Speaker 1: Advantage Plus Audience has taken the Facebook advertising world by storm. We first started seeing it six or seven months ago, but most ad accounts now have this feature. We've done a bunch of testing and have some really interesting results to report. And in this video, I'm going to let you know whether you should be using it or not. So to talk you through this, I'm in an example Facebook ad account. I'm in Ads Manager, and I've quickly created an example sales campaign in this instance. And I've gone to the ad set level, and I've scrolled down to the targeting sections. Now, the first thing that you may see is that this might look quite different to what you're used to seeing. If you haven't yet got Advantage Plus Audience, I think most ad accounts do at this point, and it's probably going to be rolled out to the remaining ad accounts very, very soon. But if you haven't yet seen, this is what it looks like. As opposed to our previous targeting setup that you'd be familiar with, we've now got Audience Controls, this section here, and then we've got Advantage Plus Audience, which is obviously what I want to focus on in this video. And I'm going to walk you through Audience Controls in a second. We're going to start with Advantage Plus Audience. Now, this is in the process of replacing the previous setup. A lot of ad accounts have this, not quite all. Some ad accounts only have this, and some ad accounts are able to switch between the two. So there's lots of different things going on here. I'm going to talk you through how this works, whether you should use it or not, how it differs from the previous setup. And then I'll explain if you do have the option to switch between the previous setup and this setup, and which you want to go ahead and do, okay? So if we start with this Advantage Plus Audience, and I click on this plus button here, the first thing that you need to understand about Advantage Plus Audience is that it's a suggestion as opposed to hard constraints. And that's a really big difference. So previously, if we said, look, I only want to advertise to people that are age 25 to 35 who are interested in this, because I think those are the people that are most likely to be interested in my products or services, under the previous setup, those were hard boundaries. And Facebook would not put your ads in front of people that were younger than 25 or older than 35 or whatever you set. And they would not put your ads in front of people that weren't interested in the things that you had mentioned that you want your detailed targeting to be. With this, it's a suggestion. Meta is going to use their ad technology to find people, yes, within your suggestion, but also that might not fit within those. They go, well, we think people that are this age or a different gender to what you've selected, or have different interests, they're not categorized within this interest on Facebook. We think those people are also likely to be interested in what you have to offer. We're going to put ads in front of them. And that's a really big deal. So when you click into it, all these options here, they're all suggestions, even custom audiences. So if you're looking to, let's say, retarget website visitors, and you put that in this audience here under the previous setup, that would have been a hard boundary and you would only have your ad shown to people that have visited your website that you're retargeting. With this, you could enter in a custom audience, people that have visited your website, and it's going to, yes, include those people, but it's a suggestion. So they can also advertise to other people. You could do the same thing with lookalikes. Obviously, the same applies to age, as we've already discussed. Same applies to gender, and the same applies to detailed targeting as well. So if you're going to be entering in your interest, demographic behavioral stuff in here, just as we do. And if you're interested, by the way, in how you go about finding those options and what you should do, I'll include a link in the video description below to another video that walks you through that and how to set up, how to find detailed targeting options. These things can all be added in as they used to be, but they are suggestions. Now, when I've spoken about Advantage Plus Audience before, and I've explained the differences between it and the previous setup, where we had hard constraints, people have understandably asked, well, how does Advantage Plus Audience differ from just, say, various targeting expansion options? So under the previous setup, you would have your hard constraints, and then you could tick a box to say, yeah, but I'm happy for Meta to go ahead and find other people that don't fit within my constraints. It started out as detailed targeting expansion, and we had all different types of targeting expansions. You can have custom audience targeting expansion, lookalike audience targeting expansion and things, and they've had various names over the last few years as Meta constantly changes these things and tweaks with them. And the answer is not a huge amount. It operates quite similarly. In my mind, I think Advantage Plus Audience, because it's a suggestion from the beginning, it's more flexible than having the previous setup with detailed targeting expansion. So if you think about it on sort of a continuum, we've got the old setup, targeting options, hard constraints, no targeting expansion. And then next we've got that, hard constraints, but with targeting expansion. Then next on the list, we've got this Advantage Plus Audience, and then the other end of the spectrum would be just complete open targeting, targeting everyone. That's sort of how I see it, is that it's a bit more open, a bit more flexible. Targeting expansion options are only supposed to be used if Meta is very confident you can get better results by expanding that audience. And primarily they do focus on the audience that you give them. With this, because it's a suggestion from the beginning, I think they're gonna take a bit more of a license with who they put your ads in front of and be more flexible and expand that and look to reach other people. So that's something to be aware of and how I see it. But in all honesty, there's probably not a huge amount of difference between the two. Now I'm gonna talk more about whether or not you should use Advantage Plus Audience if you have the option in a minute, but I do think that Advantage Plus Audience has a number of interesting advantages over previous targeting setups. There's for a long time now been a debate, should you go with open targeting and just let Meta work it all out? Or should you be really specific and take control? And we used to be very much really specific, take control, that was the better approach for all Facebook advertisers many years ago. And over time, we slowly, slowly moved more towards open targeting. But I think this is a nice halfway house. It's allowing you to take advantage of the open targeting because your audience is still really big, you can reach tons of people, but you are providing Meta with some direction. What we've seen with open targeting, particularly with new Facebook ad accounts and with ad accounts that don't have a lot of conversion history is that Meta can struggle a little bit at the beginning because there's so many people they could put your ads in front of and it takes a bit of time to work it out. As I said, especially if there's not data already within your ad account. This Advanture Plus audience gives Meta some direction. It's going, we'll start with these people because based on our experience running our business, we think these people are likely to be interested in these products and services. But once you've learned a bit, once you've done a bit of testing, by all means, look to expand into some other options. So I think this ticks that box really nicely and we can see how that's working, especially with the new recommendation to add in custom audiences and lookalike audiences. Now that's something we would never have done previously. We'd have had a separate ad set for say an interest targeting option, a separate ad set for a custom audience retargeting and a separate ad set for a lookalike audience. We wouldn't have mixed the two. That's because within hard constraints, if for example, you had a custom audience, you're only retargeting website visitors, you could have a website visitor custom audience. If you then went and added in detailed targeting options, that would act as an and function. So you're saying to Meta, I want to retarget people on my website but only if they are also interested in this interest targeting criteria. Now, because this is all suggestions, it's kind of saying, look Meta, we think people who are interested in our stuff are going to fit under this interest targeting category. So we'll add this as a suggestion. By the way, these are the people that have visited our website. These people that purchased before. Again, here's some more information for you to use. Oh, and here's a lookalike audience based on our previous customers. Again, some more information to use. We recommend starting there, but at the end of the day, do what you want. So we're starting now to test a lot with custom audiences and lookalike audiences being used as part of Advantage Plus audience. Results are really interesting. And I think as Meta moves more and more this way, we're all going to be doing this more and more, trusting the system and seeing better results from it. One thing I do want to quickly note on that point is that if you do want to specifically retarget, only retarget, then you can't use Advantage Plus audience and put your custom audience in here. So let's say, for example, you've got a specific offer that is only available to people that have visited your website, like a 10% discount, something along those lines. Well, you don't want to use that as a custom audience within an Advantage Plus audience setup because that's a suggestion. And then some people are going to see ads that say, oh, we saw that you were interested in XYZ product. Here's an extra 10% off to help you make the purchase. If someone sees an ad that says that and they've never visited your website before, that's not going to look good. That's going to be very confusing. So if you do want to specifically and only retarget, don't include your custom audience within the Advantage Plus audience section. That won't make any sense. So in a second, I'm going to talk about the audience control section and how that feeds in with the Advantage Plus audience. Before I do, I just want to quickly let you know about our Done For You Facebook and Instagram advertising services. So my company can create, manage, and optimize your ad campaigns for you. If you are interested, there's a link in the video description below. You can click on that. Go ahead and book a free call with one of my team members. They'll tell you about the work we've done previously. We've probably worked with a business like yours in the past. We've worked with all different types of businesses at this point, and we've probably been able to get them great results and should be able to get you great results as well. So you can find out more information about that, what we charge, all that sort of stuff. So if you're interested, go ahead and book a free call, and hopefully we get a chance to work together. So there are now a lot of Facebook advertising experts that recommend just going with open targeting. Just go with broad targeting. Don't put in any targeting criteria. Just let Meta work it out. And we've done a lot of testing of that against Advantage Plus audience, and we are overall seeing better results with Advantage Plus audience. As I already mentioned, it creates that nice hybrid where you are giving Meta some direction. Now, of course, if you've got an ad account that's already got more than 1,000 purchases in it or 10,000 purchases in it, then open targeting is probably going to work just fine because Meta has so much data around who purchases, what time of day, how many impressions they need to purchase, what age they are, what are they interested, all the data points they need to get you great results. But new ad accounts don't have that. So being able to provide that suggestion through Advantage Plus audience, we think is really beneficial. And that's why overall we are seeing better results with Advantage Plus audience. You're kind of getting some of the advantages of specific targeting whilst also getting some of the advantages of open targeting. So win-win. So that's something to be aware of. And I'll feedback more information about using the custom audiences and lookalike audiences, which Meta is recommending that we should do. So we're starting to experiment with that more and more as well. Now, it is important to note that in this audience control section, there is other stuff that we can do. So let's go ahead and move on to audience controls. And I'm just going to click on this, show more options, and we can see the various options that we can actually have control over. So where Advantage Plus audience is a suggestion, an audience control is a hard boundary. And you might think, well, doesn't that contradict the Advantage Plus audience in the suggestion? And yes, it does to some extent, but sometimes that's necessary. And there are things that you probably want to have hard boundaries over, even if there are other things that you're happy to be flexible over. So the first one is going to be location, right? So this is just defaulted the country I'm based in, which is United Kingdom. But you're probably going to want to have a hard boundary around where you actually advertise. For example, if we can only sell our products and services in the UK, we don't want Meta to be expanding to other countries. So that's why this is in an audience control section. Likewise, if we just wanted to advertise locally, let's say we're in the UK and we're based in Bristol, for example, then we want to be able to set a radius around that area within a certain location that we're only happy to advertise to people that are within 15 miles of Bristol. We don't want to advertise anywhere else. We don't want Meta being flexible with this because we simply can't sell our products and services. They're not going to come in store or come to our gym or come to our restaurant. So this needs to be a hard control, whether you're doing that locally or nationally, internationally as well. Minimum age. Now, sometimes it's fine to set your age targeting criteria in the advantage plus audience section because you want to set criteria, but you're happy for Meta to be flexible. But other times, depending on what you're advertising, you need a very strict age category because it might be that where you're advertising the product or service that you're offering can't be advertised to people, say, under a certain age, for example, depending on what you're advertising. Sometimes that's going to be really important. So you can come into the audience controls and be like, look, legal requirements mean that we can't advertise to anyone under 21 this particular product or services. That's going to vary depending what you're advertising. That's going to depend on where you're advertising as well, what country, but that's something to keep in mind. You can also exclude custom audiences very specifically. So let's say, for example, you are running a new promotion for a product or service and you don't want to advertise to people that have already bought it because you think, well, they might not like that they just missed out on this new 30% discount that we're giving. You could go ahead and upload a list of people that have previously purchased and absolutely make sure that they do not see your new ads. And there's other reasons why you might want to exclude custom audiences as well. So there you can put in hard constraints and pop that in there. And then also you can do the same with languages. If you operate in an area where people speak multiple languages, but you only are able to serve people, perhaps you only speak a certain language and you're only able to actually work with people that speak a certain language, then again, you can go ahead and add in hard constraints. So you can't add in, you can see in this audience control section, you can't come in and add the specific detail targeting options and be like, nope, we want these to be hard constraints. You can't do that with this and overwrite what you've put in the advantage plus audience section, but you can put in hard constraints with some of this stuff where that might be necessary for your business. Again, Meta is trying to give you the option to be like, look, we understand there are some hard boundaries somewhere. So here you go with these, but you're not going to have this for everything because we don't think it's necessary for everything. We want the rest to be suggestions so we can make it as open and free as possible. And one other thing to mention is that most ad accounts that do have this advantage plus audience feature, you can switch to the original setup. So if I scroll down to beneath this advantage plus audience, we can see here, we've got switch to original audience options. And I can click on this and you can see the Meta is trying to dissuade us from doing this. So they say that if you use advantage plus audience, you can get up to a 33% lower cost per result based on their experiment. So that sounds really enticing. Now, you'd always need to be careful and this is something to be aware of. And us as marketers often know this is that when you use up to, and then a statistic, it means, well, it could be a 1%, a 2% lower cost per result from using advantage plus audience. We don't necessarily know that it's all the way up to 33, but on average, they're saying that advantage plus audience works better. And that would be true in my experience. And they use advantage plus audience as the big blue button to take you back and use original audiences as sort of gray one to make you less likely to do it. But you can click on this and then you will see that instead of this audience control and advantage plus audience section, we now just have audience and you'll see that this setup looks very similar to what we used to previously use. And you can add in those hard constraints and go through the process just like this. Okay, so just to be aware that on most ad accounts, it is still possible to revert back to this if you want to. I don't think that many businesses should be looking to do that. If you wanted to separate out lots of different ad sets and get really specific with your targeting to work out exactly who your audience, who your best audience is, and you're a more advanced advertiser, that's okay. But most advertisers, it's fine to stick with advantage plus audience. I think it's a bit of the best of both worlds for now. It takes advantage of Meta's very smart AI and machine learning process, but you can do this. Not all ad accounts can switch back. Some are just stuck on the advantage plus audience setup now, and some don't even have advantage plus audience yet. Meta rolls things out in stages to different ad accounts at different times. It's not just based on geography. It's also based on things like how long the account's been going, ad spend, all that sort of stuff. They do it to ensure that a new feature doesn't just break the whole system. And if it does cause an issue, it only causes an issue for a certain number of users. But it does make creating content and giving advice very, very difficult because different people are at different stages. And hopefully I've sort of put in all the caveats so you'll understand where this is at. But if you can, if you do want to go ahead and change it back and you can, there is an option to do so for most advertisers. Now, whether or not you decide to use advantage plus audience, it's really important that you understand all the various targeting options that you can either use inside of advantage plus audience or outside of advantage plus audience. I give you a full walkthrough of all the Facebook ads targeting options, which ones are the best, how to set them up and all that sort of stuff in this video here. If you want to make sure that you've got the best possible targeting options and you're reaching the right people that are likely to buy your products and services, I'd strongly recommend you go ahead and give this a watch.