A few weeks ago, Meta started rolling out the Engaged Customers Audience Segment for Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. This gives advertisers more insight into their reporting. I finally have it, and Meta made a worthwhile change: It’s now called “Engaged Audience.” Many advertisers questioned the original name of this audience segment because the entire point was that these people weren’t “customers” yet. The Engaged Audience label makes a whole lot more sense. How to Create Engaged Audience If you’re not familiar with it, you define these people by creating or selecting custom audiences in y ..read more

Today’s post is a bit on the experimental and hypothetical side. But it’s inspired by a very real problem that I see Meta advertisers make that can be fixed with a restructuring of the current campaign construction flow. Redesigning the campaign flow is nothing new for Meta. It happens every few years, and it’s necessary. Meta is in a continual state of change, adding and tweaking features. This means that the feature set is different today than when things were last reorganized. That creates clutter. And we have a whole lot of clutter. That clutter creates confusion. The last time Meta redes ..read more

Are you not sure if what you’re promoting qualifies as a special ad category? If you run Meta ads that promote something in Credit, Employment, Housing, or Politics, you need to declare a special ad category. This helps you to avoid breaking certain rules and laws. But, sometimes there’s gray area regarding whether a special ad category is needed. And if it’s not required, you’ll want to avoid it. But, how do you know for sure? Categorize Your Ads Meta is rolling out a new feature to help. You may see a button to Categorize Your Ads within the special ad category section of a campaign. When ..read more

Should you still use Advantage Campaign Budget? The answer is complicated… What is Advantage Campaign Budget? In the standard campaign construction, budgets are set individually in the ad set. Advantage Campaign Budget allows you to set a campaign budget that applies to all ad sets within it. Your budget will be distributed optimally between ad sets to get you the best possible results. Is It Still Relevant? But the question is whether the conditions for using this are still relevant. Advantage Campaign Budget (then Campaign Budget Optimization) was first made available before certain devel ..read more

First, it’s important to understand what the campaign objective actually does. Most advertisers confuse the objective for the primary factor that controls ad delivery. It’s not. Just because your campaign objective is Sales doesn’t mean that delivery will be optimized for sales. Your performance goal does that. You could pick a sales objective and set a performance goal of link clicks, landing page views, or something else. Your ads will be optimized to deliver to people most likely to perform those actions — not necessarily purchase. The objective doesn’t matter. What the Objective Does Th ..read more

Meta Ads Manager and Ads Reporting provide access to countless standard metrics. But there are times when the metric you need isn’t available, and a custom metric can be created using a formula that combines existing metrics. In this post, let’s get you started with creating your own custom metrics… Access Custom Metrics Custom metrics can be used in either Ads Manager or Ads Reporting. Within Ads Manager, click Customize Columns from the Columns dropdown menu. If you’ve ever created custom metrics before, they will appear at the top. Otherwise, click the link next to the search bar to creat ..read more

Most Meta advertisers know that an auction drives ad delivery, but do you know how this works? While a typical auction rewards the highest bidder, the Meta ad auction is slightly different. Bids still contribute, but Meta is also trying to show ads to users who are likely to perform your goal action. Relevance and user experience are part of the equation. If only bids mattered, the ads users see would be far less relevant. There are three important factors. 1. The Bid Yes, the bid still matters. This is how much the advertiser is willing to pay to get their desired action or impression. Bids ..read more

Another update to Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns… When Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns were first introduced, Special Ad Categories did not qualify. If you were promoting something related to Credit, Employment, Housing, or Social Issues and Politics, you needed to go with a manual campaign. But that has changed. You can create an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign to promote a Special Ad Category now. Like every update, there’s some haziness regarding how new this change is. But I just wrote a blog post about Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns a couple of weeks ago, and this restriction was still in plac ..read more

If you have multiple ad sets that attempt to enter the same auction, the algorithm will choose the ad with the highest total value. This is Auction Overlap. The other ads won’t be considered. This is most likely to happen if you have multiple ad sets targeting the same people. Auction Overlap is meant to prevent you from competing against yourself in the auction. When is This a Problem? On a small scale, this is unavoidable and won’t lead to noticeably bad results. But, it’s a problem if it happens often. Auction Overlap is good for the surviving ad set because it won’t compete against anothe ..read more

My goal is to build the most thorough, comprehensive, and helpful resource for Meta advertisers. While I believe I’ve done that during the past 13 years, one problem is surfacing all of the most helpful content. Yes, it’s all helpful. But, I’ve created so many guides during the past year alone that are cornerstone articles for any Meta advertiser that it may be difficult to sift through. I want to aggregate all of that content into one place. This isn’t all beginner content. It’s beginner, intermediate, advanced, and even more advanced. The title of this post is misleading. While there are 16 ..read more