's functioning as people with it only within this area and then the lookalikes um operate within that. Um so, that's how you combine the two cuz again, I've created videos on lookalikes before when a lot of people questioned being like, "Ah, I only want to advertise this specific city, but I when I create the lookalike it has to be

56:46countrywide or regionwide." That's fine. You can You can still make that work. Now, one other thing I need to talk about when it comes to cold audience targeting, not warm audience targeting, but cold audience targeting, is open targeting. It's something that's become more and more popular over the years and when we were operating under original audience options, we were using open targeting very often. Open targeting is this, right? It is deleting out every

57:09single targeting criteria. So, let's make this as big as it possibly can be, 18 plus, um no interest, behaviors, demographics, no lookalike audiences. Um let's assume we were doing this, you know, uh nationwide. So, we've got the whole of the UK and basically saying there's no targeting options whatsoever, Meta, you figure it out. This can work well, but I think there are two scenarios, two boxes you want to tick to

57:34actually use this and see it work well. Firstly, does your product or service have mass appeal? Some do, some don't. Cars have pretty mass appeal, things to do with the home have pretty mass appeal, uh a lot of food has pretty mass appeal, but there are really niche things like fly fishing for salmon in coastal Scottish waters. That's really niche, right? Um that does not have mass appeal. So, if you have mass appeal, open targeting will work well. The other thing is how much data does your ad account have in it? If it's a brand new ad account, Meta doesn't really know who converts, where you get the best results, it's really

58:08difficult for Meta to optimize. Uh whereas if you've been running ad campaigns for a while, you've got a thousand plus conversions, Meta has a really good idea of who converts anyway and you you'll find going with with the open targeting. It used to be quite a decision previously with the original audience targeting options between do we go with a specific interest, do we go with open targeting? Now, with this Advantage+ audience setup, it's much more open and that's why I'm a fan of using it. I think it's a no-brainer to give Meta some suggestions like we've talked about with lookalike audiences, with interest targeting options, but

58:40Meta has the flexibility to use open targeting. It's kind of a best of both worlds. Whereas if you just go with completely open targeting, particularly as a beginner, particularly within your ad account, it can struggle. But, there are a lot We run loads of ad accounts cuz obviously the accounts we work on and typically operate with quite a bit

58:55of scale or we get them there at least. So, they're spending a lot, generating a lot of conversions, we often operate with open targeting because it's appropriate for them. So, that really depends on your business and I just wanted to touch on that cuz I think it was important. Now, I do get a lot of Meta advertisers asking if they should

59:10switch to this original audience option. If we just click on this quickly, you'll see that Meta recommends that you don't. They say that potential outcome is 30 up to a 33% lower cost per result by using Advantage+ audience, not switching over to original audience options. And to some extent what I would expect. Now, we still use original audience options sometimes as an agency. We very much know what we're doing. I would say that with original audience options, you are far more likely to make a mistake. Let's say for example, you took a local business and you added in some detailed targeting options. That's a killer because local businesses, the population

59:44is so small, you basically have to use open targeting. If you go ahead and add in interest targeting options, your audience is just going to be too small. Whereas, if you're advertising a local business using Advantage Plus audience and you add in some interest targeting options, it's not the end of the world because Meta has the flexibility to also

59:58advertise to other people. As Meta has got more sophisticated in ad platform, giving it more wiggle room, more things to decide has yielded better and better results. And I expect things to continue going that way. So, using original audience options is all about doing the opposite and maintaining control. The use case where I would say using original audience options still works well is if you can't track the eventual conversion. So, Meta is not basically able to optimize for what you really want and learn properly because let's say they come to your website and then they click through to a third-party booking page where they book in for an

1:00:33event or a hotel room or whatever and you just you just can't track those conversions. Then you need more control as an advertiser to direct Meta to advertise to the right people because it can't Meta can't learn by itself. If you're forced to use a traffic campaign for example, then you might want to get more specific. If you do do that by the way, you do switch over to original audience options, I'm just going to do that very quickly

1:00:53so I can show you. One thing that you need to be aware of still with the old school options and I would only recommend you do this if you were advertising before Advantage Plus audience came in place and you really know what you're doing. But one thing you need to absolutely make sure you do if you do want to if you think you're switching over to this and you're getting more specific with your targeting criteria is deselect this Advantage detailed targeting because you can see even with the original targeting options, the default is to reach people beyond your detailed targeting selections when it's likely to improve performance. So, you

1:01:20have to turn off that expansion. Again, not all advertisers have the capability to do that. I still do in this practice ad account, but not everyone does. But if you did want to get really specific and maintain control, you come over here, you set up your detailed targeting like the old school way. I have older targeting tutorials that show you how to do that. I'm not going to run through that here because it's not what I'd recommend most advertisers do and I

1:01:40think this might go away fairly soon. But you have to make sure you deselect that if you if that's what you want to do. I think most advertisers want to use Advantage Plus audience as I've been talking about for this video. Hence why I've done a whole tutorial on using this because I think it will get you the better results. Now, there's one other targeting area that I haven't yet covered and I want to quickly discuss that. So, I just jumped out to the campaign page level. I'm going to

1:02:02click on this green plus create button. This time I'll use a sales campaign. Click continue. And you know how I talked about using a manual sales campaign and then being able to use everything I've talked about in this tutorial and that actually applies. There is this option Advantage Plus shopping and that is the default. You can see the Meta's information underneath is maximize performance and reach valuable audiences with a simplified setup. Presets include placements, age and more. So, what they're talking about here is with Advantage Plus shopping, your options are limited. Advantage Plus shopping can work great though and you you've got tailored lead campaigns as the

1:02:35equivalent for lead campaigns. Slightly different name, but effectively the same process. It's a tailored campaign. And these can work great because they give Meta a lot of control. And if you're an e-commerce business wanting to sell a product range, I would absolutely recommend you test it. I would still say for the most part, we are using more manual sales campaigns than Advantage

1:02:54Plus shopping campaigns. Just as a just a quick aside talking about strategy because we still feel that's getting better results. But we're using Advantage Plus shopping more and more and because it leverages Meta's machine learning and AI, I expect this to improve in performance over time. And I want to quickly talk about This video is about targeting. I want to quickly talk about the targeting options with Advantage Plus shopping and you'll see something similar for the tailored leads campaign option. So, we go ahead and click continue for Advantage Plus shopping, we can see we've got the two options instead of the the three breakdown and that's because

1:03:23there are less options within Advantage Plus shopping campaign. The campaign and ad set levels that are separate in manual are basically squashed in together. So, if we scroll down, again, we're going to ignore the things that aren't related to targeting, a lot of which are similar. So, then we've got this audience location section. Now, this is going to operate similarly to audience controls within the Advantage Plus audience setup within within the new setup within

1:03:46a manual campaign, I should say. And audience location is going to allow you to select location, but it is even far more limited within location. So, if we click on here, you can see it says here I'm specific countries or states to deliver ad ads to. You can't get as specific with like the individual areas of like I just want to target Cheltenham plus 10 miles or anything like that. So, if you want to do that, absolutely need manual campaign. But if you just wanted to advertise countries or multiple countries or like specific states in the US which are like the size of other countries, obviously that's

1:04:18allowed and you can do that. And you also don't have some of the exclusions that we talked about previously that you did in the that audience controls section. And then beneath that, you've got this reporting section which can impact your targeting a little bit, but it's not really targeting. That's why it's called I reporting. Just quickly explain what this is. So, you've got define your ad accounts audience segments in advertising settings to receive reporting breakdowns between your new audience, engaged audience and existing customers. Now, this is brought in to make Advantage Plus shopping easy to understand from a who you're actually putting ads in front of. Is it just all

1:04:50my previous customers? Is it people that are in my warm audiences? Is it new people? I want to understand the split. But you don't really get the option to decide I only want you to target these people or I want you to favor new audiences over existing audiences. It's much more for reporting setup than it is for actual targeting. Really, you kind of just got your location targeting and then you're just leaving it up to Meta the rest of the stuff. And I think for most advertisers, being able to have those suggestions and those inputs particularly at the beginning with a manual sales campaign or a manual leads campaign is much more

1:05:22significant. But I just wanted to quickly cover this so you guys are aware of what you can and can't do within an Advantage Plus shopping campaign. Now, as Advantage Plus shopping becomes more and more sophisticated, we will probably see more and more campaigns moving over to this and allowing Meta to work out the targeting for us more and more often. I don't think it's quite there yet in terms of all advertisers should just do that. I think you should test it

1:05:46and you should see which performs best. This may well do so. It may well do so once your campaign's been live for a while and you're getting great results and getting conversion volume so Meta can its AI can learn and and optimize. But for now, I think most people should not just run straight towards Advantage Plus shopping. You should at least have a play with manual campaigns, learn the the basics there and you can look to move on to Advantage Plus shopping and and test too and see which performs best and always be led by the data. So, now that you know everything you need to

1:06:13know about Facebook ads targeting, the next area of Facebook advertising that I recommend you check out is ad objectives. And in this video here, I break down the six different Facebook ad objectives. I explain what each one does and most importantly, which ones you should use and when.