Advantage+? Interest audiences still work, I promise!

The speaker discusses their experience with different audience targeting options on Facebook. They focus on a particular account that requires lead generation and a specific cost per acquisition. They mention the challenges of getting people to sign up for a free product and how interest-based targeting can still be effective. They explain the concept of going broad or using Advantage Plus, which involves leaving the targeting completely up to Facebook. They share their strategy of creating different interest groups and avoiding overlap between them. They also mention using campaign budget optimization, multiple creatives, and different budgeting approaches. They emphasize the importance of testing different targeting options while still relying on interest groups for certain accounts. Overall, they suggest trying various techniques to achieve desired cost per acquisition and staying open to new targeting approaches. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. So on the last podcast we discussed Advantage Plus and whether you should use interest-based targeting and why Facebook is basically asking us not to use interest-based targeting. But I want to turn it on its head because I'm using it and I'm going to go through what I'm doing with an account using all different types of audience targeting. So let's get into it. So I've got a particular account where we have to do lead gen and we have to get CPA, cost per acquisition, or I suppose this one's cost per registration, through from a landing page that the client owns. So we're not doing this within Facebook, we're not using online, sorry on Facebook lead forms. We are sending people through to a landing page and they go through a three-stage form and then they register for something for free. Now, I love the word free because tell you what, it's still not easy getting someone to get something for free. Even though this is a free product for pregnant women to sample, they get a bag of Pampers and things like that in this bag when they're about to have a baby. It's free yet only still only 20% of people sign up to the landing page. So it's never, it's always too good to be true whatever you're trying to achieve. But we want to discuss advantage plus broad audiences interest-based because in the last podcast we discussed how when you go through to an ad set page when building an ad, you no longer see any interest base or any age groups or anything like that. They've made it, Meta has made it really really hard for you to see. Well, it's not really really hard when you know where to go but if you're new to this and you're going through your ad sets and you're thinking where can I just, where can I put in like they're interested in dogs or whatever their interest might be, you have to kind of like click a couple of buttons to go back to the original settings. But the original settings still work. So there are so many people out there saying that go broad or use advantage plus and yeah they're absolutely right. I do believe the platform is going that way. Do I think that we're not going to be doing any interest targeting? I don't know maybe, you know we've got AI in the platform, the algorithm is extremely intelligent and yes on a few accounts we do see that going broad and advantage plus is working. So what is broad? Broad is basically even if you can see all your interests or you have the option to choose interests, going broad is basically choosing a location, changing the age group and changing the gender and then everything else is left up to Facebook and you can just run an ad you know with one image or one video with a bit of copy of text and then some headline going to that broad audience. When you do advantage plus you are leaving it completely up to Facebook. Apart from you need quite a lot of assets and what I mean by assets is you need, they recommend up to 20 different pieces of creative whether that's video, carousel or statics and the same amount of copy or text to go along with it. So you are giving it as much as you can to really help that and essentially turn one ad on and leave it, giving it whatever budget you want. Facebook is wanting to be under complete control. But they work in some scenarios. In this account I'm using now we have tried both of those and we have failed. We have very strong CPA targets we need to get to so we have to be at £1.55 per registration and we just find that when we leave it to Facebook we just don't get that cost. So what am I doing in here? I am creating lots of different interest groups. Now some of those interest groups are stacked i.e. we have people who like people, women and then that is who are pregnant and that is then who have an interest in baby products, diapers, nappies or whatever we might call them. That's a stacked audience. We have those and every time we create an audience we save it. So let's say we save that as audience one and then we create another one which is slightly different. We are actually having a lot of success with TV and American shows like The X Factor or America's Top Model. We then sometimes stack those or we keep them individually and we create another audience. So what we are doing in this account we are creating lots of different audiences literally labelled audience 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then what we are doing we are going into our audience settings and we are actually able to see an overlap. So there is a little toggle tab just above where you build your audiences are and you can actually compare them. Now you can't compare 10 but I think you can compare 5. So you can choose your main audience number 1 and then you can choose 2, 3, 4, 5 and Facebook in a very easy to read circle chart will show you what the overlap is. So what we try and do on this account is not overlap these audiences. We want to keep as many so obviously if someone is into nappies there is not going to be a massive overlap between that and America's Top Model for instance and then we will also do fathers and then we will also do parents with children at the age of 5. So lots of different audiences and we are finding those are working really, really well to get the CPA where we need to be. We have also then taken those audiences that are successful, we are then doing a CBO which is using a campaign budget optimisation and we are seeing good results from that. We are then doing an ad set where we will take that audience and we might put 5 to 10 different creatives all with their own different budgets. So just to let you know, just to rewind slightly, in any audience campaign that we are doing for this particular client we always have around about 5 different creatives. So those different creatives will again be in a CBO campaign, let Facebook decide. The thing we find there is Facebook will usually favour 2. So then we go down another route and we do an ABO which is each audience has got its own budget of let's say £20, £30 a day and if we are seeing an audience winning we will up that budget on that audience. Then we have also just started testing lifetime budgets. So for the month we might say okay this particular campaign is going to spend £2, £3, £4, £5,000 and we let it run. So what we find there is that over the weekends it might get more expensive. So our test now is to see if Facebook spends less at the weekend because it is more expensive and ends up spending more in the week when it is less expensive to get registration because it understands our business and the pixel information and see if that works. But either way all of these different audiences are actually bringing in really good results even though they are completely different, built on different structures. So what I am getting to on this podcast is the fact that even though you are hearing all the time about use advantage plus Facebook pushing that, use broad audiences, lots of influencers out there are pushing broad. I am being completely honest with you guys and on most of our accounts we are still seeing advantage plus being too expensive, we are seeing broad audience being too expensive and we are still finding the interest groups are working really, really hard. Right at this moment in time if they got rid of interest groups some of my accounts would be affected because we need those interest groups to make those accounts work. It is not that the others won't work, I think it just takes more time to warm up. Now if you or your client have that time to warm up to really get the algorithm understanding what you are doing and get the CPA or cost per purchase where you need to be, fantastic. But like everyone we have all got some clients or our own business ourselves that need to get it under a certain amount and we have to try our hardest to get that CPA where it needs to be or the cost per lead or the cost per registration or the cost per purchase where we need it to be and we still have to use some of these old targeted techniques which I still think work. But at the same time still test broad, still test advantage plus just to make sure that you are also moving towards the future. I hope that helps in your ad builds, try everything and good luck. See you on the next one.